The University of Arizona Press
February 4, 2025
Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, spoke to Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak about deportees who were victims of the 1948 plane wreck in Los Gatos Canyon, California.
In the article “Deportees died in a plane crash. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it,” Hernandez shared some of his research from interviews about the plane wreck: “’There were hundreds of Mexicans in line waiting to be deported, and they were cramming many into that first plane,’ Hernandez said. The stories suggest that some passengers may have been sitting in the aisle or on baggage, overloading the World War II surplus plane. He found an eyewitness account from a man who tried to get on that first plane, but it was too full. They made him wait and board the second one, saving his life. It was the deadliest crash in California history.'”
Read the Washington Post article here.
About All They Will Call You:
All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.
About They Call You Back:
In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
