Cover Me: Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

On January 28, 1948, a DC-3 charter plane with seating for 26 passengers took off from Oakland with 32 people aboard–almost all of whom were Mexican citizens being deported from the United States.*

The plane never made it to its refueling stop in Burbank–a fuel leak in the port engine’s fuel pump ignited, and the entire port wing ripped off, taking nine passengers with it. The rest of the passengers and crew died when the plane crashed and exploded near Las Gatos Creek.

Plane crashes were hardly unheard of, but what made this particular crash so infuriatingly memorable was the way the deceased Mexican passengers  were identified in the media only as “deportees.” (The crew and guard were identified by name, however.) The unidentified victims were buried in Fresno, in a mass grave marked only as “Mexican Nationals.”

Later that year, Woody Guthrie wrote a poem about the event, called “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.”

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?

…and a decade later, college student Martin Hoffman set it to music, and the song known as “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” was born. It became popular when Pete Seeger recorded and performed it.

Over the years, “Deportee” has been covered too many times to count: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins… it seems like any artist with a social activist bent has covered the song at one point or another–including Bruce Springsteen, who first performed the song as a tribute to Woody Guthrie in Los Angeles during the River Tour.

Fifteen years later, Bruce reprised “Deportee” at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert in Cleveland, and that performance would be officially released four years later on a benefit album entitled ‘Til We Outnumber Them.

Bruce performed the songs on two more occasions in 1996, both on his solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour. The first time was as a warm-up for the Guthrie tribute three nights later; the second and was at his tour stop in Fresno, not far from the burial ground of the late victims of that 1948 plane crash.

Update 5/22/21: That was the last time Bruce played “Deportee” to date, until the spring of 2021, when Bruce was honored with the Woody Guthrie Prize. The ceremony was virtual this year, but Bruce generously performed a mini-set of Woody’s music, including a lovely performance of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”

*Recent research suggests that perhaps not all of the doomed flight’s passengers were Mexican. Listen to the interview below for a fascinating postscript to the true story of the plane wreck at Los Gatos.

Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Recorded: September 29, 1996
Released: ‘Till We Outnumber ’em  (2000)
First performed: August 28, 1981 (Los Angeles, CA)
Last performed: May 13, 2021 (Colts Neck, NJ)