Ramírez later moved to Fresno, where he opened a successful Mexican restaurant. Jaime Ramírez’s restaurant, Olé Frijole, in Fresno, features a mural on the wall honoring his grandfather and great-uncle, and the history of the plane crash that killed them both. But at Fresno’s Holy Cross Cemetery, he only found a mass grave, and a caretaker told him hardly anyone came to visit. He visited the county’s hall of records, and found their names on a list of people who had died in 1948. Ramírez, who was living in Salinas, traveled to Fresno, where he suspected his grandfather and uncle were buried.
at the age of 19, his grandmother asked him and his brother Guillermo to try and track down what happened to their grandfather and uncle. People talked about this crash where the plane caught on fire and people died jumping out to try to escape the flames.” “My grandmother Elisea just told me that he died in the U.S., in a plane crash,” Ramírez said in Spanish. But Ramirez never saw a grave for him at the cemetery in their tiny village of Charco de Pantoja, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. She told him that he had died years before. When Jaime Ramírez was a little boy, he’d ask his grandmother where his grandfather was and why he’d never met him. Gonzalez's wife kept the Spanish-language newspaper clipping with the names of the dead for decades, and handed it down to Ramírez when he emigrated to the U.S. Guadalupe Ramírez Lara and Ramón Paredes Gonzalez: Charco de Pantoja, Guanajuato Ramón Paredes Gonzalez (left), Jaime Ramírez’s maternal grandfather, and Guadalupe Ramírez Lara (right), Ramírez’s great uncle on his father’s side, both died in the 1948 plane crash. Here are some of the passengers’ stories:
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He’s also woven his research into a series of spoken-word and musical performances to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the crash, including a recent appearance in Coalinga, at a museum which still houses the propeller of the plane. Since then, he’s located the families of six more passengers, for a forthcoming sequel. Seven of the passengers’ stories are featured in Hernandez’s 2017 book, All They Will Call You. Hernandez has spent the last 13 years traveling across California and Mexico, collecting fragments of what happened on that fateful day, and the stories of the people who were killed. “That song hung in the air for 60 years, until the son and the grandson of migrant farmworkers, born and raised here in the San Joaquin Valley, decided, I wanted to answer that question: ‘Who are these friends?’” The 28 Mexican laborers were buried in a mass grave at Fresno's Holy Cross Cemetery in 1948. “Those lyrics: ‘Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says they are just deportees,’” Hernandez said. Hernandez started investigating who they were, as part of an effort to restore the dignity of their names and stories. The Mexican passengers remained unnamed, memorialized only in the song, until author and American Book Award-winning poet Tim Z. And the band Outernational recorded a version of the song in 2012, as a commentary on modern-day anti-immigrant sentiment. The initial newspaper reports mentioned the names of the white crew members, but only referred to the Mexican passengers as “deportees.” That lack of recognition moved Woody Guthrie to write a song called “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” that has become a folk anthem, sung by artists including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and more.
Officials examine the wreckage from the January 1948 plane crash near Coalinga. But the remains of the Mexican passengers were buried in a mass grave in Fresno. The bodies of the white pilot, flight attendants and immigration agent on board were sent home to their loved ones. immigration officials were in the process of deporting them back to Mexico.
Many of their work contracts had ended, and U.S. The passengers were 28 Mexican braceros - workers brought to the U.S. 28, 1948 crashed into a canyon near the Central Valley town of Coalinga, killing the 32 people on board. A flight heading from Oakland to the Mexican border on Jan. This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the worst plane crashes in California history.
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