Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)

DESCRIPTION: Once the crop is gathered in, the illegal workers who harvested them can be sent back to Mexico. They are taken and separated and put on a plane across the border. The plane catches fire and crashes over Los Gatos; the Mexicans are killed
AUTHOR: Words: Woody Guthrie / Music: Martin Hoffman
EARLIEST DATE: 1961
KEYWORDS: death disaster foreigner work political flying crash exile emigration
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jan 28, 1948 - The Los Gatos plane crash
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Scott-TheBalladOfAmerica, pp. 367-369, "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 294-295, "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" (1 text)
DT, DEPORTE*
RECORDINGS:
Pete Seeger, "Deportee" (on PeteSeeger41)
NOTES [315 words]: According to James Sullivan, Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century History in 100 Protest Songs, with a foreword by The Reverend Lennox Yearwood and Bill McKibben, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 147, the plane in this song crashed near Coalinga, California. If you draw a line from Fresno, California, due southwest to the ocean, Coalinga is just about at the midpoint.
In the song, Woody says that the workers' "work contract's out and we have to move on" but calls them "Deportees." The former statement is more nearly true -- although the people on the plane were Mexicans, the majority were legal; they seasonal workers being sent back to Mexico once their work was done. Only a few were true deportees -- illegal immigrants being sent back. "Most news reports at the time of the crash gave the names of the pilot, the first officer, the flight attendant, and the immigration officer assigned to accompany the flight" -- in other words, the Americans. "But the rest of the occupants of the chartered DC-3 were commonly identified only as 'Mexican nationals.'"
Hence Woody's song.
Woody presumably had a tune for the song, but he obviously can't have written the song before 1948, and he never recorded after that. So it was left to Martin Hoffman to set a new tune to Woody's lyrics. He gave it to Pete Seeger when Seeger performed in Fort Collins, Colorado about a decade later, and Seeger spread it (Sullivan, pp. 147-148).
In 2013, a memorial was finally put up listing all the dead (Sullivan, p. 148). I have to suspect that Guthrie's words, and Hoffman's excellent tune, had a lot to do with that.
I find it slightly ironic that the only cemetery Google Maps shows in Coalinga, which I presume is the site of the memorial, is less than half a mile from the New Coalinga Municipal Airport, and appears to be right on the flight path of planes taking off and landing there. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: SBoA367

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography