Tim Z Hernandez at Vroman's. Eaton Fire Survivor: Fragment of a Mask

Patty Rodriguez and Tim Z. Hernandez Explore "They Call You Back"

Michael Sedano

A dark and rainy night doesn't daunt the eager collective gathering in Pasadena's venerable independent bookseller, Vroman's Bookstore, to hear Tim Z Hernandez in conversation with Patty Rodriguez about They Call You Back. Hernandez and Rodriguez reward the intrepid audience with a music-filled platica featuring music by Joel Rafael (link).

Hernandez' publisher, the University of Arizona Press (link), summarizes the work, noting, Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and the New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendant of farmworkers.”

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

Patty Rodriguez

Hernandez kicks off the event reading one of the most powerful scenes from a book filled with powerful accounts of lost souls, naming the nameless, communing with spirits, personal insights, writerly writing. 

The scene recounts the day the California State Legislature honors the author and acknowledges the humanity of the long-erased deportees by calling their names from the California Senate floor.

As a senator names a name, Hernandez' nine year old son whispers, at first, then louder, then aloud calls out "Presente!" after each name. Politicians one by one stand and soon the chamber fills as if with one voice, "Presente!" as each deportee's name is called out, "Presente!" A child has led them.

Tonight, the boy leads us here, as well, listening to the words. Hernandez reads his text interspersing sotto voce presente and, as in the narrative, the audience joins the boy, the author, and the long-ago legislature, Presente! Presente! Presente! The moment offers a stark contrast between the rot infecting U.S. immigration politics, and tonight's puro humanism connecting souls across time and place in Los Gatos Canyon, the senate chamber, wherever it was the deportees called home, and Vroman's right now.

Hernandez writes how, in the minutes before he and two families take to the senate floor, Joan Baez privately sings to them Woody Guthrie's song, Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) (link). Hernandez' guest, composer performer Joel Rafael, shares the touching song's haunting melody. Rafael composed music for the documentary, "A Song for Cesar," where Rafael sings Deportee for the soundtrack.

Joel Rafael

It was a dark and stormy night, that night in Pasadena. Those assembled at Vroman's had come to resist. This is what that looks like:

Being there. That's resistance.

Taking the roll call of the airplane crash victims, and responding for them, "Presente!", that's resistance.

Acknowledging the humanity and peoplehood of gente decente caught in the spotlight of xenophobia and political scapegoating, that's resistance.

Reading They Call You Back (publisher link), that's resistance. 

Memory

Eaton Fire Survivor: Fragment of An Alfredo de Batuc Ceramic Mask 

It was so many years ago I don't remember the year. I remember walking into Frank Romero's Frogtown studio where his annual Christmas sale was going strong.

As I enter, my eye catches a table adorned with prints and a wondrous ceramic, double-faced mask, a moon face fashioned in the style of the artist's paintings and prints on display. 

I chat up a fellow in a fashionable brown suit who's tending the display. We don't introduce ourselves. I buy the ceramic mask. I learn later the anonymous vato is the artist himself, Alfredo de Batuc (link). 

The double-sided ceramic mask, along with de Batuc's serigraph pastiche of Frida Kahlo's Las Dos Fridas, perished in the January 7 Eaton Fire that destroyed the land and house where I lived. 

I held no hope to find any vestige of Alfredo de Batuc's captivating dos fridas DDLM serigraph's paper substrate. But when my daughter sifted ashes from her living room she pulled out the chin nose and left cheek of Alfredo de Batuc's clay sculpture. The obverse retains its deep crust of ashes where the inverted bowl of the face lay upon smoldering coals of books, hardwood, and stereo records. This piece of burnt clay is a fragment of whole memories, a piece of a lifetime's treasure, stuff to make dreams on because that's what we have left.

Mira nomás, artifact of the 2025 January 7 Eaton Fire, known provenance. 

Fire takes stuff and converts it into new stuff.