The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, October 19, 2025
Time: 5 p.m., CDT
Where: The Wild Detectives Bookstore, 314 W Eighth St, Dallas, TX
In the Hay Festival Dallas Forum session, answers the questions: How do we give voice to the forgotten? What does it mean to turn research into remembrance, and remembrance into literature?
Writer and poet Tim Z. Hernandez has dedicated his career to recovering stories lost to silence: tracing the unidentified victims of the 1948 Los Gatos plane crash in All They Will Call You, or reflecting on personal and collective survival in his most recent memoir They Call You Back. Blending lyrical precision with investigative urgency, Hernandez’s work lives at the intersection of art and archive, illuminating the lives of migrants, workers, and everyday people whose histories too often go unrecorded. This conversation will be moderated by Claudia Vega, founder of Whose Books in Dallas. The event is free and open to the public.
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.
