Tim Z. Hernandez was a featured writer at last weekend’s Book Festival at the Visalia Public Library. He spoke about the history of his project to restore the names of 28 Braceros who died in 1948 when the plane crashed that was deporting them back to Mexico, a crash made famous in Woody Guthrie’s song known as “Deportee.”
This project’s history has been
beautifully rendered in Tim’s book All They Will Call You
(2017), one of two books which were chosen by the Tulare County Public Library
for this year’s Book to Action program.
The title comes from the last lines of Guthrie’s song: “You won’t have your names when you ride the
big airplane. All they will call you
will be deportee.”
As I listened to Tim’s story, I
remembered how my friend Sylvia Ross, another author featured in Saturday’s
festival, once described Tim as “eye candy.”
He is delicious to look
at, but at least half of his attractiveness is the energy inside his body and
words, unified by the task of conveying the message inside his project. What I heard is that Grace stands on the side
of humane compassion, and you can, too.
Tim was born in Dinuba, went to
Redwood High School and COS in Visalia.
He identifies himself as a poet, but his role as a story gatherer and
re-interpreter is clear. When he found
the news article that first informed him of the 1948 plane wreck, still
considered the worst in California’s history, he was actually working on
another book, Manana Means Heaven,
about Bea Franco, the person known only as “the Mexican girl” in Jack Kerouac’s
book On the Road. But
the story of the nameless farmworkers captured his attention, and he began to
follow their lead while still rewriting Bea’s story.
Restoring names, restoring
identities to people from his culture that white culture sees only as a
category is a fine mission in life. It
restores dignity and presence to the people themselves, and it helps reduce the
ungainly hubris and ignorance of white culture for those of us stuck on this
side of the line. But more than that, it
gives credibility to a form of truth – and power – that many of us suspect,
even reject. And that is the form of
knowing that comes from our guts, the accumulated knowledge of culture passed
down and built up through the generations, what Tim called “abuelita instincts”
in his talk Saturday.
That term came out when he was
telling the story about finding the first list of names of the 28 Braceros
buried in a mass grave in Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno. The priest in charge of the cemetery had a
list, apparently from the list of “passengers” on that flight prepared by the
U.S. government. Tim went down the list and noticed one
mistake after another in the spellings of common Mexican names, mistakes which
told him – through his “abuelita instincts” – that there was much more to this
story than anyone knew. The missing
stories led him on a journey to find what wasn’t there, a brave move that most
people would have avoided for fear of failure if nothing else.
On Tim’s website (www.timzhernandez.com) I stumbled onto a
photo he’d posted of two farmworkers in a field, bent over, working. One has an infant on its back, legs dangling,
facing the camera. It is Tim. He writes of the photo:
“It was taken in the fields of
Wyoming in 1974, the year I was born. I
am on my father’s back while he and my mother are working. They were only 20 years old at the time. Neither had ever made it past the 9th
grade. They were young and scared, but
driven by fierce ambition. I like to
think that while they were looking forward, into the future, I was there, bound
to them, with my eyes on the past. And
it only occurs to me now, as I write this, that maybe this is how I ‘ended up
here.’”
In restoring the names and identities,
the stories, of people who our culture has wanted to keep nameless, unknown,
Tim’s work healing the past has made us a better present. From that point we all can work together for
a better future. God bless his abuelita
instincts, and his willingness to follow them.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a remedial poet who doesn’t always like hearing from her
grandmothers. You can send her your
thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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