Martin O'Malley: 'Something important to remember at this time of Thanksgiving'

Last edited Fri Nov 27, 2015, 09:38 AM - Edit history (1)

___Into a presidential campaign, a little music must fall, and along with campaign trail songs, Democratic candidate Martin O'Malley added his rendition of a song about the deaths of migrant workers in a 1948 plane crash.

A guitar player since age 17, O'Malley introduced Latino members of his staff to "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos," the Woody Guthrie poem, set to music by Martin Hoffman. The lyrics protest the lost lives of the crash victims and the mass burial of 28 farmworkers, without their names at their gravesite or in news of the crash.

"I've been aware of the song for a long time and with Latino staff on my campaign, I said, 'Have you ever heard this piece?'" O'Malley explained. "I pulled up the song on the iPad and they kept the camera rolling."

His rendition was recently posted by staff on Facebook as a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's executive action that would shield from deportation millions of immigrants in the country illegally. The programs are stalled by a court battle.

Some of the workers on the doomed plane were guest workers under the Bracero program and had finished their contracts, some on the plane had entered the country or stayed in it illegally and were being removed from the U.S.

The workers' names remained unknown until poet, author and performer Tim Z. Hernandez tracked them down with the help of others and performed to raise money for a memorial headstone. The gravestone listing each victim was erected in 2013, 65 years after the crash.

The song has been sung by many artists: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, John Cash and others. O'Malley said it crept into the Irish music genre through folk singer Paddy Reilly.

O'Malley said the song has lessons for today's political environment around immigration and the acceptance of refugees from Syria.

"I think it becomes so easy to lose sight of the human beings and families involved when we talk about comprehensive immigration reform and even Syrian refugees. There's a kind of namelessness that accompanies the globalization of indifference," O'Malley said in a telephone interview with NBC News Latino Monday.

O'Malley said the poem and song does a nice job of "stripping bare the anonymity, of the falsehood that some of these migrant workers are not human begins and don't have names."

"I think the beauty of our country is that through all sorts of different years and movements of histories and influences, whether its in civil rights or new American immigrants, there is this yearning in our country for full participation, for inclusion, for recognition," O'Malley said.

"The belief at the core of it is the same, the belief that we share as Americans, that all are created equal and the dignity of all persons," he said. "That's the value here that (GOP frontrunner) Donald Trump misses. It's a belief we affirm sometimes through conflict and sometimes through a lot of pain."

"One of the truths we lose sight of as Americans is we would not have a lot of the food on the table were it not for migrant workers, something important to remember at this time of Thanksgiving," O'Malley said.

'As millions of families come home tonight, I can’t help but think of what New Americans, on the anniversary of an executive action that would have brought them peace and dignity, are living tonight.

I dedicate this song to the safety of our families. Woody Guthrie wrote it in 1948 as a protest song for 28 migrant farm-workers that died in a plane that was deporting them. Since all of them were just "labor," in the news they were called "deportees."

We all have a name and a family. We are New Americans.'