coldhearted scientist وداد

Now it is the weekend, so it is time to sing. I am singing this afternoon from a café off Franklin Street in the Faubourg Marigny, where it is exceedingly pleasant. Our song, an old one by Woody Guthrie, is sung in remembrance of the people whose lives will be made more difficult by the fence we are now going to build along the Mexican border. It refers to the passengers on an INS plane, which crashed long ago.

The agreement of 1947 [between Mexico and the U.S.]… contained a novel provision which established amnesty through deportation. Under its terms, undocumented Mexicans who were sent back across the border could return to the U.S. as temporary contract laborers; during the life of their contracts, they could not be again deported. In practice, employers often called Border Patrol stations to report their own undocumented employees, who were returned, momentarily, to border cities in Mexico, where they signed labor 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 labor…. –Dick J. Reavis, Without Documents (New York, 1978), p. 39.

That, of course, is one of the reasons I hold the view that there really is no border. Like so many other social and political phenomena, the border is a fictional construct, although it has very real and, as often as not, deleterious effects. But here is the song.

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges are packed in their creosote dumps.
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexico border
To take all their money to wade back again.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y María.
You won’t have a name when you ride the big aeroplane,
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 came workin’ the fruit trees,
They rode the big trucks ’till they laid down and died.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y María.
You won’t have a name when you ride the big aeroplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightnin’ an’ it shook all the hills.
Who are these comrades, they’re dying like the dry leaves?
The radio said they were “just deportees.”

We died in your hills and we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys, we died in your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died ‘neath your bushes,
Both sides of the river we died just the same.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y María.
You won’t have a name when you ride the big aeroplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To die like the dry leaves and rot on my topsoil
And be known by no name except “deportee.”

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y María.
You won’t have a name when you ride the big aeroplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

And all they will call you will be “deportees.”

Axé.