The Government Disappearing People Is Not New. Just Ask Woody Guthrie.

Late in January—as the newly polished Trumpist sledgehammer began wrecking American civics in earnest—social media started circulating broad claims about farm workers fearful of the new administration’s promises of impending roundups and deportations of undocumented people. An Instagram image of farm fields and produce shelves claimed, “Central California farmworkers are not showing up over fear of deportation.” On TikTok, a short video showed pickers stooped in a green field, with text overlayed, “Texas is reporting 28% of farm workers are not showing up to work. California is reporting 46%.” In my own Bluesky feed, a red banner announced that “California citrus farmers report 75% of farm workers didn't show up today. Acres of oranges, limes, and lemons are rotting as harvest season is 'virtually halted.'”

If only there was a song about, like, exactly that.

“The crops are all in, and the peaches are rotting / The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps,” Woody Guthrie wrote in 1948. In a double-barreled critique of farm policy and immigration issues, he reported why no one was picking the fruit: “They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican Border.”

The dubious percentages in those memes turned out to be hyperbole, but their misinformation expresses a deeper and growing fear among immigration allies—one that’s been realized in recent weeks as numerous flights (either chartered by immigration officials or conducted by the U.S. military) have flown south to return migrants to Colombia, El Salvador, and other countries. Whether we export people in planes or train cars, the operation is the same: dehumanize a population and remove it.

***

By 1948, the ever-restless Woody Guthrie was spending less time rambling the open road, the lifestyle for which he tends to be known, and more time knocking around his house near Coney Island, writing songs about things he’d read about rather than things he’d seen. These are the years Woody’s progressive Huntington’s disease began to present more clearly. Early biographer Henrietta Yurchenco quoted an observation by Woody’s wife Marjorie: “As early as 1948, we began to notice that he was more reflective, and often depressed by trivial things.”

His poem about deported Mexican farm workers, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” however, was inspired by a news story that definitely did not seem trivial to him. More precisely, Woody was bothered by how the news reporting itself trivialized the particular people involved.

The New York Times article that Woody likely saw, dated January 29, 1948, said that a DC-3 plane, which had been chartered by the U.S. Immigration Service to haul migrant workers back across the border, crashed into Los Gatos Canyon in Fresno County the day before, “killing twenty-eight Mexican deportees, the crew of three and an Immigration guard.” The short report eventually named the crew and the guard but never the nonwhite passengers.

In the penultimate verse of his poem, Woody specifically critiqued a wider news media for the damaging omission: “Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? / The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’” 

I teach media studies and journalism. When classes focus on news judgment, students and I talk a lot about knowing your audience and writing to them. I don’t fault a harried rewrite man on deadline in Manhattan for failing to chase down and add the names of farm workers on the other side of the continent who largely were unknown by the system to begin with, or even reporters closer to the tragedy in California for failing to list the names that had been collected on site but wound up languishing, unobserved, in the Fresno County Hall of Records for nearly 65 years.

But as a human being, especially over all that time, the error nags—the “just” in “just deportees” becomes increasingly, impossibly unjust. Especially since no one tried to correct the record until well into the 21^st century—at the dawn of an era in which the importance of naming the disappeared might be more crucial than ever.

***

Tim Z. Hernandez’s first book, a “documentary novel” titled All They Will Call You, chronicles his attempt to track down not only the names of the Los Gatos plane victims, but something, anything of their life stories. The poetic introduction to They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir (2024)—his second book about the victims—wrestles with the contemporary news media’s revived interest in this decades-old story. In the opening chapter of They Call You Back, he dreamily narrates a press conference about the release of his first book. He’s amazed—and a bit miffed—by the sudden turnabout of the contemporary journalists. Now they’re asking for the names, clamoring for them, wagging microphones in his face and begging for a juicy story about just one.

An acclaimed author and professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, Hernandez’s dogged pursuit began by chance. He was researching a different book in a Fresno library in 2010 when he spotted an article about the 1948 crash. The report mentioned that the victims had been hastily buried in a mass grave in a nearby cemetery under a blank stone. (Only near the turn of this century did someone donate a new marker. It reads simply, “28 Mexican citizens who died in an airplane accident … RIP.”) What shocked him even more: None of the victims’ families were notified after the crash. In towns throughout Mexico that year, 28 people just didn’t come home.

Hernandez understood his assignment. Like Woody, whose song he first encountered only a short while later, he was pierced by that word “deportee”—a historically situated label for intruders unworthy of individual identities, people returned to sender without postmark—and wondered, all those decades later, if the names actually could be found. 

Woody’s song had been his own stab at the same assignment. Like Hernandez, Woody was a writer who skillfully played both sides of the fiction-nonfiction binary in order to tell truths. But without Hernandez’s knack for research, Woody did what he could to humanize his subjects. He simply made up some names for the chorus of his tuneless song:

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”

Few readers here, I suspect, would quickly recognize the song by Woody’s title, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” but many around the world know “Deportee.” Woody’s poem only ever became a song when, a decade later, a Colorado college student named Martin Hoffman wrote a tune for it and wound up playing it late one night for Woody’s friend Pete Seeger, who went on to record it in 1968 as “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” It’s since been covered by a variety of musicians under a variety of titles—“Ballad of the Deportees,” “Deportee Song,” and the other parenthetical of “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)”; even the official lyrics at woodyguthrie.org include the obligatory mention “also known as ‘Deportee.’” All anyone has called that song, pretty much, is “Deportee.”

***

Hernandez’s research became a years-long quest, both personal and historical. He pored over records and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct the incident and retrace the lives of the passengers. For All They Will Call You, he was able not only to name the dead but to contact relatives and relate several of the lost life stories. The second book tells a few more—like Sánchez Valdivia, who played baseball after a day’s work and dreamed of becoming the next Babe Ruth, and Luis Miranda Cuevas, whose final phone call to his fiancée (from a detention center in San Francisco) promised her that he’d finally made enough money to marry her and to book a mariachi band for the occasion.

The books are twin miracles: they’re literary accomplishments in themselves, alluring hybrids of narrative style and form, while at the same time reclaiming the existence, dignity, and worth of many human beings—challenging historical, existing, and emerging notions of what it means to be an immigrant in America.

“It all comes down to the same idea of why it matters that their names are even brought up,” Hernandez told NPR in a 2013 interview. “You know, here we are, 65 years later. I mean, at the end of the day—right?—our names are really what represent who we are. They’re our stamp on the fact that we’ve existed here, at one point.” In the end, he says, he’s just trying to give them “what every human being is afforded, and that’s the right to have their names.”

***

History is pockmarked with countless projects in which a whole social group is re-named with a pejorative before its individuals are stripped of their individuality. Slave owners rechristened captives with European surnames. Jews were reduced to numbers in the Holocaust. Destroying family records was a principal tactic of the Armenian genocide. A decade ago, I stood in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aries, marveling through tears at the “mothers of the disappeared,” women who’ve been demonstrating here since the late 1970s, waving white scarves bearing the names of desaparecidos who were rounded up during the Peron dictatorship.

This spring across America, many institutions are sharing guidance and setting policy about what people should do if confronted by immigration officials or witnessing an ICE raid in progress.¹ The usual gist: keep cool, notify relevant officials, don’t get in the way. Also, though, ask agents for identification (their name, badge number, affiliation), don’t give out your name (unless it’s on a subpoena or warrant), and don’t ask for the names of anyone who may be targeted (thus spoiling their protective right to silence). 

In a wider sense, there are numerous powerful ways to push back against an oppressive regime’s re-naming strategies. We saw an example of this during the Black Lives Matter movement, which included a campaign to “Say Their Names”—simple encouragement to, whenever and wherever possible, publicly name the victims of racist violence. Hearing an actual name in connection to larger, often more nebulous concepts of “systemic racism” or “racial injustice” triggers an innate empathetic response, an impulse to protect the loved ones we know by name. Hernandez lives this practice, too. He frequently gives talks around the country, sometimes with musicians who perform “Deportee,” and often he’ll step to the mic and read the 28 names, just to say them out loud. 

Woody’s song—“the last great song he would write,” according to biographer Joe Klein—was his own attempt to push back against the systematic erasure of a people. His chorus points directly to the theft: Once you’re on the government plane, “You won’t have a name.” Today, all they may call you is ... “Venezuelan gang member.” 

***

In another class I teach about American protest music, we talk about the difference between folk songs (whose authorship is often lost as the song is passed down generationally) and popular music (whose authorship is usually distinct to a writer or singer). For instance, contemporary students usually know the basic chorus and tune of a folk song like “This Land Is Your Land,” but they rarely know who wrote it. “Deportee” has had a similar life, sifting through a few generations now, sometimes identified with Woody in context, often not. 

But in that intro to They Call You Back, Hernandez reminds us where the credit is really due in cultural expressions of social justice. Those journalists asking him for the victims’ names now—they see a book with Hernandez’s name on the cover and assume they’re there to talk about him. They refer to his research and writing (as I myself came close to doing above) as “his life’s work.” Hernandez takes offense and is eager to correct that perception:

To call it "my work" is inaccurate. It assumes that the interest of this story is purely my own. As if it’s been a unilateral decision to spend the last thirteen years of my life searching for the surviving family of the unknown victims of what came to be known as "the worst plane crash in California’s history." But this is only a fragment of the truth.... There is, in fact, the other side. Their side. The victims themselves, who have the greatest investment in my search. It’s they who’ve been lost to their families for over seven decades now. It’s they who are still the source of immense grief in the hearts of those who loved them, many of whom still live and walk among us. And it’s their families who stand to benefit from my search. It’s simply too easy to forget—and at times I have—that this is not my story. This is their story. And I’m but one minor character inside of it. For they too speak. They too have their say in the matter. They, the anonymous spirits, who for almost a century have existed only in the quiet margins reserved for ghosts and memories of the disappeared.

The slang term “ghosted” refers to someone who abruptly ends all communication or vanishes from the party, without explanation—but by choice. Hernandez is writing about people being ghosted against their will, the targets of systematic procedures to evaporate individuals from public life, turning them into specters by stashing them in those margins reserved for spirits once they become nameless. The term for this is “disappeared.” 

In late March, for instance, a Tufts University grad student was disappeared off a public street by masked and hooded agents of the U.S. government, allegedly targeted because she wrote an editorial for a student newspaper criticizing her school’s support for Israel. But let’s remember our lesson from Hernandez. That grad student is not just a grad student; she has a name, and her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. 

Lawyers sprang into action to protect Ozturk, but immediately after the abduction, even they didn’t know where she was; by the time they filed motions in her defense, she’d been flown out of Massachusetts and stashed in a Louisiana holding pen for the new deportees. I’m writing this just after the incident, and already news of her being disappeared hasn’t been updated in two days. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk.