Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

"Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" is a protest song with lyrics by Woody Guthrie and music by Martin Hoffman detailing the January 28, 1948 crash of a plane near Los Gatos Canyon,[1] 20 miles (32 km) west of Coalinga in Fresno County, California, United States.

[1] The crash resulted in the deaths of 32 people, 4 Americans and 28 migrant farm workers who were being deported from California back to Mexico.

[1] In the poem, Guthrie assigned symbolic names to the dead: "Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita; adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María..."[6] A decade later, Guthrie's poem was set to music and given a haunting melody by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman.

[2] In addition to being a lament for the braceros killed in the crash, the opening lines of "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)": The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning, The oranges piled in their creosote dumps.

At the time, government policies paid farmers to destroy their crops in order to keep farm production low and prices high.