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.
Themes
Immigrant Migration and Labor
Tim Z. Hernandez uses the context of the tragedy of the plane crash in 1948 to focus on the lives of the “deportees” on that flight. As a result, a key theme of the “documentary novel” All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon is Immigrant Migration and Labor. Hernandez focuses on the lives of the four passengers whose family members he was able to contact. He documents their experiences prior to the flight, including the hard work, deprivations, and challenges they face in their migrations from Mexico to the US as well as their motivations for making the difficult choice to leave their families and hometowns for long stretches of time. Hernandez also includes details about the immigrant backgrounds of the white American passengers on the flight, Bobbie Atkinson and Officer Chaffin. In so doing, he ties all of the passengers’ experiences together into a larger commentary on the history of American immigration and labor.
As documented by Hernandez, the lives of Luis Miranda Cuevas, Guadalupe Ramírez Lara, Ramón Paredes, and José Sánchez Valdivia were distinct. However, they share certain commonalities that address larger trends in immigrant migration and labor. They all came from poor, rural farming communities in central Mexico. They faced what migration experts call “push and pull factors” that led them to come to the US for work. The push factors that encouraged them to leave Mexico included poverty, violence, and lack of water. The pull factors were the Bracero Program, the promise of better wages—or at least of work—and the prospect of supporting their families and communities.
Guadalupe and Ramón in particular had the responsibilities of finding money for their collective farming community, the ejido, and supporting their wives and children. Luis, similarly, was drawn by his dreams of supporting his family farm and giving his beloved, Casimira, a beautiful wedding. While Valdivia had fewer responsibilities, he likewise found himself working in the US due to his family ties to his father and brother. Their stories are emblematic of the lives of Mexican migrant workers in the US, upon whose labor, as Hernandez notes, the American agricultural sector depends.
Hernandez also connects this theme to Bobbie Atkinson and Officer Chaffin by researching and documenting the immigrant background of Bobbie Atkinson’s mother and Officer Chaffin’s ancestor. Their relatives came from Poland in 1912 and England in 1620, respectively, under similar circumstances as those of the Mexican migrant workers discussed at length in the text. By including these stories, Hernandez demonstrates how workers have come to the US to do backbreaking labor in the hope of a better life for hundreds of years and shows that those who died in the plane crash are part of this American tradition.
Forms of Remembrance and Memorial
All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon is a text that is interested in Forms of Remembrance and Memorial while itself simultaneously embodying a form of remembrance and memorial. In the Author’s Note, Hernandez describes visiting his grandfather in the hospital shortly before his passing. Hernandez decides to record his grandfather telling him about his life. He writes of the experience, “I went from using the recorder for its practicality to transforming it into a tool for gathering stories. Or rather, as a way to ensure that certain stories were never lost” (xiv). The results of this realization about the importance of memorializing lives are found in this text. Hernandez explores oral history, photography, historical fiction, narrative history, memory, song, memorial headstones, and funerals as aspects of remembrance. He layers these different forms on top of each other to create All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, resulting in the text itself becoming a comprehensive memorial to the victims.
In the text, Hernandez moves rapidly between quotes from his interviews with “the story keepers,” primary documents like photographs, and historical fiction based on his research. An example of this can be found in his interview with Casimira Navarro López in Chapter 4. The chapter opens with a photograph of Luis Miranda Cuevas with his friends. It then includes an account of their interview. Then, it transitions to a section of historical fiction describing Luis’s life.
Elsewhere, Hernandez includes reproductions of primary documents like an illustration of the original headstone on the migrant workers’ mass grave, which simply read “28 Mexican citizens who died in an airplane accident near Coalinga, California on January 29, 1948. R.I.P.” As a point of contrast with this stark memorial that does not include their names, at the end of Chapter 35, Hernandez includes a poetic illustration of the passengers’ names as if they are falling from the sky following the plane’s explosion. Hernandez acknowledges, however, that the names are not enough. In the final section, he regrets that he wasn’t able to contact all the families of the victims so that he could tell the stories behind the names. He writes, “without the story, the names, just like the headstone, are only a symbol” (212).
The song, “Plane Crash at Los Gatos (Deportee),” is a key form of memorial that transmitted the story from the past to the present as well as to a wider audience than victims’ family members and witnesses of the crash. The song is therefore a site of knowledge, introducing others, including the author himself, to the subject. It is also a vehicle by means of which those who were personally impacted can frame their experiences. For instance, June Chaffin, a witness, cites it in her oral interview stating: “Everything was scattered. Just like the song goes, ‘scattered like dry leaves” (167). Later, Jaime Ramírez remarks that, when hearing the song after finding his ancestor’s grave, he “understood, not really the words of the song, but its sentimiento, of course” (189). In essence, the song was the impetus for many of the other forms of memorial that followed, including the book itself.
Creating Empathy Through Storytelling
Hernandez uses memoir, oral history, and historical fiction to tell the stories behind the names of the passengers who died in the flight on January 28, 1948. Hernandez uses these tools to showcase the inner lives, passions, and dreams of the victims, witnesses, and their families. He also includes his own feelings and observations about the research process itself. In telling their stories, and his own, Hernandez creates empathy and humanizes what might otherwise be a dry or dispassionate recounting of events, enhancing the possibility that the narrative might be relatable to those whose lives may be very different from the subjects in the book.
The initial reports of the passengers who died incorrectly recorded the names of the Latino victims. As a result, they were imperfectly memorialized by a largely Anglophone media who referred to them as “deportees.” This label reduces the humans behind the tragedy to their immigration status. It was to this dehumanizing label that the title of the book, All They Will Call You refers. The lyrics written by Woody Guthrie about the plane crash state: “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” Hernandez works to give the victims back their names, but also to tell their stories in order to right what he views as a historic wrong. For instance, Hernandez describes Valdivia’s passion for baseball from childhood, Luis’s love for Casimira, and Ramón’s bravery in defending his ejido from attack. These personal details bring these figures to life. The oral histories he records from witnesses, families, and loved ones also serve a role in creating empathy for not only the victims but those left behind. He does not just transcribe their quotes but provides context for their states of mind during the interviews, as when he writes of Casimira, “[u]pon hearing [Luis Miranda Cuevas’s name], Casimira folded her trembling hands across her lap, and the corners of her mouth could not decide whether to lift or hang” (28).
Hernandez does not limit this storytelling to the Latino passengers. He also uses it to create empathy for the witnesses and the white victims of the flight. For instance, the text opens with a historical nonfiction account of Red Childers witnessing the aftermath of the plane explosion. It describes the sensory details he would have experienced: the sight of the debris falling, the smell of the fire, the feeling of its heat. These sensory details not only add depth and texture to the story but also bring into view how the explosion may have impacted witnesses like Childers.
Hernandez also extends his empathy to those who may be otherwise seen as complicit in the tragedy, Frankie and Bobbie Atkinson and Officer Chaffin, by telling their stories with the same compassion as those of the other victims and witnesses. In a key example of this, Hernandez uses historical fiction to describe Bobbie’s thoughts about Frankie, writing from her perspective: “Frankie’ll make a good father, she’s sure of it. He’s a perfect combination of sensitivity and strength” (145). This choice gives insight into their relationship, imagining what the couple might have felt toward one another as they expected their first child. Finally, in describing his fears and insecurities, Hernandez generates empathy toward himself. By sharing his feelings of doubt in the text, Hernandez extends his authorial focus on the lived experiences of individual people to his own life.
