Nameless No More

Published August 28, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Today, the date of this posting, is the celebration in Fresno of the restoration of the names of the farmworkers' bodies buried 65 years ago in Holy Cross Cemetery after the plane crashed that was taking them, courtesy of the U.S. government, back to their homeland in Mexico.  Seeing a newsclipping of the event, Woody Guthrie wrote the words that would later be put to music by Martin Hoffman and become the song "Plane Wreck over Los Gatos," or more simply "Deportee."  Sung by almost every American folksinger all these years, from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and now Joel Rafael, the song is one I have known and loved most of my adult life.

     When I first heard of this name restoration project from Tim Z. Hernandez, the project's fountainhead, I began telling everyone I knew and wrote my first column on it in May.  What I discovered was that most of the people I live among did not know the story and had never heard the song.  That lacking is a reflection of the suppression of the conflict that arose when Cesar Chavez and the UFW began agitating for changes in farmworker conditions:  wages, rules and regulations, the right to organize, exposures to pesticides, housing conditions - you name it.  Unlike most places on the urban coastal shelf I inhabited at that time, the union's demands were being placed upon the people who had the most to lose, the folks on the next rung up on the agricultural ladder.  The conflicts were so painful that most memories of that time have been buried.  As one elderly Hispanic man in my town who was on the UFW's march to Sacramento put it, "I am ashamed of that time.  So much conflict, so much pain."

     As I've watched this project progress from hope to dream fulfilled and beyond, it has occurred to me that the time is ripe for healing.  In that spirit I sang "Deportee" to my Methodist congregation yesterday, most hearing it for the first time.  The Spirit moves when and where it will.  I'm just glad I'm here to see it.  Here is the piece that was published in Wednesday's paper as "Nameless No More."

"It's a simple act of courage,
planting garlic in the fall -
a harbinger of better things to come ..."
     -- John Pitney, "Blue Heron, Fly" in Keeping the Garden, 2004

    Today I want to write about the simple acts of courage of songwriters and poets.  Every song my friend John, a Methodist minister in Oregon, has ever written has been a simple act of courage.  He'll never see, much less gather all the harvests of his plantings, which have occurred across the country and even here, from Fresno to Earlimart.  But that doesn't stop him.

     "I haven't written any songs lately," he complained to me over the phone a few weeks ago after telling me about standing on the Columbia River Bridge with a large group of people protesting fracking and the plan to transport its products by rail down the Columbia River Gorge.  "Don't worry, you will," I told him, explaining my theory of writing cycles of intake and output.  "I don't know," he said, "it might be time to lay down across some tracks."  Yikes.  To me, just thinking about fracking and the power behind it is a simple act of courage.

     Woody Guthrie's writing the song "Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos" was a simple act of courage.  He took some facts from a newspaper article about a plane wreck in 1948 in which 28 Mexican workers were killed being "returned," (i.e., deported) to their country, merged them with years of knowledge about farm labor conditions, and painted a picture that still moves people to tears today.  He did not write the music; he never performed the song.  I don't know if he even heard it performed before he died.  But he left behind an indelible story that otherwise would have been lost, not knowing if it would ever bear fruit.

     Sixty-plus years later a young Valley poet comes along, Tim Z. Hernandez, who finds himself called to follow a leading (as Quakers call it) to find out who these workers were and locate their relatives.  The son of farm laborers who worked in the fields himself, Tim was moved by his own story to discover the unmarked, invisible stories of the 28 who were buried in a mass grave in Fresno's Holy Cross Cemetery.  Just starting that project was a simple act of courage.  But now, more than two years later, with support from thousands of people across the country and more serendipity (or Grace) than you can shake a stick at, the names and relatives have been found, along with the $10,000 it cost to have a new grave marker installed with those names engraved on it, to be dedicated in a blowout ceremony next Monday, Sept. 2, 2013 - Labor Day.

     These two simple acts of courage correct a sin of omission from before I was born.  But the larger issues - the treating of immigrants who come here to work, just trying to survive, as non-persons, faceless, nameless, dispensable - and the perilous journeys they make and consequences they incur in order to do so - these issues are still with us.  Hopefully this small correction will point the way toward the next simple acts required.

     Writing about the spirit of hope that arrived to his farming friends in the body of a Great Blue Heron who appeared to them after a fire destroyed their barn, their crop, and their old John Deere tractor, John concludes the song with this about himself:

"And I may plant my garlic
in the shadow of the moon;
the neighbors know I'm looney anyhow!
But if we stop believing, then
our future has no wings.
Blue Heron, Great Blue Heron,
don't you dare desert us now!

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Trudy Wischemann is a social scientist who appreciates the missionary work of birds and bards.  You can view other columns on this site and leave a comment below.