Mourning across Borders: Multidirectional Memory in Tim Z. Hernandez's All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon

Abstract

In the documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernandez brings to light the life stories of the Mexican migrant workers who fatally died in a plane accident as they were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948. Inspired by Woody Guthrie's song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon” (1961), the novel interweaves testimony, documentation, historical contextualization, and fictional mechanisms to involve the reader ethically in the pursuit of an alternative truth – one that underscores the dialectical relationship between the migrants’ lives, their communities, and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. The author entwines the lives and deaths of US and Mexican citizens and gives them historical and affective significance within the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) of a community of mourning enacted within and beyond his narrative. His “mestizx consciousness” (Anzaldúa), a lived awareness of the power imbalances that silence the subaltern across the US–Mexico border, manifests itself through the phenomenological leitmotif of la huesera. This southwestern tale and feminine archetype explains the impulse to bring into being a “new memory” (Irizarry) of a reconstructed community around the plane wreck and to challenge the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler) that silenced the migrants’ life stories.