On January 28, 1948, a plane chartered by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service caught fire, broke apart in midair, and crashed into California’s Los Gatos Canyon. The disaster—78 years ago today—killed everyone on board: four white US citizen crew members and the 28 Mexican nationals who were being deported from the United States. An AP newspaper account identified the crew members—two pilots, a flight attendant, and an immigration officer—but referred to their incarcerated passengers only as “deportees.” Woody Guthrie distilled his outrage about the dehumanization of this anonymizing journalistic practice in the chorus of a new song. “I don’t have a name when I ride this big airplane,” mused Guthrie after reading the paper’s dehumanizing anonymization, “They just call me one more deportee.” Yet Guthrie, a folk music icon and anti-fascist activist, probably only knew the half of it. Three days after the crash, the 28 Mexican victims were buried in separate coffins in a mass grave in a Fresno cemetery. Their families were not notified about the burial. There would be no marker for years. When a simple plaque finally appeared, it did not even list the victims’ names.
Although Guthrie wrote these lyrics just days after the disaster, it was long thought that other performers first put his words to music. Now, this folk standard has been definitively restored to Guthrie’s catalog. “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape)” is one of 20 songs released in the summer of 2025 on Woody at Home—Vol 1 + 2 (Shamus Records). Guthrie recorded these previously unavailable songs on a borrowed two-channel tape recorder in his family’s Brooklyn apartment in 1951 and 1952; he laid down the songs on tape—old and new, fully realized and in flux—to give his new music publisher a better sense of his work as he tried to maintain his creative relevance and political commitments in the face of early Cold War repression and as Huntington’s disease, his yet-undiagnosed neurological condition, took its toll on his mind, body, musicianship, and family life.
Although some have long known about these home recordings, advances in digital editing and restoration software made their exposure to a wider audience possible in 2025. Now, Guthrie’s recording of “Deportee” calls out for thinking about its continuing relevance. As poet and author Tim Z. Hernandez, who has written two books engaging with the Los Gatos plane wreck, puts it: “To finally hear these words in Woody’s own haunting voice, is to hear a prophetic voice from the grave, warning us about where we’ve been, who we’ve become, and where we are headed.”
