July 11, 2025 • 50 mins
In 1948, a plane crashed near Fresno. On that flight there were 28 Mexican citizens who were being deported from the United States. Everyone on board died. The American crew members had their bodies sent home to their families for a proper burial, but the 28 farmworkers were buried in a mass grave—nameless. Today, we’re bringing back the story of the man who made it his life mission to identify the 28 unnamed workers and connect with their families. We also bring you some updates on that search—including how this very episode contributed to it.
Latino USA is the longest-running news and culture radio program in the U.S., centering Latino stories and hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa.
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This story originally aired in February of 2018.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
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Speaker 2 (01:30):
Hello, hey, ernandaw are you.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm well, it's so nice to see you. It's been many,
many years.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It has I know, it's incredible.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
That's Tim Hernandez, an author and investigative researcher. And yeah,
it's been a while since we talked. It feels like
so much has happened. But also it feels like I
was justin like the Fresno area.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I know that was eight I think eight years ago already.
So yeah, it's been a while, and look.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
At us, we still look like not a day over
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Right, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I'm catching up with Tim today because he emailed to
say there have been some interesting developments on a story
that I did back on twenty eighteen, So that's why
I'm going to be hosting the show today. The story
I'm talking about is the story of a plane that
crashed in nineteen forty eight on that flight where twenty
eight Mexican citizens who were being deported from the United States,
(02:27):
the plane crashed, everyone on board died. The American crew
members had their bodies sent home to their families for
a proper burial, but the twenty eight farm workers were
buried in a mass grave, nameless. This is the story
of Tim's search to find the families of those twenty
eight passengers, and above all, honestly, it's a story that
(02:51):
feels very connected to the present.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's important for us to look back at history to
understand the lasting impact of of deportations over generations.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Since our story aired, Tim has been able to connect
with seven more families, and I have to say that
doesn't happen often. Our story contributed to his life mission
of identifying the families of the dead.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
I was just on my phone, just kind of scrolling
through Twitter, just kind of, you know, picking up what
was happening in the day's events, and I came across
this story right of a plane crash. And when I
saw that, it just it automatically clicked in my mind.
I said, Wow, you know what, there's a story in
our family of a plane crash.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
We're going to hear more about those updates later, but
first you have to hear the story. So we're going
to play you the story that originally aired in twenty eighteen.
You'll notice that some of the time references are a
bit different because it's now been seventy seven years since
the crash happened. Stay tuned for those updates. This is
Latino USA. I'm Fernande Chavarri in for our host Marino Jo.
(04:00):
Let's get to our story. On a Wednesday morning, just
after ten am, a plane was flying over Los Gato's
Canyon in California Central Valley. It was nineteen forty eight
in February. The pilot noticed something was wrong, but he
(04:20):
had been to war and he had landed planes and
emergency situations before, so his training kicked in and he
started looking for a place to land the plane. But
then as he went over the canyon, something unexpected happened.
The left wing suddenly fell off and the rest of
the plane caught on fire. The plane started spinning out
(04:43):
of control. It hit the ground nose first, and it exploded,
killing everyone on board.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
When that first person that I saw was pulled out
of the plane, there was no head and the arms
and legs were gone. There's just the.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
The plane was headed to Elcentral California, a half hour
from the border with Mexico. And this wasn't just a
regular commercial flight. There were thirty two people on the plane,
four Americans, including three crew members and an immigration official,
and twenty eight migrant farm workers. Everyone died that morning,
(05:22):
all in the same way, but they were not all
treated the same after death. The twenty eight Mexican field
workers on that plane were known as Braseros. They had
come here at the request of the US government and
were headed back to Mexico, but didn't make it. After
the crash, only the remains of the four Americans were
sent back to their families. The Mexican citizens were buried
(05:44):
in a mass grave in California under a tiny plaque
that red.
Speaker 6 (05:49):
Twenty eight Mexican citizens who die in an airplane accident
near Colinga.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Twenty eight Mexican citizens. That's all they would call them,
and for decades that's all.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
There was.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
No one identified the remains of the twenty eight passengers,
No one asked for their families, No one really paid
attention until a Mexican American author came along and they
became personal From Futuro Media and per x It's Latino
USA am Fernanda Chavarri in for our host Maria jo Josa.
(06:24):
Today we go back to find out who were the
twenty eight unnamed people on that grave and meet a
man who made it his life mission to give them names.
And to do that, I'm joined by Latino USA producer
Maggie Feeling.
Speaker 7 (06:41):
Hey, Maggie, Hey, Fernanda. So when you and I found
out about this incident, we were talking about how these
people were virtually forgotten. They were nameless in death and
in the news. But the crash itself, it turns out
that more people might know about it than they realize.
Speaker 8 (06:58):
Goodbye by, And it's all because of one song that
kept the story alive throughout the decades.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
A song that has a very long, confusing title, Deep.
Speaker 7 (07:13):
Porti parentheses playing record Los Gatos, and it's sung here
by Pete Seeger, a super famous American folk music icon.
Speaker 8 (07:24):
Six hundred miles to that Mexico border. They chases like alaws.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
But Pete didn't write the song, He just made it famous.
In the nineteen fifties. Pete's good friend Woody Guthrie wrote it.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
When wood He heard about the crash on the radio,
he felt this strong sense of injustice. So he wrote
his feelings down as a poem, and it later became
the song.
Speaker 8 (07:46):
All all these friends, all scattered like dry leans. On
radio sends they are just deep arty.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Who are these friends who are scattered like dried leaves?
Speaker 7 (07:58):
The radio said they were just deportise.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
These kinds of poems and lyrics were not unusual for
Woody Guthrie. He was always sort of a revolutionary.
Speaker 9 (08:07):
Woody was kind of the embodiment of your quote unquote
every man in the sense that he lived and worked
and wrote and traveled among the people. I'm Nora Guthrie,
and I'm Woody Guthrie's daughter.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
We called Nora to find out why wood he wrote this.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
There was a very strong similarity between the migrant workers
in the nineteen thirties and the Oakies in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
The Okies were farmers in Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee, and of
course Oklahoma. They lost their homes during the dust Bowl
and migrated to California. Woody Guthrie was one of these people.
Speaker 9 (08:43):
When Woody came to California, he was homeless, living in
tents and little tin shacks, and so were the Mexican
field workers. They're kind of all in the same boat,
and I think that just instinctively he connected with their plug.
He didn't start out to be political. He started out
just being curious, so he would always dig further and
(09:06):
further into the news reports. And that was what happened
with the playing record Los Gatos.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Somewhere along the way, Pete Seeger, who was Woody's friend,
got ahold of the poem, set it to music, and
started singing it. Then the song got huge. It took
on a life of its own and was covered by
dozens of musicians.
Speaker 10 (09:24):
Johnny Cash, Johnny Rodriguez.
Speaker 11 (09:30):
Roll In and Dolly Parton, orangz.
Speaker 7 (09:37):
Jo Bias is so Dumb, Bob Dylan's Yeah, Mexico Harder,
they call him money, Burce Springsteen, and Woody's son Arlo
gu Three Legos is Lucy Maria.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
So you have all these super famous all American music
icons singing about Mexican farm workers in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 7 (10:06):
And it's really crazy because this song was sung throughout
the decades, and yet nobody bothered to find out who
these people were.
Speaker 9 (10:14):
And my father left a lot of songs like this.
Sometimes I call them like seeds to be harvested by
the next generation. So the thing is that he left
this song with the question why weren't the deportees.
Speaker 10 (10:31):
Namely, Oh, they will call you.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
These are the words that kept humming in my head.
All they will call you, will be deport All they
will call you. I'm Tim Hernandez, and I'm the author
who's been working on this plane. Requet los gatos for
the last seven years of your book is the name
of my book? Is all they will call you.
Speaker 7 (10:52):
So here's where Tim comes in. He's a professor and
an author, so he's always sort of digging for stories.
One day, Tim was doing recent search for something unrelated
back in twenty ten when he came across a newspaper article.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And it said one hundred people see an airplane fall
out of the sky ship plunge to earth and it
was a farm labor accident.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
So Tim was like, weird, that sounds familiar, and he
realized that it was the same story as the one
he knew from the song, and the same way that
Woody Guthrie was bothered by the injustice decades ago, Tim
too wanted resolution for the families of the victims, so
Tim set off on a quest.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You know, I just let my curiosity sort of pull me,
and I began to ask who is all and who
are they? And what do they call you? And that's
just what kept me going.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That was a s a quest that over the years
became more and more personal for Tim as he saw
the similarities between his life growing up in the Central
Valley and the migrant farm workers who died that day.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
You know, growing up the son of migrant farm workers,
I saw first hand the moments where my family felt voiceless,
and I started to see them play out as I
got older. Not beyond my family, I'd see them play
out in the broader community.
Speaker 11 (12:05):
You know.
Speaker 7 (12:06):
Tim put himself in the shoes of these twenty eight
families and thought, this could have been me, This could
have been my family.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I was born and raised here in California's San Joaquin Valley,
the agricultural hub here. My parents were actually migrant farm workers,
originally from South Texas and New Mexico, you know, kind
of growing up with migrant family, you know, we traveled
a lot quite a bit, working in different fields and
different harvests throughout the year, and my parents did that
pretty much you know up until I don't know, I
(12:33):
was about maybe eight or nine.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
And although Tim's family didn't participate in the Brassido program,
they did spend generations working in the fields in Texas
and California.
Speaker 10 (12:43):
Farming is America's biggest industry. All such farm jobs which
are top dirty or unpleasant are generally referred to as
stoop labor.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
The Brasido program, to summarize, was a seasonal worker program
that was the sort of amicable agree between the US
and Mexico that went on from the early forties to
the mid sixties.
Speaker 10 (13:05):
Brasseros.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
At that time, the US desperately needed workers to pick
fruits and vegetables.
Speaker 10 (13:11):
It isn't easy to find men willing to take on
such undesirable kinds of work. Understandably, then, the American farm
labor supply falls short and is supplemented by Mexican citizens.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
So they gave Mexican farm workers temporary permits to come
here and do the work. Millions of Mexican workers came
and went.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
When the harvesting season was over and the US government
didn't need them anymore, they would send them back by
train or fly them by plane.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
And that morning that's exactly what was happening. Those twenty
eight migrant workers were flying from San Francisco to El Centro,
right on the border with Mexico in a US government
chartered plane.
Speaker 7 (13:52):
So, based on Tim's research and interviews with the families
over the years, here's what happened. After the crash, officials
recovered as many scattered body parts as they could. Then
they formally notified the families of the four Americans and
sent them caskets of piece together remains, some as far
as upstate New York.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
As for the Mexican passengers, the leftover body parts were
also put in caskets, but they were not sent back
to Mexico. They were buried in that mass grave we
mentioned earlier, fourteen on one side, fourteen on the other,
in Fresno, California.
Speaker 7 (14:29):
So the Mexican passengers' bodies were never repatriated. Some families
in Mexico were notified by the Mexican government via letter,
others only heard about it on the radio. It's unclear
exactly how each of the families found out and if
they even knew where their loved ones were buried.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
We reached out to the Mexican government officials at the
embassy in DC, but were denied an interview. Of course,
we weren't going to find people working there who were
working for the Mexican government seventy years ago, but we
wanted to know how the government handle this. An official
said via email that today their policy is to help
families in Mexico find funeral homes and cremation services in
(15:11):
the US, and that based on the family's financial need,
the Mexican government can help them pay for part of
the cost of getting their remains back to Mexico.
Speaker 7 (15:20):
We also wanted to know how only some of the
victims of the crash ended up identified, so to find
out we flew to meet Tim Ornandez in California.
Speaker 12 (15:29):
This is all cattle territory up here. It's Los Gatus Canyon.
It's all ranchers.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Fay's family were cattle ranchers up there.
Speaker 12 (15:36):
They were And did you see the house.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I'm sorry, I know they're the cutest little baby cats.
Speaker 12 (15:42):
Did you see the big long horns earlier?
Speaker 7 (15:44):
Yes, We're driving a ko linga about an hour southwest
from Fresno with Tim and his friend Larry Hawes.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
Larry is sort of Tim's sidekick and an unofficial historian
of his family, the family that owned the property where
the plane crashed seventy one years ago.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
It's hard every turn looks the same here unless you
know exactly where the crash happened. So then that's what
prompted me to want to call find Larry's the Gaston family,
so that I could identify exactly where it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I have to ask what are we driving through? What
is what is this?
Speaker 12 (16:11):
This is called the oil patch, and this is the
Kalinga oil field, and this is Kalinga is actually coaling station.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
A oil was actually discovered here, and today there's a
whole bunch of industrial oil derricks covering a huge part
of a barren desert area.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The plane would have been able to see these oil
dereks as it was coming in here this way. And
because he had crashed landed that airplane twice before, it
makes sense that the one could actually you know, you
could surmise from that that he was more than likely
looking for a strip of dirt to land on. There's
nothing you can do crash landed q that same exact
airplane he had crashed landed twice before.
Speaker 7 (16:52):
Okay, so it wasn't the exact plane, but the kind
of plane, a Douglas DC three, which back in the
thirties and forties was a pretty revolutionary plane. Frank Atkinson,
the pilot, was used to flying and crash landing the
DC three.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
So he thought he could land that plane again, and
he might have been able to if all that was
wrong was a plane malfunction.
Speaker 12 (17:15):
But plane wing broke off and it started spinning out
of control and throwing people out. So we're here, we
are here.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
We're going through a barbarie fence. I'm so short it
fair works.
Speaker 12 (17:43):
This is the actual crash site, and this was where
the main bodies were at and dead people were everywhere
right where we're standing.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Larry wasn't born when the plane crushed, but growing up
he heard stories about that day and about how his
family raced to the scene to help in any way
they could.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Larry's mom and his aunt June were little girls at
the time. His aunt June was nine years old when
she saw the wreckage and is the only surviving witness
in Larry's family.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
June was stunning, you know, not too far off here
looking at and eye witnessing all this.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
June is in her eighties now and remembers it all
in very graphic detail. So we called her at her
home in North Carolina to get an account of what happened.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
We saw bushes with brains hanging on it, and my
thoughts then, as a little girl, that looks like decorating
a Christmas tree. It was just all over with these brains.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
At the time, June didn't realize the impact this would
have on her beyond the trauma of witnessing a crash.
Speaker 7 (18:41):
Do you remember as you got older learning more about it.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
I do remember, because my mother was following it in
the papers, and I remember her shortly after that saying,
this has become an international incident because they've buried all
of these people together in the mass grave. Then that
(19:05):
really occurred to me, how really terrible that was, that
they were just demeaning these people because they weren't us
by leaving their name off. I finally came to see
what an insult it was.
Speaker 7 (19:23):
Tim also felt like the twenty eight people who died
that day were not treated humanly or equal to the
families of the American passengers.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
So he wanted to right that wrong. Tim felt that
these brascados were sort of invisible in life and then
in death they weren't even given a name.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And some big dream I might have in the future,
maybe put us some kind of a headstone marker with
their names on it.
Speaker 7 (19:47):
So first he went to the cemetery in Fresno where
the mass grave is. He wanted to see the plot,
so we asked Carlos Rascone, the cemetery director, to show him.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
After they walked over and saw the tiny plaque and
the the act of the cemetery that read twenty eight
Mexican citizens, Tim asked Carlos to see the cemetery's ledger
of names. Surely the cemetery would have a record of
who was buried there, right, But.
Speaker 7 (20:12):
When Carlos pulled it out of the archives.
Speaker 13 (20:14):
So it just said on Mexican nationals twenty eight times.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
At this point, Carlos also wanted to find their names.
He wanted to know who was buried in his cemetery.
So Carlos joined Tim on his search, which led them
to one more place, the Hall of Records in Fresno.
That's the place that keeps all birth and death certificates.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
And it was there that they were finally able to
get a list of names.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
But they quickly realized that list was unreliable. In Mexico,
you usually have two last names, you're a maternal last
name and paternal last name, and so many of them
were treated as first names. There was somebody with the
last name Lada that was turning to a woman named Laura,
and many of the names in Spanish were turned into
Italian names.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
So they knew right away this list was botched.
Speaker 13 (21:05):
The fact that there were misspelled it kind of maybe
shows a little bit of who might have been behind
the pin or the books.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
Sure enough, there had always been a list with the names,
but why didn't it make it to the cemetery.
Speaker 13 (21:19):
I would think that It's just it was a very
sad oversight, I would say.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
So there they were with an actual list of names
in their hands for the first time, and it was wrong.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
But then Carlos remembered that every November, on the day
of the dead, someone came by to leave flowers at
the mass grave. Someone was visiting a loved one. This
was Tim's first real clue that these people were not
totally forgotten.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
He wanted to find who that person was, so Tim
put out a call on the local paper in Fresno
that said, if you or someone you know is related
to any of the two twenty eight Mexican passengers who
died in that plane crash in nineteen forty eight, contact me.
And someone did. That's coming up after the break.
Speaker 7 (22:22):
Hey, we're back.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Before the break, Tim r Nandez had put out a
call in the Fresno newspaper asking to hear from family
members of the Mexican passengers who died in the plane crash,
passengers whose bodies had been buried in a mass grave
under a plaque that read twenty eight Mexican citizens.
Speaker 7 (22:38):
And not long after Tim put out the call he
got a response.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Someone gave me a newspaper and said, look, they're talking
about your grandpa's blank crush.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
This is Jim Ramirez. We met him in Fresno with Tim, and.
Speaker 6 (22:52):
I started reading it isn't I and I got my
computer in his start.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Jimi went to his computer and started writing Tim an email.
He wrote in Spanish, I know about the accident because
that's where my maternal grandfather named Ramon Parets and my
uncle while Lupe Ramires Lada were killed. Jime then included
his address.
Speaker 7 (23:10):
My phone number and ended with if you need information,
just let me.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Know anything that you want to know.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Just yeah, what do you need to know?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I'm right here, I was like, And so that was
really hopeful. Your email, as short as it was and
as quick as it was, it had so much hope
inside of it, and so I was excited to meet
you right away. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
And not only is Hime a surviving family member, but
Tim didn't have to go to Mexico. Jime was right
there in Fresno.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Jime owns a restaurant called Olifrijole, and everyone in Presno
knows the restaurant. Most of the employees there are related
to Hime, and they are descendants of two of the
passengers from the plane crash, his uncle and his grandpa.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
So when he first told me that that was his restaurant,
I said, no, I said, you're kidding, because I've been
there since I was a kid. You know, I've been
going there. I'm sure I've seen you before, and that's
my restaurant. And I said it's legendary, and he said, yeah,
it is. You were looking for.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Now and I was right there.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
And Hime was there all along in more than one way.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Remember the flowers that someone was putting on the mass
grave on the other Los Mortos, and.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I said, wow, you know, I wonder who that person is.
Later on I would learn that.
Speaker 6 (24:13):
It was yes, sy Wassin Salinas.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
It was him. He's the one that was putting flowers
on the grave. He was Tim's first found family member.
And turns out he was also Tim's golden ticket.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
The newspaper my grandmother kept, and I kept it.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I don't know why. So here's what happened. Not long
after the crash, in nineteen forty eight, a small Spanish
language newspaper published an article that listed every passenger with
the correct spelling of both.
Speaker 6 (24:50):
Last names, and he had all the names and where
they were from in Mexico, did little towns.
Speaker 7 (24:58):
This was it. Years of searching and Tim finally had
their names.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Independent newspaper in Faro, very old. It looks like it's
a front page, right, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It is the front page.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Yeah, so it's a front page. And in the front
page you have the two photos of a priest looking
over the bodies for the funeral service. On the right
side is the column that has all of the names
first last name, where they're from, the names of their
parents or wives, if they knew them. Kelli hues Par. Wow,
(25:40):
I'm going to try to translate that as beautifully as
it is written in Spanish. On Saturday, the thirty first
of January that just passed, there was a funeral for
the twenty eight compatriots that were chosen by destiny to
perish in an unfortunate accident near Collinga, California. Like just
(26:02):
the way that this is written is super like old newspaper.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Very poetic, poetic. It's very poetic. In fact, even the
biblical sort of Seeing.
Speaker 7 (26:10):
How the Spanish language paper wrote about the twenty eight
Mexican victims made it even more clear just how differently
their deaths were treated and how their remains were handled.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Twenty eight families without closure, without being able to have
a physical place to mourn. And although yes, most of
the families knew how their sons, brothers and husbands had died,
they didn't get to have a funeral or a place
to visit their loved one. Lay flowers, just grieve and
as any cemetery director would know. Godlos says, there is
(26:40):
an importance to being able to visit someone's grave.
Speaker 13 (26:43):
It's just a sense of emptiness, like wait a minute,
you know it's not just some John Doe that got
you know, no family indigen nobody knows there was information,
and so I left kind of a blank there, like
eight a minute now.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
So now with the full names spelled correctly, Tim, Carlos
and Jaime could start the process of making a proper
headstone with all the names on.
Speaker 7 (27:12):
It, and they would also travel to Mexico to try
and find other families. Tim wanted to tell them that
their loved ones were no longer in a nameless mass grave.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
So the first family Tim wanted to meet was Jimes. Remember,
both his grandfather and great uncle died in the crash.
So Tim and Jim got on a plane and flew
to Juanajuato in central Mexico. They were there on the
sixty seventh anniversary of the crash.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
I don't want.
Speaker 7 (27:38):
To Jim set up a meeting with his family, and
right at ten forty am, the time when the plane crashed,
they had a moment of silence.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
During the trip, Jaime told Tim a little more about
his grandfather and great uncle. Guadalupe and grew up in
charcole Panto, a farming community into when they got older,
they both owned land and farm garbanzo beans wheat in alfalfa.
Speaker 7 (28:08):
But their towns struggled to get an irrigation system in place.
They didn't have the money to get it set up.
That's when the idea to go work in the fields
in California came up.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
So they both went back and forth working as braseros
and bringing money back to their town.
Speaker 7 (28:22):
Do you remember stories growing up about them.
Speaker 6 (28:24):
Yeah, it's my mitioos.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Dongle liked horse riding into just like shoot a bullets
in there.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
Oh, yellows is.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
His uncle was so blonde that they call them corn
hair like pelos. Jime's family is split between Fresno, California
and Juanajuado, and these are the types of stories that
have been keeping his grandfather alive in Jime's memory. So
(29:11):
for him to tell his family, his mother mostly that
her father would no longer be buried under a nameless headstone,
it was life changing. Now we know who the people are.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Now, we know who their lives are, who their family are,
we know how they how they are in its community.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So on September second, twenty thirteen, the new headstone was
unveiled in the cemetery. These Braseros, who were once invisible
and forgotten under a mass grave, had their names on
a big, beautiful marble headstone.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Miguel Negrete, Alvarez, Francisco Yamas, Duran, Santiago Garcia, Alixandro Rossalio,
Padi Estra, Nabe Lopez Garcia, Ramon pre Mas, Avigna de Gracia,
Lupe Ramirez, Las.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Several, Medina Lara.
Speaker 7 (29:57):
In this moment of having these names carved in to
stone forever, this is what Tim and Jime wanted for years.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
Manuel Calderon, Mari Luiz Cuevas, Miranda Martin, Rasso, Navarnacio, Perez Navarro,
Romano Too, Ramirez, Placentia, Alberto Carlos, Ronandez Rodrigu, Maria Santana,
Rodriguez One, Valenzuela Luis when says Lao flores Sevalivia, sanchezs Santos.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Around the edges of the headstone are thirty two leaves
for the song that says, who are these friends all?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Scattered?
Speaker 7 (30:39):
Like dry leaves, which brings us back to the song.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
Who are all these friends now?
Speaker 8 (30:46):
Scattered?
Speaker 7 (30:47):
Folk musician Pete Seeger, just like Tim, was always curious
about his friend woundy Ga Thrie's inspiration for the poem.
When Tim was working on this back in twenty thirteen,
Pete actually gave him a call.
Speaker 10 (31:01):
Seek trying to get a message to Kim there, I'd
like to talk to you.
Speaker 7 (31:08):
Pete also wanted to know who were these people, and
Tim had the answer, do you ever.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Think, Pete, you know singing that song at any point
that maybe someday someone would answer the answer that who
are these friends?
Speaker 11 (31:23):
No?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
And you took it on as a job that God
would want done.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
Tim wound up meeting Pete in person, where he told
him the names of the twenty eight passengers, and then
in commemoration, Pete played deporte playing rec at los.
Speaker 8 (31:41):
Catos, Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye. Also liita ah do you.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Mis Jesus.
Speaker 7 (31:56):
Tim wouldn't know it, but this would be the last
time Pete would sing the song when he died a
few months later.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Oh We'll call.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
You Woopy.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Deep and those friends who were scattered like dry leaves
had all been memorialized together. In the end, the headstone
also included the names of the four American crew members, because,
as Tim saw it, leaving them out would be perpetuating
the same kind of omission, that erasure that started all
(32:30):
of this in the first place.
Speaker 7 (32:32):
And since Tim had been in touch with the American
families for a while, they were able to travel to
Fresno and attend the ceremony at Holy Cross Cemetery.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Jime was there too, and at one point a brown
suv pulled up and Jime's brother Guillemo got out. He
opened the door and helped his seventy seven year old mother,
Garitina Parretes Murrillo, step out. She was a kid when
her father died in the crash.
Speaker 6 (32:58):
My mother also, I think she said that she felt
like she was in the actual burying ceremony.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Oh, because she never got to do an actual funeral,
So for her this was really the first, as if
it was happening decades ago.
Speaker 6 (33:16):
Yes, she felt like that, like she was burying her father.
Speaker 7 (33:23):
And when you're standing here right now, what are you
thinking about?
Speaker 6 (33:27):
More content? More content to become Poor Celestan i Nadi.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
He's happy that there's recognition and honoring of them finally
in this community, at least, because they didn't really get
any recognition or anything anywhere else. They were in darkness.
You could say, in the in the shadows.
Speaker 6 (33:54):
Yes, in the shadows, and I'll never forget.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
When we asked her, and how do you feel, Kattina,
and she said, well, I'm crying and I don't know
if they're tears of joy or tears of pain, you know.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
After hearing the Deep or Tees song play a few
times during the ceremony, the Ramidez family requested that Mariacci's
play Mexico and the song lyrics say my dear and
(34:33):
beautiful Mexico. If I die far away from you, say
that I'm sleeping so they can bring me back to you.
(35:03):
After meeting with Jime's family, Tim continued traveling in Mexico
in the US trying to answer what we Gotri's question, who
are these friends? As of today, Tim has been able
to connect with the relatives of eight of the twenty
eight Mexican passengers, so he's still searching.
Speaker 14 (35:20):
As a chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, I
rise to recognize a tragic incident that occurred seventy years Last.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Year, on the seventieth anniversary of the crash, the California
State Senate held an emotional ceremony where for the first
time in history, they recognized the twenty eight Mexican victims
of the plane crash. Senator Benusso stood next to Jime
and other surviving family members as they held photos of
their relatives, and the Senate didn't forget to honor the
man who spent seven years of his life making this
(35:52):
all possible.
Speaker 14 (35:53):
Tim Hernandez did the work that the government should have done,
but seventy years later, they will be remembered as a
valued part of the history of our state.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
What you just heard was the story that we first
aired on Latino USA in twenty eighteen. I'm Fernande Chavari
and I'm back now with Tim Ernandez for updates on
what's happened since. So from what you've sent me over
email recently, it looks like some things have happened since
we air that story, and some of the things were
directly related to us airing that story.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Absolutely? Yeah, it was partly in due thanks to the
story that you all aired that I was able to
find for me one of the most important I think
in passengers on that airplane, which is the only female
Mexican passenger, Madia Rodriguez Santana who was the first passenger.
I started to look for her family. I started to
look for the Rodriguez family since early twenty eleven. My
(37:01):
rationale was the reason why I'm looking for this person
first is because in an airplane full of all men,
I thought she would stand out. She'd be the easiest,
probably the first one I could locate. So I was
going to look for the female Mexican passenger. Makes sense
for the Yeah, it does.
Speaker 9 (37:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
And so after the first you know, year or two,
I just I couldn't find any information. So I sort
of gave up on her. But it wasn't until our
first interview aired that a ethnic studies high school teacher
contacted me and said, hey, that's my aunt Maria.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
That ethnic studies teacher was Mike Rodriguez.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
I live in Orange County, and I grew up in
Los Angeles and I live in Orange County with my
wife and my two kids. I've been a teacher of
nineteen years in Los Angeles and here in Orange County
as well. You know, I'm a huge fan of Latino USA.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
And there's this moment that really changed Mike's life.
Speaker 4 (37:56):
I woke up one morning, I think it was a
Sunday morning, and I was having my morning couple coffee
at the table, and I was just on my phone,
just kind of scrolling through Twitter, just kind of, you know,
picking up what was happening in the day's events, and
I came across this story right of a plane crash.
And when I saw that, it just it automatically clicked
in my mind. I said, wow, you know what, there's
(38:18):
a story in our family of a plane crash.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
It was a story that he had heard in his
family before, so he kept reading the Latino USA social
media post.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
And then I read about the story and how it
was actually people that were being deported twenty eight Mexican
migrants being deported from Oakland to Mexico. And so I
had heard the story of a plane crash, but I
had never heard a story about anybody being deported in
our family. So I messaged Latino USA on Twitter. I said,
is there a list of the names where I can
find them? And they said yeah, I just go to
(38:49):
the bottom of the articles. I was like, all right, cool, cool, cool,
So I'll scroll down to the bottom of the article
and I saw the list of all of the names
of the people who passed that day and then I
all of a sudden, I see it Maria Riguez Santana,
and I said, wow, that's our name.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Then Mike texted the unofficial family historian, Histio Gonzalo, and
Dio Gonzalo confirmed it was their relative. So Mike wanted
to learn more, so he sent Tim an email.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
All I do remember is saying that I read about
your story and about your book from Latino, USA, and
I wanted to let you know that that was our
Dia Marian that you wrote about in the plane crash, you.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Know, behind my desk doing my work one morning, I
see an email come up and it says something to
the effect of mister Hernani's my name is Mike Rodriguez
the third, and I heard your interview and I'd love
to talk with you. And also my family wants to
thank you for putting the headstone up and finding the
names and all of that right.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
And so it just kind of began this journey, right,
this journey of uncovering right for all of us, because
then it's like, what else don't we know about our family.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Tim knew that this journey with Mike was just getting started.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Whenever I receive it on my end an email like that,
I just I look at it and my first thought is, Oh,
this person's going to be in my life for a
long time, and they don't realize that yet. Because because
this has been a year's long project today it's going
on fifteen years. I've been searching, still looking for families,
interviewing families. Wow, I interview them over a period of years,
(40:20):
because we start to really dig deeper into who they were,
who these passengers were. That's the goal here, is to
find out who they were and what their families are
doing today in the United States.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Tim and Mike have remained close friends ever since that email.
Speaker 4 (40:33):
He's like my brother from another mother, you know what
I'm saying. Like, you know, we have a lot in
comment and both of us are interested in telling these
stories that are untold.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Tim, I'm wondering if, besides this update of someone listening
to the story that we did, contacting you and saying, hey,
that was my relative, anything else that has happened that
you want to share with us. I mean, this enough
is a pretty big deal, But wondering if you've been
able to find any other families or if anything else
has happened since we last aired the story.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
In twenty twenty four. Last year, in fall, I wrote
a second book title they Call You Back to continue
the story. That wasn't the intention when you and I
met eight year seven, eight years ago. I literally thought, Okay,
it's just just one book and I'm done. I will
keep collecting the stories and for posterity and history's sake.
But what I didn't realize even the stories after that book,
first book came out, the stories were so profound in
(41:26):
the families I could tell really needed to tell this story.
And since that time when the interview aired, I found
a seven more families, so now fifteen of the families,
and so I decided to write a second book, and
that's what the title is. They call you Back, because
they do. I thought I was done, and they kept
calling me back to the story. So that's happened. And
you know, really grateful that we've been able to capture
(41:48):
all this on footage and interviews and audio recordings, and
we've just really done a great job of documenting this
entire search since day one. And so I'm really excited
about all the things that we've been doing with this
story and hoping to get this story out as far
as we can, because at this time, this moment in time,
I think these stories are so critical. It's important for
(42:09):
us to look back at history to understand the lasting
impact of deportations over generations, because that's what this story
allows us to do. Glimpse back and to see how
many generations, three or four generations down the line, that
this single incident, this single dehumanization with regards to a
(42:30):
group of Mexicans being deported, how that has played out,
and all these families' lives over three generations at this point,
people who are now here in this country doing wonderful
things as American citizens, teachers, flight attendants, doctors, restaurant owners.
They're all here in this country legally doing amazing things
for this country, contributed in a way that is I think,
(42:51):
just integral to who we are as a country. This
story has that.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Power, a sentiment that Mike also shares.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
Important story to tell, especially seeing what's happening today with
migrants in our community and right here in Orange County,
and what's happening to the families of my students. Why
are my students' families calling in saying that we want
our kids to go virtual for the last week of
summer school. You know why, because they can't be out
right now because you know they're being hunted down by
(43:20):
federal agents. And so it's that feeling of like dehumanization, right,
That's what my family felt. That's seventy five years ago.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
There's a lack of respect in life that translated to
a lack of respect and a lack of dignity exactly
in death. It seems very.
Speaker 9 (43:36):
Parallel, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
From what I hear there now is a new memorial
marker at the crash site. Because I remember, other than
you and Larry, who we hear from in the story,
other than the two of you telling us this is
where the crash happened, there was no marker whatsoever that
signified that. So tell me more about how that memorial
marker came about.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yes, that's such an important part of the story to me.
It feels like the book end of the story. Because
we had the headstone that we installed at the cemetery
in twenty thirteen with all the names finally, and the
one thing that we didn't have was this memorial marker
at the crash site itself. And people because of the song,
people have come from all over the world looking for
the crash site, sort of making pilgrimages to the crash site,
(44:26):
but not knowing exactly where the plane crash. So it's
always been sort of important and for us one of
the plans we've had since the beginning of it all.
And I say we, I mean myself and the community
there and LOSC got those canyon and the families that
this affected. So we had over the years made attempts
to talk to the historical marker, the organization, the entity
that that helps us put those things together, and we
(44:48):
just sort of it just kind of you know, they're
with the red tape and everything. Things are lingered and lingered,
and nothing ever came of it. So finally it was
a residence of Los Gootto's Canyon. The farmers who still
own the rancher I should say, who still own property
up in the canyon. People who've been up there for
generations and have heard of the crash and knew of it,
got together themselves and decided we're not going to wait
(45:11):
for any institution or organization or whatever the government to
come and decide and help us put this together. We're
going to do it ourselves. So they got a piece
of property right across the street from the crash site,
and on their own raise the money, put their own
money into it, and with their own hands created this
beautiful memorial out of stones lifted out of the canyon itself.
(45:33):
And so that memorial is there now today, and it
has the names again of all the passengers who perish there.
It has a little bit of the history, it has
a quote by Woody Guthrie, it has a quote from
my book is they just did a beautiful job of
putting it there on the roadside. So now anytime you
drive up into Loscoto's Canyon, you can't miss the site.
Now it's this beautiful memorial. And in September of last year,
(45:53):
in twenty twenty four, myself with all of the families
of losc Goatto's Canyon, we all went out there and sell,
raided and unveiled the memorial. I tried to invite all
the families I could from that I have found till
then all fifteen of them, and also to the help
of Witty Guthrie's family, his family also said we'd like
to help you get the families there. What can we do?
(46:13):
And they actually supported the family's flights and tickets and
gas and things like that to get there.
Speaker 15 (46:18):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
The Whitty Guthrie family did that. And then they had
Whitty Guthrie's grandson, Damon Guthrie come out there and he
spoke on behalf of Witty Guthrie there at the canyon.
Speaker 13 (46:28):
It was just a.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Powerful moment, and everyone was there, and some of the
families did end up making it. I'd say about half
of the families were out there. It's just a very
powerful moment. It did feel like a closure. And I
asked one of the families that morning. I said, the
family of passenger Alberto Carlos Ragosa. I asked her name
is Maria, and I said. I looked at her and
I said, Maria, does this finally feel like a closure
(46:49):
for your family? And she looked at me and she said, actually,
it doesn't feel like a closure. It feels like an opening,
a time for a new day for our family. We
can now let that pass go and move forward into
a new day for our family because we've kept this
story and grieved over our Abato for years, for generations already,
So it feels like a new day.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Honestly, I thought that it really touched me that a
lot of people showed out from the community, people who
don't necessarily have a direct connection to the story, but
they still came to pay their respects and to honor
the lives of the twenty eight migrants.
Speaker 7 (47:26):
It was very powerful.
Speaker 4 (47:27):
You know, we're teachers now, and you wonder how much
of that story was a part of us becoming teachers,
you know, as teachers were storytellers since twenty eighteen. And
I'm thinking, is this like, has this been thea Maria like,
you know, calling to me right and calling to us
to do this work all these years? And it really
it puts goosebumps down my spine to think about it,
you know, and because her spirit, the spirit of all
(47:50):
the ones that have passed, are still with us. And
so you know, once again, I'm just very thankful to Tim.
You know that Tim took you know, got into did
in the story and decided to write about it, you know,
so we can learn about it today.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
Thank you, timz Hernandez, author and professor, for speaking with us.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
My pleasure. Thank you, Fernande, Thank you so much.
Speaker 8 (48:13):
Mike.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yes, thank you.
Speaker 15 (48:39):
All.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
They will call you will be Deportise. Originally aired in
twenty eighteen. It was produced by me Fernando Chavarri as
well as Maggie Feeling, and it was edited by Nadia Raymond.
Latino USA Today includes Droxanna Guire, Julia Caruso, Jessica Ellis,
Victoria Strada, Reinaldo Leanoz, Junior Stemi, La Beau, Andrea Lopes Crusado,
(49:02):
Luis Luna, glorimr Marquez, Julietta Martinelli, Marta Martinez, Monica Morles, Garcia,
JJ Carubin and Nancy Trujuio. I'm the managing editor. Penileera Mirez,
Maria Garcia and Marie Jojosa are our co executive producers.
Join us again next time, and in the meantime, you
can find us on social media and don't forget. If
(49:23):
you want to listen ad free and get bonus episodes,
join Futuro Plus. You'll support the kind of reporting that
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Speaker 7 (49:33):
Arios.
Speaker 15 (49:35):
Latino USA is made possible in part by the John D.
And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden,
and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. For more than
fifty years advancing ideas and supporting institutions to promote a
(49:56):
better world at Hewlett dot org.
Speaker 11 (50:00):
Hello,
Dear listener, Before we begin today's show, we have some
news to share. Starting next week, the podcast version of
Latino USA is going to be distributed by the Makurdura
Network at iHeartMedia. That is the biggest Latino vertical in
the podcast industry with over two hundred and fifty million
monthly listeners. So doing this is an opportunity for our
(00:23):
stories to reach more listeners than ever at a critical
time in our country's history. It also makes us more
resilient as an independent news nonprofit. What happens for you,
dear listener, is we maintain one hundred percent of our
editorial independence and will be an amazing company which shows
we love like Radion Bulante, will remain in public media.
(00:45):
PRX will continue to distribute Latino USA weekly to public
radio stations all over the US and Canada. Now this
is important, dear listener, because moving forward, you will hear
more ads in our podcasts, but we are going to
rely on your support as a That's really where the
vast majority of our funding still comes from from you
(01:05):
and other nonprofit sources. So if you want to support
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ad free it's easy join fuoduo plus. Go to Fuduomedia
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any ads. Easy. Thank you and as always, yes.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Hello, hey, ernandaw are you.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm well, it's so nice to see you. It's been many,
many years.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It has I know, it's incredible.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
That's Tim Hernandez, an author and investigative researcher. And yeah,
it's been a while since we talked. It feels like
so much has happened. But also it feels like I
was justin like the Fresno area.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I know that was eight I think eight years ago already.
So yeah, it's been a while, and look.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
At us, we still look like not a day over
twenty five.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Right, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
I'm catching up with Tim today because he emailed to
say there have been some interesting developments on a story
that I did back on twenty eighteen, So that's why
I'm going to be hosting the show today. The story
I'm talking about is the story of a plane that
crashed in nineteen forty eight on that flight where twenty
eight Mexican citizens who were being deported from the United States,
(02:27):
the plane crashed, everyone on board died. The American crew
members had their bodies sent home to their families for
a proper burial, but the twenty eight farm workers were
buried in a mass grave, nameless. This is the story
of Tim's search to find the families of those twenty
eight passengers, and above all, honestly, it's a story that
(02:51):
feels very connected to the present.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's important for us to look back at history to
understand the lasting impact of of deportations over generations.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Since our story aired, Tim has been able to connect
with seven more families, and I have to say that
doesn't happen often. Our story contributed to his life mission
of identifying the families of the dead.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
I was just on my phone, just kind of scrolling
through Twitter, just kind of, you know, picking up what
was happening in the day's events, and I came across
this story right of a plane crash. And when I
saw that, it just it automatically clicked in my mind.
I said, Wow, you know what, there's a story in
our family of a plane crash.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
We're going to hear more about those updates later, but
first you have to hear the story. So we're going
to play you the story that originally aired in twenty eighteen.
You'll notice that some of the time references are a
bit different because it's now been seventy seven years since
the crash happened. Stay tuned for those updates. This is
Latino USA. I'm Fernande Chavarri in for our host Marino Jo.
(04:00):
Let's get to our story. On a Wednesday morning, just
after ten am, a plane was flying over Los Gato's
Canyon in California Central Valley. It was nineteen forty eight
in February. The pilot noticed something was wrong, but he
(04:20):
had been to war and he had landed planes and
emergency situations before, so his training kicked in and he
started looking for a place to land the plane. But
then as he went over the canyon, something unexpected happened.
The left wing suddenly fell off and the rest of
the plane caught on fire. The plane started spinning out
(04:43):
of control. It hit the ground nose first, and it exploded,
killing everyone on board.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
When that first person that I saw was pulled out
of the plane, there was no head and the arms
and legs were gone. There's just the.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
The plane was headed to Elcentral California, a half hour
from the border with Mexico. And this wasn't just a
regular commercial flight. There were thirty two people on the plane,
four Americans, including three crew members and an immigration official,
and twenty eight migrant farm workers. Everyone died that morning,
(05:22):
all in the same way, but they were not all
treated the same after death. The twenty eight Mexican field
workers on that plane were known as Braseros. They had
come here at the request of the US government and
were headed back to Mexico, but didn't make it. After
the crash, only the remains of the four Americans were
sent back to their families. The Mexican citizens were buried
(05:44):
in a mass grave in California under a tiny plaque
that red.
Speaker 6 (05:49):
Twenty eight Mexican citizens who die in an airplane accident
near Colinga.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Twenty eight Mexican citizens. That's all they would call them,
and for decades that's all.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
There was.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
No one identified the remains of the twenty eight passengers,
No one asked for their families, No one really paid
attention until a Mexican American author came along and they
became personal From Futuro Media and per x It's Latino
USA am Fernanda Chavarri in for our host Maria jo Josa.
(06:24):
Today we go back to find out who were the
twenty eight unnamed people on that grave and meet a
man who made it his life mission to give them names.
And to do that, I'm joined by Latino USA producer
Maggie Feeling.
Speaker 7 (06:41):
Hey, Maggie, Hey, Fernanda. So when you and I found
out about this incident, we were talking about how these
people were virtually forgotten. They were nameless in death and
in the news. But the crash itself, it turns out
that more people might know about it than they realize.
Speaker 8 (06:58):
Goodbye by, And it's all because of one song that
kept the story alive throughout the decades.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
A song that has a very long, confusing title, Deep.
Speaker 7 (07:13):
Porti parentheses playing record Los Gatos, and it's sung here
by Pete Seeger, a super famous American folk music icon.
Speaker 8 (07:24):
Six hundred miles to that Mexico border. They chases like alaws.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
But Pete didn't write the song, He just made it famous.
In the nineteen fifties. Pete's good friend Woody Guthrie wrote it.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
When wood He heard about the crash on the radio,
he felt this strong sense of injustice. So he wrote
his feelings down as a poem, and it later became
the song.
Speaker 8 (07:46):
All all these friends, all scattered like dry leans. On
radio sends they are just deep arty.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Who are these friends who are scattered like dried leaves?
Speaker 7 (07:58):
The radio said they were just deportise.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
These kinds of poems and lyrics were not unusual for
Woody Guthrie. He was always sort of a revolutionary.
Speaker 9 (08:07):
Woody was kind of the embodiment of your quote unquote
every man in the sense that he lived and worked
and wrote and traveled among the people. I'm Nora Guthrie,
and I'm Woody Guthrie's daughter.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
We called Nora to find out why wood he wrote this.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
There was a very strong similarity between the migrant workers
in the nineteen thirties and the Oakies in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
The Okies were farmers in Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee, and of
course Oklahoma. They lost their homes during the dust Bowl
and migrated to California. Woody Guthrie was one of these people.
Speaker 9 (08:43):
When Woody came to California, he was homeless, living in
tents and little tin shacks, and so were the Mexican
field workers. They're kind of all in the same boat,
and I think that just instinctively he connected with their plug.
He didn't start out to be political. He started out
just being curious, so he would always dig further and
(09:06):
further into the news reports. And that was what happened
with the playing record Los Gatos.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Somewhere along the way, Pete Seeger, who was Woody's friend,
got ahold of the poem, set it to music, and
started singing it. Then the song got huge. It took
on a life of its own and was covered by
dozens of musicians.
Speaker 10 (09:24):
Johnny Cash, Johnny Rodriguez.
Speaker 11 (09:30):
Roll In and Dolly Parton, orangz.
Speaker 7 (09:37):
Jo Bias is so Dumb, Bob Dylan's Yeah, Mexico Harder,
they call him money, Burce Springsteen, and Woody's son Arlo
gu Three Legos is Lucy Maria.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
So you have all these super famous all American music
icons singing about Mexican farm workers in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 7 (10:06):
And it's really crazy because this song was sung throughout
the decades, and yet nobody bothered to find out who
these people were.
Speaker 9 (10:14):
And my father left a lot of songs like this.
Sometimes I call them like seeds to be harvested by
the next generation. So the thing is that he left
this song with the question why weren't the deportees.
Speaker 10 (10:31):
Namely, Oh, they will call you.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
These are the words that kept humming in my head.
All they will call you, will be deport All they
will call you. I'm Tim Hernandez, and I'm the author
who's been working on this plane. Requet los gatos for
the last seven years of your book is the name
of my book? Is all they will call you.
Speaker 7 (10:52):
So here's where Tim comes in. He's a professor and
an author, so he's always sort of digging for stories.
One day, Tim was doing recent search for something unrelated
back in twenty ten when he came across a newspaper article.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And it said one hundred people see an airplane fall
out of the sky ship plunge to earth and it
was a farm labor accident.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
So Tim was like, weird, that sounds familiar, and he
realized that it was the same story as the one
he knew from the song, and the same way that
Woody Guthrie was bothered by the injustice decades ago, Tim
too wanted resolution for the families of the victims, so
Tim set off on a quest.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You know, I just let my curiosity sort of pull me,
and I began to ask who is all and who
are they? And what do they call you? And that's
just what kept me going.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That was a s a quest that over the years
became more and more personal for Tim as he saw
the similarities between his life growing up in the Central
Valley and the migrant farm workers who died that day.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
You know, growing up the son of migrant farm workers,
I saw first hand the moments where my family felt voiceless,
and I started to see them play out as I
got older. Not beyond my family, I'd see them play
out in the broader community.
Speaker 11 (12:05):
You know.
Speaker 7 (12:06):
Tim put himself in the shoes of these twenty eight
families and thought, this could have been me, This could
have been my family.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I was born and raised here in California's San Joaquin Valley,
the agricultural hub here. My parents were actually migrant farm workers,
originally from South Texas and New Mexico, you know, kind
of growing up with migrant family, you know, we traveled
a lot quite a bit, working in different fields and
different harvests throughout the year, and my parents did that
pretty much you know up until I don't know, I
(12:33):
was about maybe eight or nine.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
And although Tim's family didn't participate in the Brassido program,
they did spend generations working in the fields in Texas
and California.
Speaker 10 (12:43):
Farming is America's biggest industry. All such farm jobs which
are top dirty or unpleasant are generally referred to as
stoop labor.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
The Brasido program, to summarize, was a seasonal worker program
that was the sort of amicable agree between the US
and Mexico that went on from the early forties to
the mid sixties.
Speaker 10 (13:05):
Brasseros.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
At that time, the US desperately needed workers to pick
fruits and vegetables.
Speaker 10 (13:11):
It isn't easy to find men willing to take on
such undesirable kinds of work. Understandably, then, the American farm
labor supply falls short and is supplemented by Mexican citizens.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
So they gave Mexican farm workers temporary permits to come
here and do the work. Millions of Mexican workers came
and went.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
When the harvesting season was over and the US government
didn't need them anymore, they would send them back by
train or fly them by plane.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
And that morning that's exactly what was happening. Those twenty
eight migrant workers were flying from San Francisco to El Centro,
right on the border with Mexico in a US government
chartered plane.
Speaker 7 (13:52):
So, based on Tim's research and interviews with the families
over the years, here's what happened. After the crash, officials
recovered as many scattered body parts as they could. Then
they formally notified the families of the four Americans and
sent them caskets of piece together remains, some as far
as upstate New York.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
As for the Mexican passengers, the leftover body parts were
also put in caskets, but they were not sent back
to Mexico. They were buried in that mass grave we
mentioned earlier, fourteen on one side, fourteen on the other,
in Fresno, California.
Speaker 7 (14:29):
So the Mexican passengers' bodies were never repatriated. Some families
in Mexico were notified by the Mexican government via letter,
others only heard about it on the radio. It's unclear
exactly how each of the families found out and if
they even knew where their loved ones were buried.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
We reached out to the Mexican government officials at the
embassy in DC, but were denied an interview. Of course,
we weren't going to find people working there who were
working for the Mexican government seventy years ago, but we
wanted to know how the government handle this. An official
said via email that today their policy is to help
families in Mexico find funeral homes and cremation services in
(15:11):
the US, and that based on the family's financial need,
the Mexican government can help them pay for part of
the cost of getting their remains back to Mexico.
Speaker 7 (15:20):
We also wanted to know how only some of the
victims of the crash ended up identified, so to find
out we flew to meet Tim Ornandez in California.
Speaker 12 (15:29):
This is all cattle territory up here. It's Los Gatus Canyon.
It's all ranchers.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Fay's family were cattle ranchers up there.
Speaker 12 (15:36):
They were And did you see the house.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I'm sorry, I know they're the cutest little baby cats.
Speaker 12 (15:42):
Did you see the big long horns earlier?
Speaker 7 (15:44):
Yes, We're driving a ko linga about an hour southwest
from Fresno with Tim and his friend Larry Hawes.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
Larry is sort of Tim's sidekick and an unofficial historian
of his family, the family that owned the property where
the plane crashed seventy one years ago.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
It's hard every turn looks the same here unless you
know exactly where the crash happened. So then that's what
prompted me to want to call find Larry's the Gaston family,
so that I could identify exactly where it happened.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I have to ask what are we driving through? What
is what is this?
Speaker 12 (16:11):
This is called the oil patch, and this is the
Kalinga oil field, and this is Kalinga is actually coaling station.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
A oil was actually discovered here, and today there's a
whole bunch of industrial oil derricks covering a huge part
of a barren desert area.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The plane would have been able to see these oil
dereks as it was coming in here this way. And
because he had crashed landed that airplane twice before, it
makes sense that the one could actually you know, you
could surmise from that that he was more than likely
looking for a strip of dirt to land on. There's
nothing you can do crash landed q that same exact
airplane he had crashed landed twice before.
Speaker 7 (16:52):
Okay, so it wasn't the exact plane, but the kind
of plane, a Douglas DC three, which back in the
thirties and forties was a pretty revolutionary plane. Frank Atkinson,
the pilot, was used to flying and crash landing the
DC three.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
So he thought he could land that plane again, and
he might have been able to if all that was
wrong was a plane malfunction.
Speaker 12 (17:15):
But plane wing broke off and it started spinning out
of control and throwing people out. So we're here, we
are here.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
We're going through a barbarie fence. I'm so short it
fair works.
Speaker 12 (17:43):
This is the actual crash site, and this was where
the main bodies were at and dead people were everywhere
right where we're standing.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Larry wasn't born when the plane crushed, but growing up
he heard stories about that day and about how his
family raced to the scene to help in any way
they could.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
Larry's mom and his aunt June were little girls at
the time. His aunt June was nine years old when
she saw the wreckage and is the only surviving witness
in Larry's family.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
June was stunning, you know, not too far off here
looking at and eye witnessing all this.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
June is in her eighties now and remembers it all
in very graphic detail. So we called her at her
home in North Carolina to get an account of what happened.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
We saw bushes with brains hanging on it, and my
thoughts then, as a little girl, that looks like decorating
a Christmas tree. It was just all over with these brains.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
At the time, June didn't realize the impact this would
have on her beyond the trauma of witnessing a crash.
Speaker 7 (18:41):
Do you remember as you got older learning more about it.
Speaker 5 (18:45):
I do remember, because my mother was following it in
the papers, and I remember her shortly after that saying,
this has become an international incident because they've buried all
of these people together in the mass grave. Then that
(19:05):
really occurred to me, how really terrible that was, that
they were just demeaning these people because they weren't us
by leaving their name off. I finally came to see
what an insult it was.
Speaker 7 (19:23):
Tim also felt like the twenty eight people who died
that day were not treated humanly or equal to the
families of the American passengers.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
So he wanted to right that wrong. Tim felt that
these brascados were sort of invisible in life and then
in death they weren't even given a name.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And some big dream I might have in the future,
maybe put us some kind of a headstone marker with
their names on it.
Speaker 7 (19:47):
So first he went to the cemetery in Fresno where
the mass grave is. He wanted to see the plot,
so we asked Carlos Rascone, the cemetery director, to show him.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
After they walked over and saw the tiny plaque and
the the act of the cemetery that read twenty eight
Mexican citizens, Tim asked Carlos to see the cemetery's ledger
of names. Surely the cemetery would have a record of
who was buried there, right, But.
Speaker 7 (20:12):
When Carlos pulled it out of the archives.
Speaker 13 (20:14):
So it just said on Mexican nationals twenty eight times.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
At this point, Carlos also wanted to find their names.
He wanted to know who was buried in his cemetery.
So Carlos joined Tim on his search, which led them
to one more place, the Hall of Records in Fresno.
That's the place that keeps all birth and death certificates.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
And it was there that they were finally able to
get a list of names.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
But they quickly realized that list was unreliable. In Mexico,
you usually have two last names, you're a maternal last
name and paternal last name, and so many of them
were treated as first names. There was somebody with the
last name Lada that was turning to a woman named Laura,
and many of the names in Spanish were turned into
Italian names.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
So they knew right away this list was botched.
Speaker 13 (21:05):
The fact that there were misspelled it kind of maybe
shows a little bit of who might have been behind
the pin or the books.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
Sure enough, there had always been a list with the names,
but why didn't it make it to the cemetery.
Speaker 13 (21:19):
I would think that It's just it was a very
sad oversight, I would say.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
So there they were with an actual list of names
in their hands for the first time, and it was wrong.
Speaker 7 (21:32):
But then Carlos remembered that every November, on the day
of the dead, someone came by to leave flowers at
the mass grave. Someone was visiting a loved one. This
was Tim's first real clue that these people were not
totally forgotten.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
He wanted to find who that person was, so Tim
put out a call on the local paper in Fresno
that said, if you or someone you know is related
to any of the two twenty eight Mexican passengers who
died in that plane crash in nineteen forty eight, contact me.
And someone did. That's coming up after the break.
Speaker 7 (22:22):
Hey, we're back.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Before the break, Tim r Nandez had put out a
call in the Fresno newspaper asking to hear from family
members of the Mexican passengers who died in the plane crash,
passengers whose bodies had been buried in a mass grave
under a plaque that read twenty eight Mexican citizens.
Speaker 7 (22:38):
And not long after Tim put out the call he
got a response.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Someone gave me a newspaper and said, look, they're talking
about your grandpa's blank crush.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
This is Jim Ramirez. We met him in Fresno with Tim, and.
Speaker 6 (22:52):
I started reading it isn't I and I got my
computer in his start.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Jimi went to his computer and started writing Tim an email.
He wrote in Spanish, I know about the accident because
that's where my maternal grandfather named Ramon Parets and my
uncle while Lupe Ramires Lada were killed. Jime then included
his address.
Speaker 7 (23:10):
My phone number and ended with if you need information,
just let me.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Know anything that you want to know.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Just yeah, what do you need to know?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I'm right here, I was like, And so that was
really hopeful. Your email, as short as it was and
as quick as it was, it had so much hope
inside of it, and so I was excited to meet
you right away. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
And not only is Hime a surviving family member, but
Tim didn't have to go to Mexico. Jime was right
there in Fresno.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Jime owns a restaurant called Olifrijole, and everyone in Presno
knows the restaurant. Most of the employees there are related
to Hime, and they are descendants of two of the
passengers from the plane crash, his uncle and his grandpa.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
So when he first told me that that was his restaurant,
I said, no, I said, you're kidding, because I've been
there since I was a kid. You know, I've been
going there. I'm sure I've seen you before, and that's
my restaurant. And I said it's legendary, and he said, yeah,
it is. You were looking for.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Now and I was right there.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
And Hime was there all along in more than one way.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Remember the flowers that someone was putting on the mass
grave on the other Los Mortos, and.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I said, wow, you know, I wonder who that person is.
Later on I would learn that.
Speaker 6 (24:13):
It was yes, sy Wassin Salinas.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
It was him. He's the one that was putting flowers
on the grave. He was Tim's first found family member.
And turns out he was also Tim's golden ticket.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
The newspaper my grandmother kept, and I kept it.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I don't know why. So here's what happened. Not long
after the crash, in nineteen forty eight, a small Spanish
language newspaper published an article that listed every passenger with
the correct spelling of both.
Speaker 6 (24:50):
Last names, and he had all the names and where
they were from in Mexico, did little towns.
Speaker 7 (24:58):
This was it. Years of searching and Tim finally had
their names.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Independent newspaper in Faro, very old. It looks like it's
a front page, right, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It is the front page.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Yeah, so it's a front page. And in the front
page you have the two photos of a priest looking
over the bodies for the funeral service. On the right
side is the column that has all of the names
first last name, where they're from, the names of their
parents or wives, if they knew them. Kelli hues Par. Wow,
(25:40):
I'm going to try to translate that as beautifully as
it is written in Spanish. On Saturday, the thirty first
of January that just passed, there was a funeral for
the twenty eight compatriots that were chosen by destiny to
perish in an unfortunate accident near Collinga, California. Like just
(26:02):
the way that this is written is super like old newspaper.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Very poetic, poetic. It's very poetic. In fact, even the
biblical sort of Seeing.
Speaker 7 (26:10):
How the Spanish language paper wrote about the twenty eight
Mexican victims made it even more clear just how differently
their deaths were treated and how their remains were handled.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Twenty eight families without closure, without being able to have
a physical place to mourn. And although yes, most of
the families knew how their sons, brothers and husbands had died,
they didn't get to have a funeral or a place
to visit their loved one. Lay flowers, just grieve and
as any cemetery director would know. Godlos says, there is
(26:40):
an importance to being able to visit someone's grave.
Speaker 13 (26:43):
It's just a sense of emptiness, like wait a minute,
you know it's not just some John Doe that got
you know, no family indigen nobody knows there was information,
and so I left kind of a blank there, like
eight a minute now.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
So now with the full names spelled correctly, Tim, Carlos
and Jaime could start the process of making a proper
headstone with all the names on.
Speaker 7 (27:12):
It, and they would also travel to Mexico to try
and find other families. Tim wanted to tell them that
their loved ones were no longer in a nameless mass grave.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
So the first family Tim wanted to meet was Jimes. Remember,
both his grandfather and great uncle died in the crash.
So Tim and Jim got on a plane and flew
to Juanajuato in central Mexico. They were there on the
sixty seventh anniversary of the crash.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
I don't want.
Speaker 7 (27:38):
To Jim set up a meeting with his family, and
right at ten forty am, the time when the plane crashed,
they had a moment of silence.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
During the trip, Jaime told Tim a little more about
his grandfather and great uncle. Guadalupe and grew up in
charcole Panto, a farming community into when they got older,
they both owned land and farm garbanzo beans wheat in alfalfa.
Speaker 7 (28:08):
But their towns struggled to get an irrigation system in place.
They didn't have the money to get it set up.
That's when the idea to go work in the fields
in California came up.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
So they both went back and forth working as braseros
and bringing money back to their town.
Speaker 7 (28:22):
Do you remember stories growing up about them.
Speaker 6 (28:24):
Yeah, it's my mitioos.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Dongle liked horse riding into just like shoot a bullets
in there.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
Oh, yellows is.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
His uncle was so blonde that they call them corn
hair like pelos. Jime's family is split between Fresno, California
and Juanajuado, and these are the types of stories that
have been keeping his grandfather alive in Jime's memory. So
(29:11):
for him to tell his family, his mother mostly that
her father would no longer be buried under a nameless headstone,
it was life changing. Now we know who the people are.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Now, we know who their lives are, who their family are,
we know how they how they are in its community.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So on September second, twenty thirteen, the new headstone was
unveiled in the cemetery. These Braseros, who were once invisible
and forgotten under a mass grave, had their names on
a big, beautiful marble headstone.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
Miguel Negrete, Alvarez, Francisco Yamas, Duran, Santiago Garcia, Alixandro Rossalio,
Padi Estra, Nabe Lopez Garcia, Ramon pre Mas, Avigna de Gracia,
Lupe Ramirez, Las.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Several, Medina Lara.
Speaker 7 (29:57):
In this moment of having these names carved in to
stone forever, this is what Tim and Jime wanted for years.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
Manuel Calderon, Mari Luiz Cuevas, Miranda Martin, Rasso, Navarnacio, Perez Navarro,
Romano Too, Ramirez, Placentia, Alberto Carlos, Ronandez Rodrigu, Maria Santana,
Rodriguez One, Valenzuela Luis when says Lao flores Sevalivia, sanchezs Santos.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Around the edges of the headstone are thirty two leaves
for the song that says, who are these friends all?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Scattered?
Speaker 7 (30:39):
Like dry leaves, which brings us back to the song.
Speaker 5 (30:42):
Who are all these friends now?
Speaker 8 (30:46):
Scattered?
Speaker 7 (30:47):
Folk musician Pete Seeger, just like Tim, was always curious
about his friend woundy Ga Thrie's inspiration for the poem.
When Tim was working on this back in twenty thirteen,
Pete actually gave him a call.
Speaker 10 (31:01):
Seek trying to get a message to Kim there, I'd
like to talk to you.
Speaker 7 (31:08):
Pete also wanted to know who were these people, and
Tim had the answer, do you ever.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Think, Pete, you know singing that song at any point
that maybe someday someone would answer the answer that who
are these friends?
Speaker 11 (31:23):
No?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
And you took it on as a job that God
would want done.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
Tim wound up meeting Pete in person, where he told
him the names of the twenty eight passengers, and then
in commemoration, Pete played deporte playing rec at los.
Speaker 8 (31:41):
Catos, Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye. Also liita ah do you.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Mis Jesus.
Speaker 7 (31:56):
Tim wouldn't know it, but this would be the last
time Pete would sing the song when he died a
few months later.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Oh We'll call.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
You Woopy.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Deep and those friends who were scattered like dry leaves
had all been memorialized together. In the end, the headstone
also included the names of the four American crew members, because,
as Tim saw it, leaving them out would be perpetuating
the same kind of omission, that erasure that started all
(32:30):
of this in the first place.
Speaker 7 (32:32):
And since Tim had been in touch with the American
families for a while, they were able to travel to
Fresno and attend the ceremony at Holy Cross Cemetery.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Jime was there too, and at one point a brown
suv pulled up and Jime's brother Guillemo got out. He
opened the door and helped his seventy seven year old mother,
Garitina Parretes Murrillo, step out. She was a kid when
her father died in the crash.
Speaker 6 (32:58):
My mother also, I think she said that she felt
like she was in the actual burying ceremony.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
Oh, because she never got to do an actual funeral,
So for her this was really the first, as if
it was happening decades ago.
Speaker 6 (33:16):
Yes, she felt like that, like she was burying her father.
Speaker 7 (33:23):
And when you're standing here right now, what are you
thinking about?
Speaker 6 (33:27):
More content? More content to become Poor Celestan i Nadi.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
He's happy that there's recognition and honoring of them finally
in this community, at least, because they didn't really get
any recognition or anything anywhere else. They were in darkness.
You could say, in the in the shadows.
Speaker 6 (33:54):
Yes, in the shadows, and I'll never forget.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
When we asked her, and how do you feel, Kattina,
and she said, well, I'm crying and I don't know
if they're tears of joy or tears of pain, you know.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
After hearing the Deep or Tees song play a few
times during the ceremony, the Ramidez family requested that Mariacci's
play Mexico and the song lyrics say my dear and
(34:33):
beautiful Mexico. If I die far away from you, say
that I'm sleeping so they can bring me back to you.
(35:03):
After meeting with Jime's family, Tim continued traveling in Mexico
in the US trying to answer what we Gotri's question, who
are these friends? As of today, Tim has been able
to connect with the relatives of eight of the twenty
eight Mexican passengers, so he's still searching.
Speaker 14 (35:20):
As a chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, I
rise to recognize a tragic incident that occurred seventy years Last.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Year, on the seventieth anniversary of the crash, the California
State Senate held an emotional ceremony where for the first
time in history, they recognized the twenty eight Mexican victims
of the plane crash. Senator Benusso stood next to Jime
and other surviving family members as they held photos of
their relatives, and the Senate didn't forget to honor the
man who spent seven years of his life making this
(35:52):
all possible.
Speaker 14 (35:53):
Tim Hernandez did the work that the government should have done,
but seventy years later, they will be remembered as a
valued part of the history of our state.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
What you just heard was the story that we first
aired on Latino USA in twenty eighteen. I'm Fernande Chavari
and I'm back now with Tim Ernandez for updates on
what's happened since. So from what you've sent me over
email recently, it looks like some things have happened since
we air that story, and some of the things were
directly related to us airing that story.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Absolutely? Yeah, it was partly in due thanks to the
story that you all aired that I was able to
find for me one of the most important I think
in passengers on that airplane, which is the only female
Mexican passenger, Madia Rodriguez Santana who was the first passenger.
I started to look for her family. I started to
look for the Rodriguez family since early twenty eleven. My
(37:01):
rationale was the reason why I'm looking for this person
first is because in an airplane full of all men,
I thought she would stand out. She'd be the easiest,
probably the first one I could locate. So I was
going to look for the female Mexican passenger. Makes sense
for the Yeah, it does.
Speaker 9 (37:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
And so after the first you know, year or two,
I just I couldn't find any information. So I sort
of gave up on her. But it wasn't until our
first interview aired that a ethnic studies high school teacher
contacted me and said, hey, that's my aunt Maria.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
That ethnic studies teacher was Mike Rodriguez.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
I live in Orange County, and I grew up in
Los Angeles and I live in Orange County with my
wife and my two kids. I've been a teacher of
nineteen years in Los Angeles and here in Orange County
as well. You know, I'm a huge fan of Latino USA.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
And there's this moment that really changed Mike's life.
Speaker 4 (37:56):
I woke up one morning, I think it was a
Sunday morning, and I was having my morning couple coffee
at the table, and I was just on my phone,
just kind of scrolling through Twitter, just kind of, you know,
picking up what was happening in the day's events, and
I came across this story right of a plane crash.
And when I saw that, it just it automatically clicked
in my mind. I said, wow, you know what, there's
(38:18):
a story in our family of a plane crash.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
It was a story that he had heard in his
family before, so he kept reading the Latino USA social
media post.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
And then I read about the story and how it
was actually people that were being deported twenty eight Mexican
migrants being deported from Oakland to Mexico. And so I
had heard the story of a plane crash, but I
had never heard a story about anybody being deported in
our family. So I messaged Latino USA on Twitter. I said,
is there a list of the names where I can
find them? And they said yeah, I just go to
(38:49):
the bottom of the articles. I was like, all right, cool, cool, cool,
So I'll scroll down to the bottom of the article
and I saw the list of all of the names
of the people who passed that day and then I
all of a sudden, I see it Maria Riguez Santana,
and I said, wow, that's our name.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Then Mike texted the unofficial family historian, Histio Gonzalo, and
Dio Gonzalo confirmed it was their relative. So Mike wanted
to learn more, so he sent Tim an email.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
All I do remember is saying that I read about
your story and about your book from Latino, USA, and
I wanted to let you know that that was our
Dia Marian that you wrote about in the plane crash, you.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Know, behind my desk doing my work one morning, I
see an email come up and it says something to
the effect of mister Hernani's my name is Mike Rodriguez
the third, and I heard your interview and I'd love
to talk with you. And also my family wants to
thank you for putting the headstone up and finding the
names and all of that right.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
And so it just kind of began this journey, right,
this journey of uncovering right for all of us, because
then it's like, what else don't we know about our family.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Tim knew that this journey with Mike was just getting started.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Whenever I receive it on my end an email like that,
I just I look at it and my first thought is, Oh,
this person's going to be in my life for a
long time, and they don't realize that yet. Because because
this has been a year's long project today it's going
on fifteen years. I've been searching, still looking for families,
interviewing families. Wow, I interview them over a period of years,
(40:20):
because we start to really dig deeper into who they were,
who these passengers were. That's the goal here, is to
find out who they were and what their families are
doing today in the United States.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Tim and Mike have remained close friends ever since that email.
Speaker 4 (40:33):
He's like my brother from another mother, you know what
I'm saying. Like, you know, we have a lot in
comment and both of us are interested in telling these
stories that are untold.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Tim, I'm wondering if, besides this update of someone listening
to the story that we did, contacting you and saying, hey,
that was my relative, anything else that has happened that
you want to share with us. I mean, this enough
is a pretty big deal, But wondering if you've been
able to find any other families or if anything else
has happened since we last aired the story.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
In twenty twenty four. Last year, in fall, I wrote
a second book title they Call You Back to continue
the story. That wasn't the intention when you and I
met eight year seven, eight years ago. I literally thought, Okay,
it's just just one book and I'm done. I will
keep collecting the stories and for posterity and history's sake.
But what I didn't realize even the stories after that book,
first book came out, the stories were so profound in
(41:26):
the families I could tell really needed to tell this story.
And since that time when the interview aired, I found
a seven more families, so now fifteen of the families,
and so I decided to write a second book, and
that's what the title is. They call you Back, because
they do. I thought I was done, and they kept
calling me back to the story. So that's happened. And
you know, really grateful that we've been able to capture
(41:48):
all this on footage and interviews and audio recordings, and
we've just really done a great job of documenting this
entire search since day one. And so I'm really excited
about all the things that we've been doing with this
story and hoping to get this story out as far
as we can, because at this time, this moment in time,
I think these stories are so critical. It's important for
(42:09):
us to look back at history to understand the lasting
impact of deportations over generations, because that's what this story
allows us to do. Glimpse back and to see how
many generations, three or four generations down the line, that
this single incident, this single dehumanization with regards to a
(42:30):
group of Mexicans being deported, how that has played out,
and all these families' lives over three generations at this point,
people who are now here in this country doing wonderful
things as American citizens, teachers, flight attendants, doctors, restaurant owners.
They're all here in this country legally doing amazing things
for this country, contributed in a way that is I think,
(42:51):
just integral to who we are as a country. This
story has that.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Power, a sentiment that Mike also shares.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
Important story to tell, especially seeing what's happening today with
migrants in our community and right here in Orange County,
and what's happening to the families of my students. Why
are my students' families calling in saying that we want
our kids to go virtual for the last week of
summer school. You know why, because they can't be out
right now because you know they're being hunted down by
(43:20):
federal agents. And so it's that feeling of like dehumanization, right,
That's what my family felt. That's seventy five years ago.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
There's a lack of respect in life that translated to
a lack of respect and a lack of dignity exactly
in death. It seems very.
Speaker 9 (43:36):
Parallel, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
From what I hear there now is a new memorial
marker at the crash site. Because I remember, other than
you and Larry, who we hear from in the story,
other than the two of you telling us this is
where the crash happened, there was no marker whatsoever that
signified that. So tell me more about how that memorial
marker came about.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yes, that's such an important part of the story to me.
It feels like the book end of the story. Because
we had the headstone that we installed at the cemetery
in twenty thirteen with all the names finally, and the
one thing that we didn't have was this memorial marker
at the crash site itself. And people because of the song,
people have come from all over the world looking for
the crash site, sort of making pilgrimages to the crash site,
(44:26):
but not knowing exactly where the plane crash. So it's
always been sort of important and for us one of
the plans we've had since the beginning of it all.
And I say we, I mean myself and the community
there and LOSC got those canyon and the families that
this affected. So we had over the years made attempts
to talk to the historical marker, the organization, the entity
that that helps us put those things together, and we
(44:48):
just sort of it just kind of you know, they're
with the red tape and everything. Things are lingered and lingered,
and nothing ever came of it. So finally it was
a residence of Los Gootto's Canyon. The farmers who still
own the rancher I should say, who still own property
up in the canyon. People who've been up there for
generations and have heard of the crash and knew of it,
got together themselves and decided we're not going to wait
(45:11):
for any institution or organization or whatever the government to
come and decide and help us put this together. We're
going to do it ourselves. So they got a piece
of property right across the street from the crash site,
and on their own raise the money, put their own
money into it, and with their own hands created this
beautiful memorial out of stones lifted out of the canyon itself.
(45:33):
And so that memorial is there now today, and it
has the names again of all the passengers who perish there.
It has a little bit of the history, it has
a quote by Woody Guthrie, it has a quote from
my book is they just did a beautiful job of
putting it there on the roadside. So now anytime you
drive up into Loscoto's Canyon, you can't miss the site.
Now it's this beautiful memorial. And in September of last year,
(45:53):
in twenty twenty four, myself with all of the families
of losc Goatto's Canyon, we all went out there and sell,
raided and unveiled the memorial. I tried to invite all
the families I could from that I have found till
then all fifteen of them, and also to the help
of Witty Guthrie's family, his family also said we'd like
to help you get the families there. What can we do?
(46:13):
And they actually supported the family's flights and tickets and
gas and things like that to get there.
Speaker 15 (46:18):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
The Whitty Guthrie family did that. And then they had
Whitty Guthrie's grandson, Damon Guthrie come out there and he
spoke on behalf of Witty Guthrie there at the canyon.
Speaker 13 (46:28):
It was just a.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Powerful moment, and everyone was there, and some of the
families did end up making it. I'd say about half
of the families were out there. It's just a very
powerful moment. It did feel like a closure. And I
asked one of the families that morning. I said, the
family of passenger Alberto Carlos Ragosa. I asked her name
is Maria, and I said. I looked at her and
I said, Maria, does this finally feel like a closure
(46:49):
for your family? And she looked at me and she said, actually,
it doesn't feel like a closure. It feels like an opening,
a time for a new day for our family. We
can now let that pass go and move forward into
a new day for our family because we've kept this
story and grieved over our Abato for years, for generations already,
So it feels like a new day.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Honestly, I thought that it really touched me that a
lot of people showed out from the community, people who
don't necessarily have a direct connection to the story, but
they still came to pay their respects and to honor
the lives of the twenty eight migrants.
Speaker 7 (47:26):
It was very powerful.
Speaker 4 (47:27):
You know, we're teachers now, and you wonder how much
of that story was a part of us becoming teachers,
you know, as teachers were storytellers since twenty eighteen. And
I'm thinking, is this like, has this been thea Maria like,
you know, calling to me right and calling to us
to do this work all these years? And it really
it puts goosebumps down my spine to think about it,
you know, and because her spirit, the spirit of all
(47:50):
the ones that have passed, are still with us. And
so you know, once again, I'm just very thankful to Tim.
You know that Tim took you know, got into did
in the story and decided to write about it, you know,
so we can learn about it today.
Speaker 3 (48:06):
Thank you, timz Hernandez, author and professor, for speaking with us.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
My pleasure. Thank you, Fernande, Thank you so much.
Speaker 8 (48:13):
Mike.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yes, thank you.
Speaker 15 (48:39):
All.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
They will call you will be Deportise. Originally aired in
twenty eighteen. It was produced by me Fernando Chavarri as
well as Maggie Feeling, and it was edited by Nadia Raymond.
Latino USA Today includes Droxanna Guire, Julia Caruso, Jessica Ellis,
Victoria Strada, Reinaldo Leanoz, Junior Stemi, La Beau, Andrea Lopes Crusado,
(49:02):
Luis Luna, glorimr Marquez, Julietta Martinelli, Marta Martinez, Monica Morles, Garcia,
JJ Carubin and Nancy Trujuio. I'm the managing editor. Penileera Mirez,
Maria Garcia and Marie Jojosa are our co executive producers.
Join us again next time, and in the meantime, you
can find us on social media and don't forget. If
(49:23):
you want to listen ad free and get bonus episodes,
join Futuro Plus. You'll support the kind of reporting that
makes episodes like this one possible. Thank you.
Speaker 7 (49:33):
Arios.
Speaker 15 (49:35):
Latino USA is made possible in part by the John D.
And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden,
and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. For more than
fifty years advancing ideas and supporting institutions to promote a
(49:56):
better world at Hewlett dot org.
Speaker 11 (50:00):
Hello,
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