52 pages • 1 hour read
Tim Z. HernandezAll They Will Call You
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Section 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 1: “The Witnessing”
Section 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Wednesday, January 28, 1948”
Content Warning: The source material features graphic depictions of death and references to suicide. Additionally, the source material references offensive terms for Latino people.
Chapter 1 is a moment-by-moment description of what witnesses in Los Gatos Canyon in the Central Valley of California saw on January 28, 1948. On that day, a plane full of a number of Mexican “deportees” crashed and all passengers and crew were killed. Tim Z. Hernandez describes the events in historical narrative form, with direct quotes from witnesses or their surviving relatives and from newspaper accounts.
The witness accounts begin at 10:40 am. An old man named Red sees a fire and runs toward it. He can hear the screams of people and smells burnt flesh. His granddaughter June shares her recollections of what he told her about the site. Soon afterward, convicts from the Fresno County Road Camp, the warden, and two deputies, arrive. They give Red a shovel and the men begin to try putting out the fire by shoveling dirt onto it. Then, the local school bus driver and Red’s son-in-law, “Happy” Gaston, arrives in the school bus and begins to help. More people arrive, including other locals and government officials. Soon after the fire is brought under control, the local Mexican consular official, Salazar, arrives. Salazar inspects the wreckage site and observes the disembodied, burnt, and melted body parts everywhere.
That afternoon, newspaper reporters arrive at the crash site. One of the first photographers on the scene was Henry Stuart for the Coalinga Record, whose images were in the first newspaper story about the crash, written by F. J. McCollum. That evening, Happy Gaston’s daughter June shows her mother blood-stained money that one of the convicts had given her from the crash site, and her mother makes June throw it away. Later, in an interview with the author, June recalls that the wing of the airplane had come down to earth near her grandmother’s easy chair.
F. J. McCollum’s story about the crash makes newspaper headlines across California. The following day, an article in the Fresno Bee includes a list of the Mexican passengers who had been killed in the crash, but it contains many inaccuracies and discrepancies.
Section 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Reconstructing Stories (La Huesera)”
Hernandez describes how investigators used a combination of guesswork, eyewitness accounts, and physical evidence to reconstruct what took place and to figure out the identities of the passengers on the plane. Most critically, it was difficult to reconstruct how many bodies there were “because of the total annihilation of everyone aboard” (17). Hernandez imagines what might have been the conversation between the immigration official, J. P. Butler, and Deputy Coroner Ray Webb about the gathering of evidence.
Hernandez recounts how one of the convicts taking part in the grim task of gathering body parts, Velorio “El Indio” Martínez, tells the other convicts about La Huesera, The Bone Woman. According to folklore, the Bone Woman can put together a whole person or animal from just a fragment of bone. He says this is similar to what the accident investigators are attempting.
Authorities assemble a list of the names of the passengers, but it has many errors. For example, Tomás Gracia de Aviña was turned into a woman when his name was recorded as Tomasa.
By January 29, the day after the crash, the story had been picked up by news agencies across the country. All told, “two World War II pilots, an immigration officer, a stewardess, and twenty-eight ‘deportees’” were presumed dead in the crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California (19).
Section 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Los Gatos Canyon”
In Chapter 3, Hernandez describes the geography, economy, and culture of Los Gatos Canyon. The canyon is in the San Joaquin Valley, “the ‘breadbasket of the world’” (20). The nearest town is Coalinga, a small oil town. Migrant workers from all over the world, and all over the US, come to the San Joaquin Valley to work in the agricultural fields where many fruits and vegetables are grown.
Hernandez shares quotes from “old-timers” about their home, Los Gatos Canyon. They describe how the Mexican bandit Joaquin Murrieta used to hide out in the canyon before he was beheaded and how Spanish soldiers massacred Yokut people there. Part of the canyon is named the Hernandez Valley for two ranching families named Hernandez (no relation) who settled there in the mid-19th century. The area is situated on the San Andreas Fault, which periodically causes earthquakes and tremors.
June Gaston recounts her family’s history. Her family arrived in Los Gatos Canyon as pioneers from Oklahoma. She recalls a time her father was digging holes for fence posts when he came upon an Indigenous American burial ground, so he stopped digging. Then, she describes how her father “Happy” used to work at the prison camp. He oversaw the prisoners as they built roads and did firefighting. He didn’t like the job, but June had happy memories spending time with the prisoners there. Together, June and her father would sometimes track prisoners who escaped from the camp. One day, a man in his sixties escaped from the camp. When the man made it over the county line, June’s father said he had probably “escaped into Mexico by now” and decided they would not track him any further (22).
Section 1 Analysis
In Section 1, Hernandez introduces the variety of methods he uses throughout the text to reconstruct the plane crash and those impacted by it. He switches between different modes of historiographical writing subtly. The first of these modes is historical fiction. Hernandez relies on his research to create fictionalized reconstructions of events. This is what Chapter 1 opens with. The first description of witnessing the plane crash is told from the third-person limited perspective of Red Childers. While Hernandez likely got the facts of what Red saw from interviews and newspaper coverage, details such as “[h]is old heart was beating like it hadn’t in too long” and “[t]he echoes of godforsaken screams cast out into the air just seconds ago were still reverberating in Red’s ears” are a form of poetic license that the author takes to draw the reader into the scene with sensory perceptions (5). Poetic license is a literary technique wherein writing departs somewhat from the known facts for dramatic or humorous effect. It is a technique Hernandez often uses for Creating Empathy Through Storytelling.
Hernandez explains this choice in his Author’s Note to the text, writing, “While the telling itself is true, its loyalty is not to people of fact but rather to people of memory” (xiv). While in conventional historical narrative an assemblage of facts is considered “true,” Hernandez challenges this assumption. He notes that the official account of the events of the Los Gatos plane crash is sorely lacking, beginning with discrepancies in the number of casualties and their names. In the absence of reliable facts, Hernandez instead relies on an assemblage of memories and impressions to present the truth of events.
The notion of assemblage of memories creates the form of All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon. Following the historical fiction passage in Section 1, Hernandez provides a quote from June Gaston, the granddaughter of Red Childers, that supports the characterization he created. Hernandez extensively uses quotes from interviews he conducted with the family members of those impacted by the crash. This is a second mode of historical narrative, namely, oral history. As noted elsewhere in this guide, oral history is a form of historical writing often used to gain insight into how ordinary people (that is, not public figures, for instance) experience a moment in time. In the case of this historical project, Hernandez relies heavily on interviews with family members and friends to access their memories of those impacted. In this way, Hernandez demonstrates how oral history is one of several Forms of Remembrance and Memorial. Without the memories of these people, the impact of this plane crash may have been lost to time.
The third form of historical writing used in the text is conventional historical narrative that relies on primary and secondary source documents. Toward the end of Chapter 1, beginning under the sub-heading “12:10 p.m.,” Hernandez quotes extensively from the first news reports on the plane crash beginning with F. J. McCollum’s article for the Coalinga Record, the local newspaper. In Chapter 2, Hernandez describes an image from the news report.
In keeping with the assemblage method mentioned above, Hernandez weaves all three of these historiographical forms together in his narrative. For instance, he follows up his citation of the news story with a passage of historical fiction that portrays how he imagines F. J. McCollum reported the story by interviewing witnesses. In this case, the pairing of conventional history and historical fiction shows how primary and secondary source documents are created. In so doing, Hernandez shows how official documents are themselves based on oral history and personal memory just as much as his narrative recreation of the crash and its aftermath is.
