This well-written, absorbing new memoir from El Paso writer Tim Z. Hernandez shows how his life became intertwined with an almost-forgotten plane crash and how identifying and honoring its victims became both a personal mission and an obsession. 

In 2008, Hernandez was in Fresno, California, interviewing Bea Franco, the real woman behind the fictional character “Terry the Mexican girl” in Jack Kerouac’s famed novel On the Road. Hernandez was melding her life story into a work of historical fiction titled Manaña Means Heaven. Franco, then in her nineties, encouraged him to also look into a horrific event that had occurred near Fresno sixty years earlier and was in danger of becoming “lost to history.” 

On January 28, 1948, a DC-3 twin-engine passenger plane chartered by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service crashed and burned in Los Gatos Canyon. Thirty-two people were aboard, and none survived what was then considered California’s worst air disaster. News accounts quickly named the pilot, first officer, stewardess, and a U.S. immigration agent. But the twenty-eight other victims were identified simply as “deportees,” and they were soon buried together in an unmarked mass grave. 

A few of the twenty-eight indeed were deportees being sent back to Mexico. Most, however, were braceros, Mexican farm workers who had been recruited to work in American agricultural fields because of ongoing labor shortages. They were just getting a free ride home.  

Folk singer Woody Guthrie was so outraged by the unmarked burial that he wrote a protest poem “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” that was later put to music and performed by a wide range of well-known music stars, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, and Dolly Parton.  

In 2010, Hernandez began researching the crash and soon became obsessed with finding the families of all the victims. He hoped to put up a headstone bearing the names of those who had died. 

 In 2017, after hard, grinding research, his first work about the crash was published. Titled All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, it focuses on the fatal flight and its terrible aftermath. It also describes the extensive time, effort, and travel the author put into the book. After years of hard work, he had found just seven of the victims’ families and recorded how they had been affected by their loved one’s death and anonymous burial. 

This new work, They Call You Back, looks again at the plane crash, its aftermath, and its effect on the author and members of the victims’ families. It also takes a closer look inside Hernandez’s quest to locate more relatives of the braceros and deportees and shows how his marriage was upended by the research process. They Call You Back is a stand-alone work, but All They Will Call You can add an extra layer of reading engagement if one can find a copy. 

“Between 2010 and 2014,” he writes in his new book, “I became overwhelmed by how much information was coming at me; it was as if I had pried open a closet that belonged to thirty-two people and out spilled the mess of their entangled matters accumulated over seven decades. I was consistently up past midnight, obsessed with giving some organization to it all. Documents were funneling toward me from the four directions, phone calls, and texts at all times of the day. It was clear the spirits weren’t familiar with personal boundaries and had little, if any, consideration for my mental well-being.”  

After the first book was published, relatives of more crash victims came forward. Hernandez relays their stories, too, in They Call You Back.  He writes movingly about his own past, reflecting on people, events, feelings, and teachings that have affected him and kept him and his creative interests tightly tied to history.  “[E]ven now, as I sit behind my cozy desk on the fifth floor of a university that overlooks two countries,” he reflects, “I find it nearly impossible to remain present. The two-headed serpent of hindsight and foresight has been coded in my DNA for generations—a condition not even four years at a Buddhist college, which required endless hours of meditation, was able to reprogram. I feel like Janus, the mythological Roman god, resigned to eternally looking forward and backward.”  

In 2018 Hernandez was recognized by the California Senate for his work regarding the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos. He is an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, teaching in the Bilingual Creative Writing program.