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Mourning across Borders: Multidirectional Memory in Tim Z. Hernandez's All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2020
Abstract
In the documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernandez brings to light the life stories of the Mexican migrant workers who fatally died in a plane accident as they were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948. Inspired by Woody Guthrie's song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon” (1961), the novel interweaves testimony, documentation, historical contextualization, and fictional mechanisms to involve the reader ethically in the pursuit of an alternative truth – one that underscores the dialectical relationship between the migrants’ lives, their communities, and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. The author entwines the lives and deaths of US and Mexican citizens and gives them historical and affective significance within the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) of a community of mourning enacted within and beyond his narrative. His “mestizx consciousness” (Anzaldúa), a lived awareness of the power imbalances that silence the subaltern across the US–Mexico border, manifests itself through the phenomenological leitmotif of la huesera. This southwestern tale and feminine archetype explains the impulse to bring into being a “new memory” (Irizarry) of a reconstructed community around the plane wreck and to challenge the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler) that silenced the migrants’ life stories.
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References
1 Hernández, Tim Z., All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2017)Google Scholar, hereafter ATWCY.
2 Another Chicano writer, the poet Rigoberto González, published a poem honoring the dead Mexican workers based on the same song by Woody Guthrie. See “Our Deportees,” American Poetry Review, 41, 2 (March–April 2012), 32–33, 33.
3 The endpapers of Hernandez's book are a reprint of the manuscript of the original poem by Woody Guthrie, “Los Gatos Plane Wreck.” The poem was later set to music by Martin Hoffman. The slightly modified lyrics, titled “Plane Wreck at los Gatos” (also known as “Deportee”), are featured in the official Woody Guthrie webpage, www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Plane_Wreck_At_Los_Gatos.htm, accessed 1 Oct. 2019. The song was covered by such renowned musicians as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Ani DiFranco, and Ry Cooder. More recently, a collaboration between the band Outernational and Tom Morello resulted in the recording of a version that protests the 2010 Arizona law against illegal immigration. Hernández's research inspired yet another version by Lance Canales mentioned later in this study.
4 The phrase “The land belongs to those who work it” (La tierra es para quien la trabaja) is popularly attributed to Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and has been invoked by multiple agricultural peasant movements across the Americas, ranging from Mexican agricultural workers in California, led by César Chávez in the 1960s, to the later Zapatista movement in Chiapas.
5 Nicolas P. De Genova argues that the illegal status of migrant workers and American citizens’ need for disposable labor and services is rooted on the “legal (political) economies” of the state. Illegal migration waves are the material effects of legal practices; they are by no means random, but carefully planned and patterned depending on historical contingencies. De Genova, Nicolas P., “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (Oct. 2002), 419–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 ATWCY, 11–13, 16.
7 Ibid., 16.
8 Guthrie, “Plane Wreck.”
9 ATWCY, 205–6.
10 Ibid., 210–12.
11 California State Senate, Senate Daily Journal, 29 Jan. 2019, 3195, at www.senate.ca.gov/dailyjournals, accessed 5 March 2020. A video clip of the senate floor session is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vst2ruQDAMs&t=10s, accessed 5 March, 2020.
12 Camacho, Alicia Schmidt, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US–Mexico Borderlands (New York and London: New York University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Irizarry, Ylce, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016)Google Scholar.
14 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Verso, 2006), 32Google Scholar.
15 The interest of Hernandez's work has extensively been covered by the press and the author has granted multiple interviews. See, for example, Luis Guzman's interview in Poet's Quarterly, 11 July 2013, at www.poetsquarterly.com/2013/07, accessed 1 Oct. 2019. See also recent book review by Christopher Rollason (2017) at https://rollason.wordpress.com, accessed 5 March, 2020.
16 This is my rewriting of Gloria Anzaldúa's term la consciencia de la mestiza, which she develops in Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 78–91. The term refers to a contested, shifting Mexican American/Chicanx subjectivity and to complex self–other dynamics within colonial and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. I find this term useful to describe the phenomenology of lived experience in the cross-border poetics in ATWCY. I am using the spelling mestizx in keeping with the neologisms Latinx and Chicanx. These are gender-neutral neologisms, sometimes used instead of the also neutral spelling of Latin@ or Chican@ to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The -x suffix replaces the standard -o/-a ending of nouns and adjectives that are typical of grammatical gender in Spanish. The terms have been used by intersectional approaches to the the history, culture, and political organization of the people of Latin American and Mexican origin in the United states, which combine the analysis of race, class, and gender.
17 Ibid., 3.
18 Butler, 34.
19 Galarza, Ernesto, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. An Account of the Managed Migration of Mexican Farm Workers in California 1942–1960 (San José, CA: Rosicrucian Press, 1964)Google Scholar.
20 ATWCY, 34–36.
21 Ibid., 75–76.
22 Ibid., 33.
23 De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’,” 433.
24 Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 63.
25 The origin of the Spanish word enganchado is to be found in the advance payment given to Mexican workers since the nineteenth century to incite workers’ recruitment, commit them to future labor away from their region, and later return them. This debt-based system was called the enganche (“hook”). Durand, Jorge and Arias, Patricia, La Experiencia Migrante: Iconografía de La Migración México–Estados Unidos (Guadalajara, Jalisco: Altexto, 2000), 28–29Google Scholar.
26 Ibid., 76.
27 Butler, Judith, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Ahmed, Sarah, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 13Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., 1, 3, 4.
30 Butler, Precarious Life, 134.
31 Guthrie, “Plane Wreck.”
32 Ibid.
33 ATWCY, xiv.
34 Pérez, Ricardo F. Vivancos, Radical Chicana Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013), xixCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Butler, Precarious Life, 27–32.
36 Rigoberto González, “Author Tim Z. Hernandez Gives Voice to Farm Workers Killed in 1948 Plane Crash” NBC News, 6 Feb. 2017, at www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/author-tim-z-hernandez-gives-voice-farm-workers-killed-1948-n715616, accessed 1 Oct. 2019.
37 Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Volume III (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 184Google Scholar.
38 Ahmed, 35.
39 Ibid., 36.
40 “I had to be a great listener. I had to be sensitive yet tactful, gentle but fearless in what I asked and how. It was an enormous learning curve for me, but I was a willing student.” Paul Sánchez, “Go Out and Taste the Dirt: A Normal Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez,” The Normal School: A Literary Magazine, 11 Jan. 2017, at www.thenormalschool.com/blog/2017/1/23/go-out-and-taste-the-dirt-a-normal-interview-with-tim-z-hernandez, accessed 1 Oct. 2019.
41 Caminero-Santangelo, Documenting the Undocumented, 37.
42 Flis, Leonora, Factual Fictions: Narrative Truth and the Contemporary American Documentary Novel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 28Google Scholar.
43 Ibid., 25.
44 For further discussion of the genres of testimonio and testimonial novel see Beverley, John and Achúgar, Hugo, eds., La voz del otro: Testimonio, subalternidad y verdad narrativa (Guatemala: Ediciones Papiro, 2002)Google Scholar.
45 Kerr, Lucille, “Gestures of Authorship: Lying to Tell the Truth in Elena Poniatowska's Hasta no verte Jesús mío,” MLN, 106 (1991), 370–94, 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Ibid., 388.
47 ATWCY, xiv. I interviewed Hernández on several occasions in 2017. In one of these exchanges, the author stated that once he stopped seeing himself as “Writer” he could have the freedom not to stick to any one genre. He would rather be viewed as someone who asks himself questions and seeks answers through writing.
48 Flis, 3.
49 Nancy Pedri, “Factual Matters: Visual Evidence in Documentary Fiction,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto, 2001, 48–49.
50 Flis, 23.
51 I'm using Avishai Margalit's phrase to refer to shared memories that go “beyond the experience of anyone alive”; that is, to “alleged memories” of the past, in The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58–59. Margalit's term is closely related to Marianne Hirsch's notion of post-memory developed later in her essay “The Generation of Post-memory,” Poetics Today, 29, 1 (2008), 103–28.
52 ATWCY, 5.
53 Ibid., 6.
54 Ibid., 15.
55 Ibid., 10.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Ibid., 17.
58 At this point the author only mentions the southwestern folkloric tale through El Indio. Later in this essay I deal with the phenomenological value of la huesera as a leitmotif that inspires the project of reconstructing and piecing together memories in Hernandez's text.
59 Ibid., 16.
60 Ibid., 17.
62 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York and London: Hill and Wang, 1981), 57–59Google Scholar.
63 ATWCY, 66–68.
64 Ibid., 33.
65 Tim Hernández showed me the original letter, written in delicate penmanship. For the characterization of Ramón he had it analyzed by a graphologist. Unpublished exchange with the writer.
66 ATWCY, 53.
67 They were probably cristero militias opposed to the division and distribution of land among farming families that the Mexican Revolution had accomplished. Steffen, Cristina and Huacuja, Flavia Echánove, Efectos de las políticas de ajuste estructural en los productores de granos y hortalizas de Guanajuato (México, DF: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2003), 87Google Scholar.
68 Their migration north to build a well virtually matches historical records on the construction of wells assumed by solidary groups of ejidatarios after the 1940s to cut down the risks involved in the cultivation of seasonal crops. Ibid., 88.
69 Mouffe, Chantal, “Which World Order: Cosmopolitan or Multipolar?”, Ethical Perspectives, 15, 4 (Dec. 2008), 453–67, 454CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 ATWCY, 76.
71 Ibid., 160–62.
72 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (London and New York: Oxford University Press), 4–10.
73 Caminero-Santangelo, Documenting the Undocumented, 49.
74 Irizarry, Chicana/o and Latina/o.
75 Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 17.
76 The “narrative of loss” is one of the four main categories or genres of fiction Irizarry outlines in her analysis of the development of a “new memory of latinidad” in ibid., 32, 35–73.
77 Butler, Precarious Life, 32.
78 Ibid., 178.
79 Ibid., 179.
80 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 130.
81 Butler, Precarious Life, 33.
82 Caminero-Santangelo, 49.
83 ATWCY, 175.
84 Guthrie's poem uses the singular “I” and the collective “You” to convey a hypothetical Mexican migrant's viewpoint and address to the American people/citizen. The Mexican worker speaks of “my peaches,” “my orchard,” “my good fruit,” and “my hills,” thus claiming his entitlement to the land and the product of his labor. In the official song lyrics, two voices are discernible: the voice of a narrator telling about the workers’ fate (“they”), who also addresses them as “you” (“mis amigos”), and the voice of a migrant telling of about a collective (“we”) and their abuses at the hands of farmers and officials (they). The final two strophes of the song go back to the narrator, but in the coda there is a certain ambivalence about “we” and “my,” as the voices of the migrant and the narrator merge into a single one that asks whether the best way to cultivate orchards and fruit is to let fruit rot as well as letting people die. See Guthrie, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon.”
85 ATWCY, 20–22. Murrieta is a historical and legendary figure, an outlaw known as the “Robin Hood” of the West. History and legend mix in the facts about his life: He is thought to have been a Sonoran gold miner who Anglos allegedly drove away from a mining claim after abusing his family.
86 ATWCY, viii.
87 Huyssen., Andreas “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” New German Critique, 88 (2003), 147–64, 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
88 Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Ibid., 1–5.
90 Ibid., 15.
91 Ibid., 16.
92 ATWCY, 154.
93 Ibid., 151–52.
94 Rothberg, 11.
95 ATWCY, 210.
96 Ibid., 112.
97 Ibid., xiii–xiv.
98 Ibid., 46.
99 Ibid., 214.
100 Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run with the Wolves (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992)Google Scholar.
101 Silva, Ir'ene Lara, “La Huesera or Flesh to Bone,” in Schuler, Brandon D., Johnson, Robert, and Johnson, Erika Garza, eds., New Border Voices: An Anthology (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2008), 99–105Google Scholar, quoted in ATWCY, 203.
102 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera 4.
103 ATWCY, xiv.
104 La huesera is also alluded to in another piece of Chican@ writing related to memory: Sandra and Sheila Ortiz Taylor invoke the myth in relation to the investigative pursuit of the truth and the assemblage of scattered bits and pieces of stories. In the foreword to their autobiographical Imaginary Parents (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1996), Sheila says that the book is “made of bones”: “Scissors and paste, my father would say. Bricolage, my sister says. A miniaturist to the bone. Bone woman insists on all the parts” (xiii).
105 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 34.
106 Fresno singer Lance Canales & The Flood recorded this version featuring Tim Z. Hernández calling out the real names of the Mexicans deceased in the accident. A video clip of this version is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeCstLTB0EI, accessed 5 March 2020.
107 The publication of ATWCY has coincided with the hardening of US immigration policy. The executive relief programs (DACA, DAPA), implemented during the Obama administration, were an alternative to the comprehensive immigration reform that Congress failed to pass during his term. The revocation of DAPA during the Trump administration led to the traumatic separation of thousands of children from their deported parents. The crackdown on sanctuary cities accused of not cooperating with federal immigration authorities, the proposal of the RAISE Act and a merit-based immigration system, the encouragement of police brutality in the enforcement of the law, a militaristic approach to the border, and the ICE raids targeting undocumented teenagers are a few additional examples of the “zero tolerance” immigration policy.