Hi, Workers to Deportees -
I think the center of Woody's complaint, was that the migrant workers were not named, while the Anglo members of the flight crew were identified by name.
Woody wrote the song after reading a brief article in the New York Times. I posted the text of the article in another thread (click). According to the article:

Irving F. Wixon, director of the Federal Immigration Service at San Francisco, said that the Mexicans were being flown to the deportation center at El Centro, Calif., for return to their country.
The group included Mexican nationals who entered the United States illegally, and others who stayed beyond duration of work contracts in California, he added. All were agricultural workers.

I worked at that deportation center in El Centro for three weeks in the summer of 1996. At the time, it was called an "Immigration Detention Center." It was not a particularly horrible place. The center's employees were mostly Hispanic. They weren't cruel or abusive - but long-term detention of innocent immigrants is bad enough.

This was only a brief article on the NY Times, but it was front-page news in all the California newspapers for three days in January, 1948, until Gandhi was assassinated. At the time, this was the biggest plane crash ever to have happened in California, so it was big news - but the California papers didn't name the workers who were killed, either.

We have several other threads that cover this story and song in detail - look at the crosslinks at the top of this thread. I took photographs at the crash site and at the cemetery, and did a page on the song on my Website:

http://www.joe-offer.com/Deportee/deportee.html