Why this Old Song is Still Relevant

By Alessandra Profumo

Click in this article to find out more about the song and the story behind it.

On January 28, 1948, an airplane carrying thirty-two people crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California. The four American crew members and twenty-eight migrant farm workers being deported to Mexico, were killed. News accounts on the radio that day, and in the newspapers on the days that followed, listed the names of the crew members but referred to the twenty-eight passengers as “deportees”. The bodies of the twenty-seven men and one woman, recovered in that crash in the Diablo Mountains, were buried in a mass grave in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno. Only twelve of the victims were ever identified.

According to all accounts, famed American folk singer, Woody Guthrie, was deeply struck by the fact that none of the media reports at the time, named any of the Mexican victims or even bothered to look into their identities. He first recorded his reactions as sort of a poem with simple guitar strumming. It would be ten years later that that poem would be set to music by school teacher, Martin Hoffman, and recorded by revered folk singer, Pete Seeger. It was Seeger’s version that became most popular though more than thirty-five versions by various artists have been since performed and recorded.

So why in 2013 should this simple song about a tragic accident in 1948 still have relevancy? As we wait to hear the fate of the Immigration Reform Act now facing passage in the House, new provisions continue to be added that may strengthen the bill politically but weaken the existing compromise initiative. Provisions such as, though qualified applicants on the path to citizenship will now be expected to pay taxes, they will not qualify for health care benefits, may make the bill an easier pill for those on the far right to swallow. They will however, do nothing to ease the discomfort of an ailing child of a hard working farmhand, who won’t be able to afford to send his child to a doctor. His child still will be underserved only now, openly and legally. The lyrics of the song remain relevant as the debate over illegal migrant farm workers rages on, farmers are still being subsidized not to grow food, and poor people still don’t have enough to eat. But I digress.

This Guthrie song is still relevant as long as we, as a society, continue to dehumanize each other with epithets such as “illegal alines”, “terrorists”, “welfare mothers”, “gringos”, and oh yes, “deportees”. It is so much easier to deny health care to an illegal alien than to someone named Carlos Gomez. It is also easier for some to immediately assume that a person named Carlos Gomez, rather than a Carl Smith, is an illegal alien. Nonetheless, it is our name that, for good or bad, contributes to who we are and how the rest of the world views us. I once knew the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who changed the family name from Khan to Cohen thinking that the family would escape any negative connotation associated with Genghis, only to be met with anti-Semitism.

Our names are what connect us to our history, our culture. While researching about the Guthrie song, I came across a recent NPR interview with author Tim Hernandez who, in doing his own research on a book he is writing, has unlocked the mystery of the names of those workers who died sixty-five years ago. There is now a project to properly memorialize the workers by creating a marker listing their names. Hernandez, along with Lance Canales, both sons of migrant farm workers, have collaborated on an updated version of the song that includes the reading of those names.

This dehumanizing of groups of people makes it easy to demonize them. Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of this. Yet, today if another air disaster such as this were to take place, it is still more than likely that the victims would be reported as being unnamed deportees. I doubt that we will ever hear of a Cessna going down with just a bunch of unnamed one per-centers.