“The Radio Said They Were Just Deportees”: From Border Necropolitics to Transformative Grief in Tim Z. Hernandez’s All They Will Call You (2017)

Abstract

Just as necropower discriminates between those who can and those who cannot live, post-mortem circumstances are explicitly affected by an irrefutable gentrification of memory and grievability. Drawing on the political dimension of mourning and on the concept of slow death, this paper proposes a necropolitical reading of All They Will Call You (2017), where Tim Z. Hernandez revisits the 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican deportees at Los Gatos (California) and the subsequent oblivion that prevented their memorialisation except for a mass grave containing their remains and a protest song (“Deportees”) composed by Woody Guthrie. My analysis focuses on Hernandez’s attempts at dismantling the tropes of criminality and expendability that Latino immigrants are associated with as a result of their racialised vulnerability, which are distinctively aggravated in border contexts. Excavating in the background stories of these deportees seems to me an ironic contestation to the failed forensic work that left them unnamed and unritualised for seven decades. And, at the same time, I contend that, in line with the work of many activists and artists in the US–Mexico border, Hernandez mobilises solidarity while transforming our perception of migrant bare lives into one of migrant agency.