Beyond the Los Gatos Plane Wreck – discovering Tim Z. Hernandez
NUMBER 31 - A Braid of Lyrical, Fictional, Nonfiction from Tim Z. Hernandez
January 2025
yes, this is how I roll on weekends – d. ewing
January 28, 1948: A news piece about the wreck of a plane carrying migrant workers so moved Woody Guthrie that he picked up a pencil and wrote a poem.
The story begins for many of us with a song by Pete Seeger based on the poem by Woody Guthrie, set to music by Martin Hoffman. Prior to this book, I had no knowledge of that composer’s story. That’s just one example of how deep Tim Z. Hernandez goes as he untangles the story of 28 “Mexican Nationals,” labeled that but no more as they were laid to rest in a mass grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, Fresno.
Hernandez was given photos, newspaper clippings, nicknames, stories including family pets who also mourned the loved one who never came back. He was allowed to hold legacies that are still being passed to the next generation by families who understand that ancestors should be respected. We’re shown a topography of emotion that belongs to Mexico, the land and the people, in a way we may never have otherwise have known it. The emotion Woody Guthrie felt and wrote about through the symptoms of Huntington’s neurological disorder.
He’s not a direct ancestor, or I’d know his name already. I text my Argentinean friend whose passion is genealogy. She finds me his parents’ names and his final resting place, texts me links to family trees. But I’m in an airport on a cellphone and right now I really have to read on.
…well, I mean I came to this country, no English, no car, not even knowing my way around, nothing. I came in the trunk of a 1964 Mustang, yes. My father paid three hundred dollars to bring me here. I was seventeen years old and never left my little pueblito of Charco de Pantoja. I was so scared. Well, when I was a kid, growing up, my mother used to tell us stories of her father, Ramon, and how he would always go to los Estados to work. And when he would return he would sing a song to her, ‘La Valentina.’ My mother would always tell us these stories. So when I got older, I asked her, What happened to my grandfather?” And she would tell us the story of the plane crash. But she never knew anything about where it happened, nothing, nada, just somewhere in the Diablo mountains, that’s it. So when I came to work in Salinas, I asked my supervisor for one day off, and I told him I had to go to Fresno to see about something. So, he gave me the day off, and, well, it was on October 25, 1989. That’s the day I went to the Fresno county Hall of Records and I got their death certificates. And from the certificate is how I found the cemetery. It says on there Holy Cross Cemetery. So, I looked at the phone book and found it. I went there and I asked on e of the workers, “Have you seen a big grave with a lot of Mexicans?” The man working there said, “Well, there is one that says something about Mexicans.” And then we walked across the cemetery and there they were. I just…I just…I couldn’t say anything.
