All They Will Call You - after (and before) the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos

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.

October 17, 2024: I’m on my way to FAR-West 2024, a Folk music conference, sitting in an airport, reading a book about a plane crash.

The story begins for many of us with a song by Pete Seeger based on Woody Guthrie’s poem set to music by Martin Hoffman. Prior to this book, I had no knowledge of the composer’s story. That’s just one example of the level of detail Tim Z. Hernandez explores 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 found the names, but would not rest. He went into Mexico, seeking families who remembered the people who belonged to the names. In writing the book, he fills in the shapes of whole humans who had dreams and goals they thought could be achieved by going to El Norte to work for a season, and then another, and then another. Here’s what it takes to make such a daring plan. Have you ever wondered?

He 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. Hernandez shows us 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.

Tim Z. Hernandez writes with a style that echoes the tradition of Mexican literature. They way he unfolds the story like an heirloom tablecloth reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He sets the table with plates collected from each family who let him in, with the tea they served him. We have all the time in the world for a grandmother to recall days of courting the young man who promised to bring her a mariachi. And with the same detail, with trinkets, paper scraps, items of clothing, Hernandez draws for us the same image witnesses described: people in flames falling from an airplane.

All They Will Call You is the story of America’s relationship with Mexico, the land and the people, an often-dysfunctional relationship viewed from a distance but full of love and graceful tragedy if you take the time to listen. I invite you to listen.

Hernandez’s follow-up book, They Call You Back, is not quite a sequel. The author goes deep in to his why: why follow these ghosts? There’s not much I can say here that wouldn’t be a spoiler, so I’ll follow his lead.

I’ll tell you how I found my grandmother as a woman with tainted dreams on a visit in my mid-20s with kids of my own. I’ll tell you that the kitchen of the Texas house my father rented while building our homestead had funny papers stapled to the walls because our landlord raised the rent when we drywalled the living-room. These are the stories that came to mind while reading They Call You Back, while I crawled over rock with the author as he learned to look for those who are lost.

We are all made of our own stories. You may find yourself leafing through your own family album, like I did, as you read this book.

They Call You Back is a continuation of the search for people lost in that fatal plane crash at Los Gatos, but it’s also a journal in which Hernandez can color in details on portraits of his formative years. He’ll share his children with you, since they’re on that journey with him. But there’s more.

The State of California ultimately acknowledged the wreck, the lack of diligence in finding the names of the 28 Mexican nationals lost; acknowledged Hernandez’s work in finding their families, in gathering support for a proper memorial stone to be placed. If you don’t like spoilers, do not watch the following video from January 29, 2018 until you’ve read They Call You Back.

Not everyone has been located. There are more families carrying the memory of the relative who never came back. But my journey is to continue backward through the catalogue of Tim Z. Hernandez, to follow his search for Jack Kerouac’s “Mexican Girl” – Terry in On The Road, but Bea Franco in real life. He found her, too.

Hernandez’s braided style of storytelling carries through Mañana Means Heaven as it does in his two subsequent books. His knack for filling in watercolor scenes that begin with only a few lines results in a portrait that feels real.

Between recounting the steps Hernandez took to research, it doesn’t matter how much of Bea’s literary story matches her memories. We’re transported to a world of grit, pages behind the pages in Kerouac’s manifesto. We feel the pull of an enigmatic young poet, the way a strained mother who works in the fields might have felt it. We get to taste the world of migrant camps in the shape of a White boy’s dalliance.

The book begins and ends with Hernandez asking Bea whether she remembers a guy named Jack.

I felt moved after reading Mañana Means Heaven to revisit Kerouac’s account, someplace I haven’t been since high school (having found him uninteresting during my college years.) I read him a little softer now, through the lens of Hernandez’s Mexican Girl. Bea, in this romantic version of the story, is kinder than I was as a student of modern literature. She wants every drop of the attention he lavishes on her, unlike any attention she’s received before. While Kerouac admires girls in slacks, Bea Franco wears the pants, teaching Jack how to navigate her world. This is what he came for – to see America – but as he describes Los Angeles in On the Road as a warmer, sadder New York, Hernandez’s Bea responds with a demeanor of, “What, this old thing?”

Tim Z. Hernandez talking with Pete Seeger

Tim Z. Hernandez is a master of distillery; he’s taken testimonies as real as hearth-baked bread and turned them into meals we can sit down to and digest no matter what bus we came in on. His prose is lyrical and clear, refreshing in these times of spare sentences. We sense the reality of it all. Please take a break from your diet of facts-only and remember how we used to make magic.

Visit timzhernandez. com and look through everything he’s collected on his website. That is a journey in itself.

BUY THE BOOKS: Available at Amazon or University of Arizona Press.

debora Ewing writes, paints, and screams at the stars because the world is still screwed up. She improves what she can with music collaboration, peer-review at Consilience Poetry Journal, or designing books for Igneus Press. Follow @DebsValidation on X and Instagram. Read her self-distractions at FolkWorks.org and JerryJazzMusician.com.

All They Will Call You – after (and before) the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos

All They Will Call You – after (and before) the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos

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