“My father’s own father, he waded that river...” from Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee”
In last week’s column I mentioned
discovering Tim Z. Hernandez’s book All
They Will Call You at the Lindsay Public Library. It was being given away as part of this
year’s Book to Action project of the Tulare County Library. Wednesday Mar. 28th, the day this
paper will hit the newsstands, the Exeter Public Library will hold a book club
meeting on it at 7 p.m.
The book’s title comes from the
Woody Guthrie song “Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos,” commonly known as
“Deportee.” The song is about that 1948
plane wreck carrying 28 Mexican nationals being deported from California at the
end of their official stays courtesy of the Bracero Program. Everyone died in the wreck, including the
three crew members. The last lines of
the chorus came from the newspaper reports of the accident, and the truth of
our tendency to keep farm laborers nameless, identity-less: “You won’t have your names when you ride the
big airplane; all they will call you will be deportee.”
I
I have loved this song since I first
heard Joan Baez’s recording of it, probably in Berkeley, probably sometime in
the 1970’s. When I met Tim Hernandez as
part of the planning group for the Kaweah Land and Arts Festival in 2009 and
later learned of his project to restore the names to those dead deportees
buried in a mass grave in Fresno, I was in awe.
Tim’s project seemed so huge on one hand, and yet so perfectly focused,
a laser beam that, in healing this one wound, could start the healing process
for a problem so massive it blinds us.
The book is fantastic. It starts
with stories of people who witnessed the crash: the landowners, the first
responders, the photographer and editor of the Coalinga newspaper, whose report
hit the AP wires that night. Then it
moves to stories from the lives of a few of the men who were being
deported: their girlfriends and wives,
their dogs and horses and grandparents left behind, their little farms whose
lack of water and the need to drill wells drove these farmers from their land
to do farm work up North. Their villages
and families become real; the treks become real; the distances become real. Most of all, they leave the nameless stranger
category and become neighbors.
And on some very important level, we
can begin to wade that river with them, back and forth, ride boxcars and buses,
dodge la migra, stand in line waiting for jobs we hope will provide enough
money to send home. I can’t think of
anything more important for us to do at this moment in time than learn what it
means to be on the receiving end of that terrible vulnerability. Roll up your pant legs, friends: we’ve got work to do.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer with a mean poetic streak who sings, mostly in the
shower. You can send her your wading
stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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