So it went something like this:
A young, doe-eyed folk singer shared songs in a dark empty coffee shop in San Francisco. The songs, passed down to her by her mentors, were popular a decade before she was born and were written three, four, five decades before that. The floor boards creaked as she rocked to the rhythm of her guitar strumming. She didn’t have a great voice, but she meant every word, carrying the weight of the oppressed whom she never really met. “Still she’s overdoing it,” I thought, sipping my third cup of coffee. “But what the hell? It’s a chilly night and the entertainment in here is free.”
She began her second set, explaining the history of her next song. And the history – it went exactly like this:
In 1948, Woody Guthrie, forced to retire from performing due to early signs of Huntington’s disease, heard a radio report about a plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon. The dead were four Americans and 28 migrant farm workers, who were being deported back to Mexico. The radio announcer said the names of the four Americans but reported the others as “just deportees,” as if their names weren’t important. From this report, Guthrie did what every great humanitarian would do – he wrote a poem dedicated to those unnamed victims.
And so this young woman stopped talking and sang Guthrie’s poem, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” set to music by Martin Hoffman in 1958. Her voice shook as she stepped in the shoes of Guthrie, who stepped in the shoes of a lone Mexican worker, saying goodbye to his amigos who were flying back to the border. That flight didn’t make it to the border, but instead headed straight down into the canyon.
“Who are these friends who scatter like dry leaves?” cried the singer. “The radio said they were ‘just deportees’.” And at that moment, I felt the waterworks coming. By the time she sang the final chorus, I could barely hold my tears.
I was so unbelievably touched but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the way she was singing, or what she was singing about, or the fact the poet himself cared so much for these “friends” whom he had never met. Or perhaps, as horrible that plane wreck was, the real tragedy was that some people would be so heartless that they would brush off others like they were “dry leaves.” Those immigrants were human beings, for God’s sake, and to describe them as “just deportees,” well it was unspeakable.
It took me years to learn that song. I never wanted to play it, because it really hit a nerve. I just didn’t want to go there. But when I began playing at a farmers market here in Los Angeles, I put the song in my repertoire. At the market, I would run into immigrant farm workers and recalled that my own family, like so many Japanese American families at the turn of last century, worked on farms, worked there until the war started and they were placed in internment camps up and down the West Coast. Though they own their own properties, they were, and would always be, aliens in the eyes of the American public.
So I sing this song with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. Because at times I do still feel like an outlaw, a rustler and a thief, but I know that on both sides of the river, we die just the same.
“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita/Adios mi amigos, Jesus y Maria/You won’t have your names when you ride the big aeroplane/All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”
So which song makes you cry?
My version of “Deportee”
