Farmworkers Buried in Mass California Grave After 1948 Plane Crash Get Memorial TBJ Now
go to original September 4, 2013

The granite memorial at the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Fresno commemorates the 28 farmworkers whose plane crashed near Coalinga en route to Mexico in 1948. (Associated Press)

Twenty-eight farmworkers who were buried in a mass grave after their plane crashed en route to Mexico in 1948 now have a gravestone with their names on it.

Their burial without names prompted a protest poem by Woodie Guthrie that was sung over the years by musicians including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

The granite memorial was unveiled Monday at the grave site at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Fresno.

Read the rest at TBJ Now

Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) performed by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez during the 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue (Tirso José Alecoy)

Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) from dylanchords.inf
words by Woody Guthrie

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are packed in the creosote dumps
They're flying you back to the Mexico border
To pay all your money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name 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
They rode the big trucks till they lay down and die

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
A fireball of lightning, and it shook all the hills
Who are these comrades that died like the dry leaves
The radio tells me they're just deportees

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

We died in your hills and we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys we 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

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

Some of us are illegal, and others not wanted
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
But it's six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be 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 and rot on the top soil
and be called by no name except "deportee"

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

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