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They Were Just Deportees (Crash at Los Gatos Canyon) [1]
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Date: 2025-01-28
Jan 28, 2025
Filed under: "The more things change."
They called them deportees.
On Jan 28, 1948 a private DC-3 aircraft under contract to to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service crashed in the mountains West of Coalinga CA. The plane was carrying 32 persons including 28 Mexican citizens being deported or returned to Mexico at the end of work contracts. All aboard were killed.
Woody Guthrie, outraged that the 28 dead Mexican citizens were only referred to by the media as “deportees” , wrote a poem about the crash that would become a song sung first by Pete Seeger and then by every other folk singer of the 60s and 70s.
Here's the eternally lovely Joan Baez in 2016 with her version.
YouTube video
“The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
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,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are illegal, and some are 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.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my Topsoil and be called by no name except "deportees"?
This happened 77 years ago!
"Ich bin ein Deportee"
Compass Wallah
[END]
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