"Deportees" have names

"This song is a reminder that the small things we do in this life matter."

Hi all,

Thank you for joining me for this week’s song, Deportee.

If you’d like to hear the song before you read my introduction to John McCutcheon’s video, I’ve included his video just below this article.

For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below the video.

The Song

(345 words)

“On the 28^th day of January, 1948, a plane took off from San Jose, California, bound for El Centro, California.”

This is how John McCutcheon begins his introduction in his performance video of the song, Deportee. The song was written by Woody Guthrie in 1948. Woody Guthrie was a folk singer who traveled around the U.S., meeting people from different backgrounds and occupations. He listened to their stories and then he wrote songs about their lives and about his observations of the injustices in the United States.

John McCutcheon tells very simply the story behind this song that Woody Guthrie wrote, so I won’t rewrite it here. However, there are some things that might not be familiar to students outside the U.S.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is a part of the government. It it responsible for immigration issues and to process applications for citizenship to the U.S. It is also responsible for sending people who are in the U.S. illegally back to their home countries. This is called deportation, and the people are referred to as deportees.

From 1942 to 1964, the government had a policy under which people who owned large farms could hire temporary workers from Mexico. These workers were able to enter the U.S. legally and stay until their contract ended. Then they had to return to Mexico. This was call the bracero program. Bracero is Spanish for a Mexican worker allowed to enter the U.S. under these conditions.

In the song, you will hear the phrase, Both sides of the river. This refers to the Rio Grande River which is the line that separates Mexico from the state of Texas in the U.S. Thousands of workers have died trying to cross the Rio Grande in search of work in the U.S.

All They Will Call You: Camino de Sol Series by Tim Z. Hernandez is available on Audible.com. It is an EXCELLENT piece of research into the lives and families of those who died in the crash. It is also sold on Amazon in hardcover or eTextbook.

---

VOCABULARY

occupation 職業

injustice 不公平

Immigration 入国管理局

Naturalization 帰化

application 申請

deportation 国外退去

Vocabulary in the video

inevitably 必然的に

all on board were lost 飛行機内の全員が亡くなった

to pen 書く

be informative 情報を伝える

buried 埋葬される

mass grave 集団墓地

roadie ローディー（アーティストの楽器全般を扱う仕事）

overcrowding 過密状態

acre エーカー

obvious 明らか

headstone 墓石

anonymous 匿名

put in charge 担当にされた

archdiocese 大司教区

simultaneously 同時進行で

Labor Day 労働者の日

generosity 寛大さ

unveiled 除幕式

a good deed 善行

decade 10年

rot 腐敗

creosote dumps クレオソート (at one time, farmers put creosote on piles of low-quality oranges that could not be sold. This was a way to make sure that they could make money from their orange and that no one would steal the unused oranges for some other use.)

wade 水の中を歩く

outlaws 無法者

rustlers 牛泥棒

thieves 窃盗団

scatter 撒く

‘neath (beneath, under)