Abuelita Instincts

Published April 18, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form

     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 9^th 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.

 

 

 

 

Wading That River

Published Mar. 28, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“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. 28^th, 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.”

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     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.