Oakland Municipal Airport, destined for El Centro, a city near the U.S.-Mexico border. As the Douglas DC-3 soared above the Los Gatos Canyon, some 60 miles southwest of Fresno, the left engine caught fire and exploded. The left wing detached and plummeted to the ground, followed shortly by the plane itself. It was a spectacular crash. During the violent descent, passengers still attached to their seats were sucked out of the hole in the plane’s left side, screaming until they crashed to earth. The plane plowed into a creek bed and erupted into a giant fireball that scorched the tops of trees. There were no survivors; few bodies were left intact. The tragedy was the deadliest airplane disaster in California history, the sort of grisly affair that would typically attract widespread media attention and sympathetic articles about the deceased.
These weren’t typical passengers, however, but 28 Mexican farmworkers being deported. Just three days later, they were buried in a mass unmarked grave in a Fresno cemetery. The U.S. government made no attempt to locate and notify their families. News reports identified the four dead Americans — two pilots, a flight attendant and an immigration agent — by name. They lumped the Mexicans together as a brown mass of “deportees.” For most people, the tragedy came and went.
One person who lingered was folksinger Woody Guthrie. Angered at the erasure of the names of the dead, he wrote a poem called “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee),” in which he asked, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” The poem would be put to music by a college student named Martin Hoffman, who would teach it to Pete Seeger, who would turn it into one of the century’s great protest songs.
More than half a century later, Tim Z. Hernandez, a poet and novelist who teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso, became consumed by Guthrie’s haunting question. His search for the dead sent him across the U.S. and into remote Mexican villages, often with little more than a copy of an old Spanish-language newspaper article for a guide.
The result, “All They Will Call You,” is a stunning piece of investigative journalism and a lyrical meditation on memory, meaning and the immigrant experience. It is also unlike any book I’ve read before, combining oral history, dogged shoe-leather reporting and imaginative leaps into the unknown.
“While the telling itself is true,” writes Hernandez, “its loyalty is not to people of fact but rather to people of memory. Which is to say, all of us. ... And how reliable is fact anyway when the ‘official’ documents themselves have been proved incorrect, beginning with the names of the passengers? Officialness too has its inconsistencies.”
In less skilled hands, this approach could be distracting, or subtracting. But Hernandez, who grew up in a string of farmworker towns in the San Joaquin Valley, has a deep empathy and familiarity with his subjects, and he steps with care and compassion.
We find Luis Miranda Cuevas picking strawberries in Watsonville, shortly before he will be rounded up and placed on the doomed flight. Cuevas takes a break to pull out a creased photograph of the girlfriend he has left behind. Hernandez writes, “He remembered a dicho he once overheard an old man at el jardín utter: ‘El recordar es vivir.’ To remember is to live again. Perhaps no one understood this more than Luis. If he had a favorite pastime, it was nostalgia.”
Hernandez was able to track down the family members of seven passengers, whose memories restore humanity to the deportees. Cuevas, we learn, dressed up as a woman and sewed next to his girlfriend, lest her strict father realize she was talking to a boy. (The ruse didn’t work for long.) José Sánchez Valdivia was a Babe Ruth-obsessed young man who took breaks in the field to smack dirt clods; soon he had organized teams of Stockton farmworkers into a Mexican baseball league, where they used wilted heads of cabbage for bases.
Hernandez’s attention isn’t limited to the deportees. His portrait of the pilot and his wife — the flight attendant — is tender and moving. He also recounts the tragic story of Hoffman, the unknown student who turned Guthrie’s poem into a song and passed it along to Seeger. Either everyone matters, or no one does.
This earthy book is thicker than its 223 pages, and Hernandez’s attention to detail and insistence on the dignity of a forgotten people recalls “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” another genre-bending book.
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” proclaimed James Agee. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.”
Like Agee, Hernandez stretches what a book can do, going deep into a story and returning with a stirring portrait of a long forgotten-incident and a never-known people. “All they will call you will be ‘deportees,’” wrote Guthrie. Thanks to Hernandez, that’s no longer the case.
Gabriel Thompson is the author of “America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century” (University of California Press) and “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do” (Nation Books). Email: books@sfchronicle.com
All They Will Call You
By Tim Z. Hernandez
(University of Arizona Press; 223 pages; $26.95)
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