The University of Arizona Press
July 14, 2025
Fernanda Echavarri of Latino USA interviewed Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, about the lasting impact of deportation over generations. She first interviewed him in 2018 about his life’s mission to find the families of the victims of the 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. This new podcast interview reveals interesting developments on his search, including a forthcoming documentary film, and how the original Latino USA story uncovered clues that helped his search.
All thirty-two people on board died in the 1948 crash. Twenty-eight of them were Mexican farmworkers who were in the United States because of the Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States. All the people on the plane died the same way, but in death, they were not treated the same. For the four American crew members, U.S. officials gathered what remains they could, and sent caskets to their families. The remains of the twenty-eight Mexican braceros were not sent back to Mexico to be repatriated or given proper burial by their families. It was the deadliest crash in California history.
Listen to the Latino USA podcast 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.
