Viernes: blogiando de Los Gatos...

Everyone from Woody Guthrie (whose wrote it, along with California high school teacher Martin Hoffman), to Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen to the Byrds to Dolly Parton has sung this... but for some odd reason, there isn't a free internet copy available. Can't figure that one out. Woody's attitude towards copyrights was: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S... for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning, The oranges piled in their creosote dumps; They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border To pay all their money to wade back again Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be "deportees" My father's own father, he waded that river, They took all the money he made in his life; My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees, And they rode the truck till they took down and died. Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted, Our work contract's out and we have to move on; Six hundred miles to that Mexican border, They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves. We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on your plains. We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, Both sides of the river, we died just the same. The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, "They are just deportees" Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except "deportees"? Words by Woody Guthrie and Music by Martin Hoffman © 1961 (renewed) by TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc.

The agreement of 1947 (between Mexico and the U.S)... contained a novel provision which established amnesty through deportation, agreeing to limit deportations to one per year per farm worker. Under its terms, undocumented Mexicans who were sent back across the border could return to the U.S. as temporary contract labourers; during the life of their contracts, they could not be again deported. In practice, employers often called Border Patrol stations ( la migra) to report their own undocumented employees, who were returned, momentarily, to border cities in Mexico, where they signed labour contracts with the same employers who had denounced them. This process became known as "drying out wetbacks" or "storm and drag immigration." "Drying out" provided a deportation-proof source of cheap seasonal labour... The 28 men who died in Los Gatos were victims of this bizarre system.