No Longer Just "Deportees"

The nameless “deportees” of Woody Guthrie‘s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)” were recently remembered by name on a monument unveiled in Fresno, California. The song and the memorial commemorate a plane crash on January 28, 1948 after a plane chartered by the U.S. Immigration Services flew out of Oakland and crashed near Coalinga.

Thirty-two people died in the crash, but newspapers originally only reported the four names of the pilot, the first officer, the flight attendant, and an immigration officer. The media merely referred to the 28 others as “deportees.” Many of the 28 Mexicans were part of a government work program who the government was flying home, while some of them had entered the country illegally.

Woody Guthrie knew about the importance of names, as he showed in his earlier song about the 1941 sinking of the Reuben James. After the California plane crash, he read about the nameless deaths and created his own protest by writing a poem about the event, noting the way the media dehumanized the people from south of the border.

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.”

Guthrie biographer Joe Klein called the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” lyrics “the last great song [Woody Guthrie] would write” (Woody Guthrie: A Life, p. 362). Guthrie, however, chanted the words of the poem, as it was without music.

“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” would not be performed publicly as a song for more than a decade, after a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman added the music and Pete Seeger began performing the song. In the video below, Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie performs the song at Farm Aid in 2000.

The song ends with a question, asking “Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/ To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/ And be called by no name except ‘deportees’?” The memorial evokes Guthrie’s imagery, as it features a stone etched with names on 32 leaves, commemorating all who died in the plane crash.

The recent news coverage of the memorial has tried to make up for the original reporting on the crash. The Los Angeles Times published an article listing the names of everyone who died in the crash. You may also order a cool print that commemorates the memorial and lists the names.

There are several nice covers of “Deportee,” including one by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-1970s (thanks to Dylan scholar Michael Gray for pointing me to the Baez-Dylan version).

Also, check out this cool video of Lance Canales & The Flood singing “Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)” that also features the memorial. Canales lives in Fresno, and he and his band wanted to highlight the names of those killed. At around the 3:25 mark, you see people holding up signs with the names. So this video of a powerful rendition of the song finally answers Guthrie’s question, “What were their names?”