Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we can raise our good crops?

To fall like dry leaves and rot on out topsoil

And be known by no names except “deportees”

Woodie Guthrie,  Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos) 

On January 28, 1948 a DC-3 flying 32 people from the U.S. to Mexico, most of them braceros, crashed in the Diablo Range near Los Gatos creek west of the town of Coalinga in Southern California. All the crew and passengers died. Regardless of the employment status of the 28 passengers—most of whom were braceros who worked legally in the United States—initial reports of the news only gave the names of the pilot, co-pilot and stewardess (all of them U.S. citizens), while the names of Mexican citizens were omitted, collectively deemed as “deportees,” and later buried in a mass grave in Fresno’s cemetery in a grave marked “Mexican nationals.” 

The accident inspired folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie—known for his guitar marked with the legend “this machine kills fascists”— to compose the poem Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos), which became a classic North American protest song and was later covered by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. In his poem, Guthrie denounces the dehumanization of his country’s agricultural industry which, not content with poisoning surplus crops with creosote to raise prices, takes away all dignity from its workers by cutting out their names and the possibility of repatriating their remains. César Estrada Chávez, Mexican-American union leader and co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, said that the media’s treatment of the accident convinced him that farm workers “should be treated as important human beings and not as agricultural implements.” As noted by Guthrie and Chávez, the dehumanization of the victims of the Los Gatos plane crash is intimately linked to the disappearance of the name as the mask ofbios (0.13, 3.3.1), which condemns these people to social invisibility (7.3, 7.15) in death, and even while alive.

Only 65 years later, in September 2013, a monument was erected listing the names of the 28 Mexicans who died in the accident, along with the initials of the crew members. Name and Dignity are inseparable.