Seventy-seven years ago, a chartered Douglas DC-3 aircraft left Oakland with 28 Mexican nationals being sent back to México. Most were “braceros,” the slang term for Mexican laborers once imported to the United States in a long-ago farm labor program. Some on the plane that day were undocumented residents being deported once their labor was no longer needed.

The passengers, two pilots, a flight attendant and an immigration guard never made it home. An engine caught fire after a fuel leak, sending the plane and its human cargo plunging into Los Gatos Canyon near Coalinga on a clear Jan. 28 morning.

For more than six decades, the names of Luis Miranda Cuevas, José Sánchez Valdivia, Ramón Paredes González and others were essentially erased from the face of the world.

Their stories would have never been known had it not been for Tim Z. Hernández, a grandson of Mexican farmworkers, who saw several newspaper articles about the crash while researching for a novel and began a five-year quest to track down the names.

The result was his acclaimed 2017 book, “All They Will Call You,” in which he told the stories of seven of the victims. In a second book, “They Call You Back,” the Dinuba native added a few more stories.

— The last telephone call Navarro López made to his fiancé in Jocotepec, Jalisco was to tell her he would hire a mariachi to play at their wedding.

— Sánchez Valdivia, a native of Zacatecas, had dreams of becoming a baseball superstar just like his hero Babe Ruth.

— Paredes González left his village in Guanajuato to earn the money to build a community water well.

The Mexican nationals were buried in a mass grave. A tiny stone noted: “28 Mexican Citizens Who Died In An Airplane Accident Near Coalinga California On Jan. 28, 1948 R.I.P.”

Their names, unfortunately, were “just scattered like dry leaves,” as Woody Guthrie notes in his poem “Deportee (Plane at Los Gatos Canyon).” The words were set to music by college student Martin Hoffman and made famous by folk singer Pete Seeger and others.

Thanks to Hernández, there is a tombstone with the names of all 32 victims at the mass grave in Holy Cross Cemetery in West Fresno. Last fall, a monument across the road where the DC-3 crashed was unveiled, again with all the names.

The “insanity” of deportations continue

Seventy-seven years later, the deportations continue. Or, using Hernández’s definition, the insanity persists.

Last week, U.S. military cargo airplanes began “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America,” as President Donald Trump describes a campaign that will surely round up plenty of innocent orange pickers, carpenters, dishwashers and housemaids.

Trump’s goal of deporting “millions and millions” means federal agents will have to round up non-criminals to meet his goal. In the last four decades, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports there have been more than 425,200 non-citizen immigrants with criminal convictions.

There were more than 3 million deported under the Obama administration. The 1953-54 “Operation Wetback” deported more than 1 million, including legal residents.

“All of that is just atrocious because, obviously, we’re denying a lot of access to resources and basic human needs for people,” said Hernández, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, during a Tuesday morning phone call.

Hernández calls the use of airplanes “demeaning.” In 1948, the plane that crashed with 28 victims aboard was overloaded, and some passengers sat atop suitcases and bags in the aisle, he said. Hernández read recent reports of migrants from Brazil who were reportedly handcuffed and denied water or access to restrooms during the flights. In addition, U.S. military planes carried Colombian migrants who claimed they too were shackled.

“The military airplane is much more of a sort of showmanship than anything else,” he said. “It’s more expensive.”

The issue of migrants in the United States would be eased by comprehensive immigration reform, but Congress has bumbled that solution through the years. Just when it appeared a different bipartisan bill would have the votes needed to pass last year, then-candidate Trump ordered his GOP lackeys to spike it because it would remove immigration as a campaign issue.

Immigration reform, Hernández believes, “is a dirty word for both parties.”

“To see that playing out again, it harkened me to think about all the faces of the families I have been personally in touch with over the last 15 years,” said Hernández, “and to see how deep the tragedy and that trauma has been embedded in their lives.”

His concern – which should be ours as well – is the dehumanization of deportation. Many undocumented immigrants come to the United States to work. Their labor is needed in California and other states for hard, dirty jobs Americans won’t do. Immigration reform could make it possible to bring workers to our state and others legally to perform essential work that benefits all of us. Instead, under Trump, we’ve skipped the smart alternative and moved straight to punishment and dehumanization.

Each deportee has a story and a contribution to tell. They are worth more than just being nameless passengers on an airplane.

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