"Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)"

How a 1948 crash in California inspired a powerful song, both of which remain starkly relevant to tell of a very old system

Burial site for those who perished in the 1948 crash, with new memorial, Holy Cross Cemetery, Fresno, California. Photo by Elnogalense - CC BY-SA 4.0 - Courtesy Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136456403

In any discussion of deportation, it can be mind-blowing to realize that, in the US,it has a very long history. Like at least as long as the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920. Over the past few weeks, I thought about a song on this subject, specifically, a deportation that ended in tragedy in 1948, at the dawn of the Cold War.

With the recent plane crashes over the Potomac in Piscataway Territory / Banneker City (Washington, DC) on 29 January and in northeast Philadelphia on 31 January, I wondered about the timing of writing about it. It was the latter tragedy, of an ambulance jet with six Mexican citizens, including one pediatric patient and her mother, bound for home, that proved compelling. More than that, I found out that the aforementioned crash occurred on 28 January 1948, 77 years and one and three days before the two crashes respectively. And not long before the event was stopped from falling into oblivion by a singer-songwriter’s beloved and often-recorded contribution, among many others in his work, to the songbook of utterly unforgettable folk music in the US: “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”

This tribute to migrants who lost their lives began as a poem by Woody Guthrie (1912-1967). A DC-3 went down in flames in Los Gatos Creek in the Diablo mountains in San Joaquín Valley, California, which was witnessed by rural migrant workers below. As the story has long been told, Guthrie, living in New York at the time, had read about the disaster in The New York Times. He was struck by how only the names of the three flight crew members and Immigration guard were listed, but none of those of the 28 passengers, who were identified merely as “deportees.” At the time, there were at best incomplete or inaccurate accounts of known names printed in newspapers based relatively near the crash site, including The Fresno Bee.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,

A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,

Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

The radio says, "They are just deportees"

The blanket appellation “deportee” was a cover for a truth that was more complex, and speaks loudly about the complexities of deportation. Among these un/named passengers, there were indeed at least some undocumented migrants being sent to Mexico. There also were a large number who were contracted to work in the US under a federal government program. In other words, the latter had documents, but their contracts expired and were too being sent home.

The contract migrant workers - braceros - were employed by a federal program to import temporary - and cheap - labor from Mexico to work in farms and railroads throughout the western and southwestern United States.

From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero project was the largest guest worker program in US history, originally as a wartime project. Some 5,000,000 braceros - including women as well as men - were brought in and expected to leave when the contract was over. To know this, therefore, you would have to realize that the word “deportee,” then as now, had already been reduced in that ill-fated flight to a catch-all term for anyone, regardless of the reason for being forced to leave a country. It was exacerbated when the 28 were buried in a mass grave in Fresno, identified only as the "28 Mexican Nationals Who Died In A Plane Crash." Their names were placed on the gravesite only in 2013, 65 years later.

For as long as cheap migrant labor has been typical throughout the US, deportation has been, and the full extent about has yet to be known, used as a weapon by business owners to cover up for crimes including wage theft, to avoid paying workers, or to avoid giving in to workers who dare demand for better conditions.

Guthrie, in turn, wanted to say the fallen workers’ names. At the heart of the poem, for which Martin Hoffman wrote the music in 1957, is a mournful call for dignity and a reminder that names matter.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,

Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;

You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you will be "deportees"

The lyrics would, in fact, later be a catalyst for finding all the names, finally correctly spelled decades later. Author Tim Z. Hernández was doing research for a book that ultimately derived its title from a verse: All They Will Call You. Therefore, the song would substantially figure in the story, and he was able to allow, over six decades later, the saying of their names. Significantly,including, finally and if known, their middle names and double surnames, which in Spanish denote each passenger’s names of both parents, so families could better identify them.

While it is unclear whether Guthrie ultimately became familiar with any of their names, three of them – Juan, Jesús, and María -- were each matched with a passenger: Juan Valenzuela Ruiz., Jesús Meza Santos, and María Santana Rodríguez.. Also, he was onto something with the second female name, because with the revelation of the names came the fact that there were three women workers on board, and not s one as previously believed. Unfortunately, while the names were obscured, many of the bodies could not be positively identified.

With the addition of Hoffman’s melody, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” became a protest song staple, in folk, country, and rock. It helped sear into memory what may have been just a footnote in US history and, more generally, the global history of migration. It is an elegy to be sung from the heart.

(It is notable that, for Guthrie, the song was just one of a vast number of poems for which he did not write music. It’s such a huge trove that, in the 1990s, Billy Bragg and Wilco recorded two albums’ worth of new music for the words. Before that, Bragg had already recorded “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”)

Moreso, among the names of the 28, a stunning revelation came to light in Hernández assembling the pieces of the story, in addition to the revelation that three were women: one of the lives lost was actually a Spaniard. Even more, there is evidence to suggest that another was possibly Filipino.

By the 1960s and early 1970s, the song was being recorded by artists including The Byrds and Joan Baez, Later, more artists recorded it, including Dolly Parton (fittingly, for her album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs), a French version by Nana Mouskouri and a haunting rendition with only percussive accompaniment by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Today, the history of deportations repeats itself. We witness here new stories about human life reduced to what is alleged on paper. To counter that without resorting to tired liberal memes about migration, we can know that a touching song made profound change possible. For the 28 on board, the change came in the reminder of their humanity.

My first time hearing the song, and the interpretation of which remains resonant with me,: was recorded in the 1960s as well, by the legendary Odetta.

You can read along with the lyrics on the official Woody Guthrie site:

https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Deportee.htm

The names of the 28 are:

Miguel Negrete Álvarez. Tomás Aviña de Gracia. Francisco Llamas Durán. Santiago García Elizondo. Rosalio Padilla Estrada. Tomás Padilla Márquez. Bernabé López Garcia. Salvador Sandoval Hernández. Severo Medina Lára. Elías Trujillo Macias. José Rodríguez Macias. Luis López Medina. Manuel Calderón Merino. Luis Cuevas Miranda. Martín Razo Navarro. Ignacio Pérez Navarro. Román Ochoa Ochoa. Ramón Paredes González. Guadalupe Ramírez Lara. Apolonio Ramírez Placencia. Alberto Carlos Raygoza. Guadalupe Hernández Rodríguez. María Santana Rodríguez. Juan Valenzuela Ruiz. Wenceslao Flores Ruiz. José Valdívia Sánchez. Jesús Meza Santos. Baldomero Marcas Torres.

¡PRESENTE!

Y adiós, mis amistades.

Odetta (b. Odetta Holmes) (31 December 1930 – 2 December 2008), Rest in Power!

“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”© 1961 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)