{"id":2487,"date":"2014-03-31T09:30:56","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T13:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2014-04-01T10:02:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T14:02:27","slug":"ghosts-of-deportees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/2014\/03\/ghosts-of-deportees\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts of Deportees"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Woodie<\/a>

Woodie guthrie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

“…Woodie Guthrie\u2019s famous ballad\u00a0Deportee\u00a0<\/em>about a 1948 plane crash in California that killed the pilot, crew and passengers, who were Mexican nationals being deported back to Mexico at the end of the harvest season.\u00a0 Guthrie had read about the crash in the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, which described the crew in detail and then dismissed the passengers as anonymous deportees. \u00a0The point of the song is in the refrain:\u00a0 \u201cYou won\u2019t have a name when you ride the big airplane \/ All they will call you will be deportee,\u201d capturing the denial and indignity visited on migrant farmworkers even in death.<\/p>\n

That night McCutcheon had a response.\u00a0 He and others had considered that if the crash victims were deported, there should be some record of the deportation order in INS archives from which identities could be recovered.\u00a0 They found them and erected a monument in Fresno last Fall over the mass grave where they are buried that gives them back their names. \u00a0(A video of the dedication event from the\u00a0Fresno Bee\u00a0<\/em>is available\u00a0here<\/a>.)…<\/p>\n

–via CounterPunch<\/a>, and rockrap.com<\/p>\n

The names McCutcheon found overlap nicely with the names Guthrie chose for his song (“Goodbye to my Juan… Rosalita… Jesus et Maria…,” and you can easily imagine Guthrie using all the others in verses he dreamt up but never wrote down. The melody we know, chiefly from the insanely beatific Byrds cover on Sweethearts of the Rodeo<\/em> (1969), comes from Martin Hoffman; Guthrie’s melody seems lost<\/a>. The miracle of the song lies in how Guthrie turns the victims’ names into melodic flowers, and how gloriously \u00a0all their names ring out even though they’re fictional. How could you not adore such beautiful names, Guthrie asks, at once celebrating the individual lives and shaming the “deportee” epithet.<\/p>\n

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