As this mania to deport immigrants accelerates, I keep hearing in my memory a poem written by Woody Guthrie and made most famous by singer Pete Seeger in the 1950s.
I have long been in favor of expelling dangerous immigrants – some of them murderers and/or drug criminals, rapists or those with a record of serious offenses.
However, imagine how many good, hard-working, tax-paying immigrants might soon be booted out of this country.
The song that keeps replaying in my mind is called “Deportee.”
A horrific incident caused Guthrie’s poem. On Jan. 28, 1948 (the day of my birth), an airplane filled with a crew of four and 28 immigrant California farm workers crashed in Los Gatos canyon in California. Some passengers were blown out of the plane by an explosion, and others fell to their deaths inside the flaming plane as it crashed to the ground in a fiery impact. All aboard died.
The migrant victims were buried in a mass grave in Fresno, Calif.
Those workers were being flown back to Mexico. At that time, the government paid farmers to destroy crops to keep farm production low and food prices high. Guthrie was outraged that food would be destroyed and poisoned when there were so many poor people and entire families suffering from hunger. He was also incensed that in news reports of the plane crash they mentioned the names of the flight crew but referred to the 28 immigrant victims merely as “deportees.” Guthrie wanted to remind people that those “deportees” were human beings with the same ambitions, sorrows, setbacks and a yearning to be free and have a chance for happiness like all other people.
The song sung by Guthrie is a heart-breaking lament for innocent people who died so horribly. Seeger made the song popular and many other greats sang that song in the following decades, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, The Byrds, Dolly Parton and many others.
Here are the opening lyrics to that powerful song:
“The crops are all in, and the peaches are rotting.
The oranges are packed in the creosote dumps.
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money, then wade back again.
My father’s own father, he waded that river.
They took all the money he made in his life.
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees.
They rode the truck ‘til they lay down and died.
Four-line chorus:
“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane.
All they will call you will be ‘Deportee.’
Some of us are illegal, and others not wanted.
Our work contract’s out, and we have to move on.
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
….
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon.
A fireball of lightning, it shook all our hills.
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They were just deportees.”
Years after the plane crash, so long after the “deportees” were buried in that mass grave, some people did research into those victims’ lives to find out their names. By 2013, all of them had been identified – three of them women, 25 of them men. Money was then raised to place the names of all the victims on a memorial above the mass grave in Fresno.
I first heard “Deportee” in the early 1970s. It’s haunted me ever since.
To hear that sad-but-powerful song, “Deportee,” visit YouTube and type in “Deportees: Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon.” Choose the version sung by Woody Guthrie and/or Pete Seeger (I think those are the best of the bunch).
