In 1948, a plane carrying migrant workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon. Those deaths were nearly ignored by the press and public of the day. An echo comes to us as a small child traveling in hope from Guatemala to America is lost to dehydration and neglect.
In the early afternoon of October 25, 1947 one of the safest planes in the air, a Douglas DC-6, made a routine midair fuel transfer. United Flight 608 was headed from Los Angeles to Chicago, when something went wrong. The transfer overfilled a tank, and the excess fuel ran into a cabin heater.
The pilot reported the fire and got instructions for an emergency landing site. He could see the strip and the approach looked good. Less than a mile from the site, the plane went down in a remote area of Utah. There were no survivors.
Rescuers from hundreds of miles away converged on the rural crash site. Residents circled the wreckage and kept animals away. Relatives were notified and 52 names of passengers and crew were published. News reports around the country included pictures of those who had died. It was a major tragedy.
Three months later, it happened again. A flight from Oakland to El Centro, California caught fire in the air and crashed in Los Gatos canyon. This time 32 people died. 28 of the passengers were Mexican migrants who had entered the United States as part of a government special program to harvest fruit. Now they were being taken back.
This time, most news reports carried the names of 4 who had died in the crash, 3 crew members and 1 passenger who was an American. The other 28 were referred to as deportees.
2500 miles away, in New York City, Woody Guthrie listened to a radio report. The announcer listed the victims. Pilot Frank Atkinson, his wife flight stewardess Bobbie Atkinson, co-pilot Marion Ewing, passenger Frank Chaffin, and 28 others who were “just deportees.” Guthrie was outraged at the contrast. Victims of the Utah crash, and the four Americans who died in Los Gatos were important enough to be named and to be mourned. The Mexican workers who had picked crops were said to be “just deportees.”
Guthrie was widely known as poet and singer. He performed before large audiences. He composed what some folks consider to be his last great protest song. In it, he called attention to American attitudes about immigrant workers. That protest has been echoed as Plane Wreck at Los Gatos has been sung by a host of performers: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and others.
In my early teens, I often listened with family to a rendition by a folk singing group known as The Brothers Four.
Guthrie tried show the humanity of the anonymous 28, adopting the voice of a relative or friend in mourning, and assigning names; Juan, Rosalita, Jesus, Maria; to those who were not named on the radio.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
and, of course, the refrain:
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”
In 2010, 62 years after the tragedy, writer Tim Hernandez took on the task of finding the identities of those migrant workers and locating any relatives. Death certificates and one small news paper carried mangled versions of the names. As part of his research, Hernandez took out ads in a bilingual paper. He eventually found a few surviving family members.
On January 28, 70 years after the deadly crash, the names were read on the floor of the California legislature.
Hernandez says his search is continuing.
Over the decades since the crash, Woody Guthrie’s angry protest has come under critical scrutiny.
He wrote, spoke, and sang about the demeaning treatment migrant workers face:
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.
One criticism is that Guthrie did not realize that those on the plane were here legally and would not have been chased at all. But the phrase “Our work contract’s out and we have to move on” seems to acknowledge that, while addressing more general treatment. That program was, after all, temporary.
Another attack on the song points out that the plane trip was voluntary:
…it is possible those taking the plane back home may have welcomed the two hour flight in lieu of the other option, a 14 hour plus bus trip. In fact, the INS gave the deportees the choice of air or ground travel.
Check-Six, an aviation history site
That criticism does strike me as absurd. Woody Guthrie was not protesting for greater air safety, laudable as that would be. And the logic is nearly identical to that of a brief parody of point-counter-point dialogue in the movie Airplane, as two pundits discuss an imminent air tragedy.
Shana, they bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into.
(Turning to the camera)
I say let ’em crash.
That yesterday’s satire has turned into today’s active argument is one testament to the current state of contemporary conservative thought.
I thought of the Plane Crash of Los Gatos and the the version sung in my youth as I heard reports of the death of another small child of a parent seeking legal refuge in the United States.
Jakelin Caal Maquin and her father made the dangerous journey from Guatemala. We don’t yet know many of the specifics of their life in that country.
But we do know that the American appetite for illicit drugs and our national policy of enforcement rather than treatment have had an effect that echoes that of prohibition 90 years ago. The major differences are in degree and in distance. The violence that comes from our policy is much worse and is more widespread. But it happens away from us.
We know that life for many in Guatemala is brutal, and that children are faced with the daily threat of brutality, rape, and death at the hands of gangs financed by American drug money. We know that thousands of parents, faced with impossible choices, try to get their children away from the violence. We know that the United States is one destination for those seeking safety for their children.
We know that those fleeing those imminent threats have a legal right to a hearing to see if they are eligible for sanctuary in the U.S. If they are processed at a legal point of entry, they are entitled to an initial hearing. And, if they cross illegally but quickly turn themselves in, they are entitled to a hearing.
We also know the screening process that follows is thorough, and usually takes years.
We know that, at legal points of entry, the Trump administration has been slow walking the process to the point of absurdity. Parents with small children are waiting on roads and bridges, without food and water, subject to the elements, and vulnerable to predators. They often wait for months.
And we know a few bare facts about 7 year old Jakelin Caal Maquin. We know that she and her father entered the United States illegally and turned themselves in. We know that standard procedure involves immediate medical examination. It appears that did not happen. Her father, who does not speak English, was directed to sign a form saying both were healthy. Reports say Jakelin Caal’s father then attempted to get medical attention for his little girl. She was gravely ill and had been vomiting. We are told that the required medical examination was denied her. Instead she was placed on a bus ride that lasted for an hour and a half.
When the bus arrived at an internment camp, we are told she was unconscious and efforts to awaken her failed. At that point, she was airlifted for medical treatment.
And we know official reaction within the Trump administration to the death. Here is Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen:
This family chose to cross illegally. What happened here was they were about 90 miles away from where we could process them. They came in such a large crowd that it took our Border Patrol folks a couple times to get them all. We gave immediate care.
We’ll continue to look into the situation. But again, I cannot stress how dangerous this journey is, when migrants choose to come here illegally.
Yes, we do what we can. But they make the choice. It’s their own damn fault.
We see videos of border guards assigned to destroy water supplies that have been left in desert areas by good Samaritans. We see tear gas used against children and those parents who decide they simply cannot keep their children on bridges any longer.
And we hear celebration of such images by some conservative television personalities.
We know from the public record that anti-immigration policy is not designed to limit or keep out only illegal immigrants. Nor does it apply universally to all immigrants.
I say to myself, why aren’t we letting people in from Europe? I have many friends, many, many friends–and nobody wants to talk this, nobody wants to say it–but I have many friends from Europe. They want to come in. People I know. Tremendous people. Hard-working people. They can’t come in.
– Donald Trump at CPAC, March 15, 2013
Current American policy is a new reversion to an old principle from the 1940s. It is an extension of Mitt Romney’s self-deportation proposal. What President Trump sees as immigration of those from undesirable origins, origins to the south, can be prevented by making America more brutal than the brutality from which they flee.
That is why we must extinguish the bright promising light of what Ronald Reagan described as the city on a hill.
That means some small children will die.
But today’s new, modern version of conservatism has its own moral answer.
This family chose to cross illegally.
and
They knew what they were getting into. I say let ’em crash.
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