On January 29, 1948, a plane crashed near Los Gatos Canyon in California. The fatalities consisted of four Americans and 28 illegal immigrant farm workers who were being deported back to Mexico.
Woody Guthrie noticed that radio and newspaper coverage of the incident only gave the names of the American casualties, referring to the Mexican victims merely as "deportees." His response was to write a poem in which he assigned names to the dead: Juan, Rosalita, Jesús and María.
The Mexican victims of the accident were buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno. Of the 27 men and one woman, only 12 were ever identified.
The opening lines of the poem - "The crops are all in, the peaches are rottening,The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps" are a reference to the government policy of the time to pay farmers to destroy their crops in order to inflate the prices of farm products. Woody felt this was morally wrong when there were hungry people in the world.
It is interesting to note that, under an agreement between Mexico and the U.S. (1947) "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, New York, 1978, p. 39.]
Woody's poem was not set to music until a decade later, when Martin Hoffman, a schoolteacher, put a tune to it. It was popularised by Pete Seeger.
Other artists who have recorded it include The Kingston Trio (1963), Cisco Houston (1963), Judy Collins (1964), The Byrds (1969), Joan Baez (1971), Arlo Guthrie (1974), Dolly Parton (1981), Paddy Reilly, Sweet Honey in the Rock (1985), Christy Moore (1985), Billy Bragg, The Highwaymen (1985), The Dubliners, Peter, Paul and Mary (1995), Bruce Springsteen (2000), Barbara Dane (2004), Arlo Guthrie, The Battlefield Band and The Wolfe Tones.
Lyrics and chords:
D ........................................... G ................ D
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
............................................. A7 ........ D
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
.............. G ................................... D
They're flying them back to the Mexican border
........................................... A7 ............... D
To pay all their money to wade back again.
.......... G ............................... D
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
..... A7 ........................... D
Adios mes amigos, Jesus y Maria;
......... G ........................................... D
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane,
....................................... A7 ........... D
All they will call you will be "deportee."
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"?
You can see a playlist of my Woody Guthrie songs here:
[ Ссылка ]
Lyrics and chords of many of my songs are no longer available, as my website has expired. I am currently posting lyrics to the information panels on all my videos and those that are too long to post in full will be found on my new website: [ Ссылка ]
