Woody Guthrie: Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

SONG Deportees

WRITTEN BY Woody Guthrie

PERFORMED BY Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston

APPEARS ON The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie (1972)

NOTE This song, one of Guthrie's most memorable, has been covered many times. I couldn't find a version of Woody singing it, so I've included renditions by the Boston folk singer Antje Duvekot, Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris, and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

The agreement of 1947 [between Mexico and the U.S.]... contained a novel provision which established amnesty through deportation. Under its terms, undocumented Mexicans who were sent back across the border could return to the U.S. as temporary contract laborers; during the life of their contracts, they could not be again deported. In practice, employers often called Border Patrol stations to report their own undocumented employees, who were returned, momentarily, to border cities in Mexico, where they signed labor contracts with the same employers who had denounced them. This process became known as "drying out wetbacks" or "storm and drag immigration." "Drying out" provided a deportation-proof source of cheap seasonal labor...

Dick J. Reavis, Without Documents

Sometime during 1948, Woody Guthrie read an account of plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. The plane was returning anonymous undocumented migrant workers to California, human beings that the newspaper article identified only as "deportees." He then wrote his great song "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" in which he humanized the dead migrants as only he could. To Guthrie, they are not merely deportees: They have names (Juan, Rosalita, Jesus, Maria) and families:

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

To Guthrie it is the "they" who took the money, who "chase us like outlaws," who are the anonymous ones, hiding behind legalisms to rob and exploit the migrants until there is nothing left but "dry leaves to rot on my topsoil." The use of the word "my" implicates all of us in the fate of the migrants, for it is we who eat "the good fruit."

Last week, I read this account of the customers at a Rocky Mount, NC drug store who couldn't afford all of their medications and as a result had to pick and choose. One two-time heart attack victim could not afford $160 anti-clotting medicine. A mother skips inhaler refills for her asthmatic son. A man passes on prescriptions for heart disease and emphysema. Reading the article brought to mind this verse from "Deportee":

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we cab grow our good fruit?

Surely, Rocky Mount is one of our American orchards and the people who live there are our good fruit, now deportees in their own land. And surely we -- their amigos, their fellow countryman -- can find a better way to care for them.

LYRICS

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
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"?

The Boston-based folk singer Antje Duvekot sings the first version of "Deportee." BTW, Antje has an outstanding new CD called The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer.

Here, Woody's son Arlo and Emmylou Harris sing "Deportee." Emmylou's harmomy vocal is, as always, peerless:

Finally, here are Bob Dylan and Joan Baez from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Review tour: