32 Strips of Paper

Tom Zoellner considers Tim Z. Hernandez’s “They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir,” about the book that helped solve mysteries associated with a 1948 plane crash.

By Tom ZoellnerOctober 25, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

ON JANUARY 28, 1948, a group of Mexican farm laborers boarded a DC-3 in Oakland, California, prepared to be deported. Some had been in the United States as part of the Bracero Program to replenish the labor shortage created by World War II, while others were in the country without documentation. Shortly into the flight, a fuel leak in the left-side wing sent the aircraft plunging into Los Gatos Canyon in the Diablo mountains.

The headline in The New York Times read: “32 Killed in Crash of Charter Plane; California Victims Included 28 Mexican Workers Who Were Being Deported.” The songwriter Woody Guthrie read the story and wrote a song about it called “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” The remains were interred in a single grave in Fresno with “Mexican Nationals” as the epitaph, no individual names. That might have been their only monument had it not been for the detective work of writer and poet Tim Z. Hernandez, who pieced together the lives of some of the passengers in his stunning 2017 book All They Will Call You, a reference to a line in the Guthrie song and to the dehumanizing words on the grave.

Hernandez thought he had laid the story, along with some of his own personal torments, to rest—but it turns out there was more to say. The result is They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir (2024), a sequel that is both brilliant and uneven, turning in on itself in search of meaning, a ball with many narrative threads going in different directions, some resolving, some not. Hernandez is haunted by questions that merge into each other, and the book is “a series of intersecting stories, braided together.”

Some of what Hernandez is doing is lifting the hood on the peculiar engine of narrative nonfiction or, in the words of an old stage play, “how I got that story.” He relates a scene from a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, in which a professor asked him about his methodology of telling the stories of people for whom there wasn’t much of a paper trail. Hernandez struggled to give an answer that would make sense in an academic milieu. The reality of his method was hard to explain, intensely personal and bordering on the mystical. He writes that he cut 32 strips of paper, each bearing the name of one of the crash victims. Then he took a stiff drink, looked at them on his kitchen table, and waited for a sign.

“If nothing comes to me, I’ll touch one of the names. Lift it to my face, press it against my chest, my forehead, the palms of my hands, my ear, hold it there for a few minutes,” Hernandez writes. “Sometimes I’ll shuffle them around to see if a door will open. Maybe one will step across, demand to be picked up, or to have his or her name spoken into the air. So I speak their names, out loud, into the room. Kind of like one does in a séance, or when working with a medium.”

Hernandez is working with not just traditional search tools but also a “methodology of ghosts” or the “abuelita sensibility,” by which grandmothers have an intuitive understanding of how spiritual patterns can manifest earthly occurrences. As he describes it, the abuelita sensibility is “the inexplicable logic of being in tune with our innate connection to the phenomenal world. What some refer to as ‘the law of attraction,’ our grandmothers have been manifesting since day zero.” He touches relics left behind by the passengers, seeks out the plane’s broken propeller, makes offerings of sage and tobacco at the crash site in Los Gatos Canyon, visits the hometown cemeteries of the deceased, asks the dead for permission to find and tell their story. His six-year-old daughter doesn’t understand much about his career, only that dad “looks for people.”

The backstory of Hernandez’s previous book about the 1948 plane crash is interspersed with stories from his own past: his flailing first marriage, his struggles with alcohol, his grandfather’s death, and, most compellingly, his relationship with his uncle Virgil, a James Dean–like antihero who died at 38 after a series of misadventures. Revealing the cause here would be a spoiler, but it comes as a shock about halfway through the book.

Before that, Hernandez writes about how Virgil gunned his pickup truck over the edge of a bluff in Bakersfield, leaving his relatives to assume he was killed. While looking for the body, Hernandez follows a trail of blood down into the ravine, where the water trickles into the nearby vegetable fields. “It’s quite possible my uncle’s blood has made its way to you, and that you’ve consumed him like holy Eucharist,” he writes, in one of the book’s more startling lines. But as it turns out, the trail of blood leads back out to the road, where Virgil went stumbling in search of help after he survived the wreck. What Hernandez doesn’t go out of his way to point out, wisely enough, is that following a trail of blood is an apt metaphor for his quest to track down the lives of the departed deportees. Even 13 years after finishing the project, there are still people in that crash whose stories are a mystery to him. As he puts it: “the search has come from both sides of the astral plane. […] They are not finished with me.”

Hernandez sometimes lets his poet voice run away with him, and there are points where the narrative bogs down in sentences that strain too hard to be profound. He also has a weakness for the sentimental when a factual voice would serve him and the reader much better in some of the more somber passages. But the linguistic whiffs are not as numerous as the times when he makes solid contact: his grandfather Alejandro, a hard-boiled Korean War vet who fought a losing battle with Veterans Affairs bureaucrats, “hated elevators, sterile buildings, and high-rises, preferring to be closer to the earth, for nothing can fall when it’s close to the earth”; in the Central Valley farm country, “John Deere is the preacher, and there’s enough crushed grapes flowing to keep everybody numb.”

After a visit to Woody Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, the site of a notorious 1911 lynching, Hernandez confronts the specter of entropy that threatens to erase the memory of injustice, particularly that which the broader society would like to forget. “We are made to witness, and to succumb to, and relive within our bodies, this plague of invisibility time and again,” he writes. One of his UC Berkeley professors called it a “damnatio memoriae,” the grave antiquarian punishment of erasing someone from popular memory. This sense that a person had never lived at all is a fate that Hernandez partially enacts on the killer of Latino shoppers in an El Paso Walmart in 2019 by conspicuously blacking out his name. It is the horrid vacuum from which he seeks to save the DC-3 passengers, his uncle Virgil, his grandfather Alejandro, and perhaps himself.

For all its eloquence and thought-provoking sections, They Call You Back amounts to a book about another book. And while the casual reader need not be familiar with All They Will Call You, that same reader might be justified in asking why this follow-up memoir was necessary or whether it verges on being a victory lap. The best answer that Hernandez can give—and not an unworthy one—is the power of obsession, which he says, in the book’s opening words, is a spiritual concept, not easily explained. It comes from the Latin “obsideo,” to be held captive by spirits. For anyone who has chased an elusive truth and refused to give up, this will be a familiar feeling and might answer the question about literary motivations. He seems to have had no other choice.

Scenes near the book’s beginning and end tell the story of one day: a hearing before a committee of the California State Senate on January 28, 2018, recognizing official negligence in the treatment of the crash victims. In this room, families of the victims perform a version of a Latin American funerary rite, in which the name of the deceased, read aloud, is followed by a spirited call of “Presente,” meaning they are still with us. It is a sign that the walls between life and death are perhaps not so tall, perhaps more illusory than can be conceived. In this winding but ultimately winning narrative, Hernandez continues to chase the mystery.