52 pages • 1 hour read
Tim Z. HernandezAll They Will Call You
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Mexican Migrant Workers in the US
During World War II, and particularly after the US entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, industry in the US faced a labor shortage. With American men going off to fight, a new source of labor was required. This led to the creation of the Bracero program in 1942. This program brought Mexican temporary workers to the US to pick crops, build railroads, and provide other essential labor. These Mexican workers largely came from poor, rural areas of Mexico and hoped to earn money they could send home to support their communities. Many of the Mexican flight passengers who died in the plane crash had come to the US as part of this program.
When World War II ended in 1945, the US government began to wind down the Bracero program. They pursued an aggressive deportation strategy to remove Mexican migrant workers from the US. However, the agricultural sector still relied heavily on low-wage Mexican migrant labor. This resulted in a revolving-door policy where workers are deported and then they return to the US soon after to continue working. These migration flows largely persist into the 21st century. This creates a precarious situation for Mexican migrant workers who may be in the country illegally and therefore can be deported at any moment, even as their labor is essential to the American agricultural industry. The impacts of this dynamic are most evident in California, which has the largest agricultural sector in the US, but they can also be seen throughout the country.
Literary Context: Documentary Novel
Author Tim Z. Hernandez describes All They Will Call You as a “documentary novel.” The text blends aspects of oral history, narrative history, and historical fiction to create connections between the different figures in the story, their histories, and generate empathy for their experiences. To understand this blend, it is important to understand each of these genres. Oral history is a method of gathering historical data, typically about ordinary people, by interviewing those who were part of an experience or those who knew the people involved. Oral history does not attempt to evaluate the veracity or truthfulness of any given account but rather layers different accounts to give an understanding of how witnesses experienced a particular moment in time. One of the most prominent figures in oral history is the historian and radio host Studs Terkel, whose work Hard Times (1970) Hernandez cites in an Epigraph at the beginning of the book. Hernandez quotes extensively from his interviews with family members of those who died and witnesses of events.
Hernandez also relies on primary documents, some of which he reprints in the text, and academic study to generate narrative histories about the events. This is a form of historical writing that is a verifiable and factual description of what occurred and is probably the most common form of popular historical writing. Finally, Hernandez uses historical fiction narrative to portray the inner thoughts and private conversations of the figures in the story. These sections are fictional because there is no documentation to corroborate their veracity, but they are based on Hernandez’s research into their lives. These fictional passages, similar to a reenactment in a documentary, create empathy and humanize those who died.
