This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

I conducted interviews for this series in Spanish and French. Then I transcribed them and

translated them and we had voice actors read them. So when you're listening to this,

please remember that everything you're hearing in English was recorded in other language and it's through the lens of my translation that you're hearing these people's words.

As we always do, we have included the sources for this podcast in the show notes.

I've also included a link to Primrose's legal aid fundraiser. People would like to help out.

Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted.

Our work on tracks out and we have to move on.

600 miles to that Mexico border, they chase us like outlaws and rustlers like these.

Goodbye to my one, goodbye, Rosalida.

Adios, my amigos, Jesus and Maria.

You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane,

and all I will call you will be deportee.

On the 28th day of January, 1948, a plane took off from Oakland, California, on board with a crew, an immigration nationalization service officer, and 28 people who had come to the U.S. to work in the Bracero program.

They were being sent to El Centra, where they were to be deported to Mexico. The pilot, Frankie Atkinson, had found a job flying DC-3s as a civilian

after flying the legendaryly dangerous hump route between India and China and the Second World War.

His wife, Bobby, herself, the daughter of a migrant mother, was filling in that day

as the usual flight attendants

weren't available. On board were 28 passengers, all headed back to Mexico after United States

where they come to work, had decided it didn't need or want them any longer. The plane never

landed in El Centro. It was overdue for maintenance, and its left engine caught fire. Then its wing ripped off.

Above Coalinga, not so far from the fields where many of them had worked for year after year.

...