Deportee

Woody Guthrie was America’s troubadour in the 1930s and 1940’s, writing songs for common folk that are standards and have inspired singer/songwriters from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen.  Everyone knows, and likely has sung along, to This Land is Your Land.

Guthrie wrote songs supporting unions, silly songs/children’s songs and even a song criticizing “Old Man Trump.”

Guthrie had a real soft spot for migrant farmworkers, and the trials and travails they endured.  So, when he read about a plane carrying migrants being deported back to Mexico, and saw that the story named the pilot and crew, but not the Mexican passengers, he was moved to write a poem, “Deportee”:

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"

On 28 January 1948, a DC-3 plane carrying 32 persons, mostly Mexican farm laborers, including some from a guest worker program, crashed 20 miles west of Coalinga, California.  The crash killed everyone aboard the plane.

Some of the passengers were being returned to Mexico at the termination of their bracero contracts, while others were illegal immigrants being deported. Initial news reports listed only the pilot, first officer, and stewardess, with the remainder listed only as "deportees." Only 12 of the victims were initially identified. The Hispanic victims of the accident were placed in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, with their grave marked only as "Mexican Nationals"

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"[1]

It is very likely that Guthrie was a bit unfair to the press, but he was spot on the attitudes of the majority in the country, who looked at the migrant workers as lesser beings.  Martin Luther King, Jr. has said “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

 

And we should respect those who do their job – whatever it is – well and with honor.

 

______

 

Thanks to my nephew, Jamie Ness, a talented singer/songwriter in Duluth, for insights into this song.[2] 

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[1] To hear The Highwaymen perform the song, click here. 

[2] For a sample of Jamie’s music, click here.