Throughout my 78 years of life, I have felt inspired by the insightful lyrics and melodies of one of my cultural heroes: U.S. folk music singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, whose themes include labor rights and organizing, socialism, anti-fascism, and anti-racism.
Guthrie was born and raised by middle-class parents in Okemah, Oklahoma. He first married at age 19, but he left his wife and three children at the beginning of the Midwest dust storms that signaled the Dust Bowl period. He joined the thousands of Okies who migrated to California looking for employment. Over the course of his life, he married three times and fathered eight children.
Related:
He succumbed to Huntington’s Disease in 1967. His first two daughters also died from this inherited condition.
Dive deeper every day
Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
Most people have heard his most popular song, an anthem of sorts for his United States homeland: “This Land is Your Land.”
This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me
Woody wrote this song as a subterranean challenge to the notion of the private ownership of land. A stanza that educators of young children often omit in their classrooms goes:
There was a big, high wall there that tried to stop me A sign was painted said “Private Property” But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing This land was made for you and me
The omission of this stanza whitewashes the urgency and scope of his critique at this critical juncture in U.S. history over the purpose and importance of immigration. Taken in its entirety, “This Land Is Your Land” asks us to reflect on an overarching but yet-to-be-realized mission statement of the United States. It also begs the question of whether the nation embraces the propagandist pablum we are fed and which dominant elites promote around the world – that allowing immigration jeopardizes the nation’s “identity.”
Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie Mazia, was born Marjorie Greenblatt. Her mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. Woody, the Oklahoma troubadour, and Aliza, the Jewish poet, collaborated through the 1940s in Brooklyn. They interwove Jewish culture with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor, and socialist activism.
Guthrie wrote songs inspired by this relationship, for he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Okies and other marginalized and subjugated groups.
The Jewish Klezmer group, The Klezmatics, released Happy Joyous Hanukkah on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released Wonder Wheel – Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band.
Now, in this four-hundredth and sixth anniversary year when European-heritage people abducted, chained, brutally transported, and enslaved Africans on this land we now call the United States of America, the newly-elected president rants and “Truths” hateful diatribes against Latinx U.S. citizens and others who hope to come here.
We as a nation must decide who is welcome on this land. Is it “made for you and me,” or just “them” and not “us”?
From the day European explorers and so-called “settlers” (a.k.a. land thieves who violently displaced and committed genocidal slaughter of native peoples) stepped foot on this land, dominant Protestant Anglo-Saxons set rigid parameters defining who was to be included as “my” on this land.
In her pioneer book, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, Suzanne Pharr describes a series of elements she finds common to the multiple forms of oppression. Such elements include what she refers to as a “defined norm” and a “lack of prior claim,” among many others.
Pharr explains a “defined norm” as “…a standard of rightness and often of righteousness wherein all others are judged in relation to it. This norm must be backed up with institutional power, economic power, and both institutional and individual violence.”
Another way “the defined norm manages to maintain its power and control…” and is kept exclusive is by what Pharr refers to as the element or system of “lack of prior claim.”
This, according to Pharr, “…means that if you weren’t there when the original documents [national Constitutions, corporate founding documents, the Torah, the Christian Testaments, the Qur’an, for example] were written, or when the organization was first created,” she wrote, “then you have no right to inclusion… Those who seek their rights, who seek inclusion, who seek to control their own lives instead of having their lives controlled are the people who fall outside the norm… They are the Other.”
In the original and unamended version of the U.S. Constitution, for example, since only European-heritage male landowners had the right to vote, all Others, including women and people of color (those outside the defined norm and who lacked prior claim) had to fight long and difficult battles against strong forces to gain access to the voting booth, often under the threat of violence, which was sometimes actually inflicted against them.
In fact, the framers of the U.S. Constitution decided Black people only constituted three-fifths of a full human being for census purposes.
People of goodwill, people who adhere to the idea that “all people are created equal,” people who abide by Woody Guthrie’s vision that “this land was made for you and me” have reacted with shock, grief, and anger to the domestic terrorism overtaking this land.
We place blame on patriarchal Christian white nationalism, the groups and individuals, and a former president and now president-elect who consistently promotes hatred and division, who targets people as “invaders,” “criminals,” “rapists,” “breeders,” “eaters of dogs and cats” that are overtaking this land and robbing its “good citizens” of their livelihoods.
Ironically, not having any grounding in history, Trump couldn’t possibly understand that we, the people of the United States of America, were the actual invaders trumping (pun intended) up a war to confiscate land from the proud Mexican people.
Trump’s latest trumped-up war against all Latinx people, whether U.S. citizens or not, represents his cynical reelection strategy to instill fear and loathing, to divide and conquer – a strategy with deadly consequences. For this, he must be blamed.
But what about the remainder of the citizens on this land? What part do we play in perpetuating the defined norm of patriarchal Christian white supremacy? How do we maintain the notion of a lack of prior claim to equality of opportunity and to human dignity for anyone other than this mythical “original” white American?
Woody Guthrie’s anthem certainly does not represent the United States at this critical juncture or throughout our history. Guthrie, though, constructed a platform on which he placed a beacon to guide a nation he loved toward a path of righteousness, the likes of which the world has yet to realize.
Since Trump and the GOP dominated the election, recurrent echoes have been rambling throughout my mind over Trump’s threat to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States using the National Guard and military to implement his draconian policies. Guthrie’s remarkable and poignant ballads have brought me to tears during my grieving process over the possible demise of our current form of government.
His song, “Deportee,” also known as “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” depicts in clear and stark terms the crash of a charter plane transporting California farm workers back to Mexico, their country of origin. The crash killed 32 people, including 29 deported Mexican workers, on January 28, 1948.
Guthrie was specifically skilled at putting real human faces to issues that many people heard about in generalized terminology in the news and casual conversation.
For anyone who supports Trump’s mass deportation plans, who believes that undocumented immigrants are traveling thousands of miles through harsh conditions – many dying on their way northward – to take your jobs, to rob your homes and businesses, to rape and mutilate your mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, to traffic in drugs and in human beings, to eat your dogs and cats, I ask you to listen to “Deportee,” a few times. It is sung by his son, Arlo Guthrie and friend, Pete Seeger.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees.”
I also ask you, how many people do you personally know whose field jobs as vegetable and fruit pickers or as new roof installers in the summer’s sweltering sun were taken by Latinx immigrants?
How many people do you personally know whose families have already been or who are frightened will soon be separated and broken by family separation policies to be enacted under the Trump regime’s second term?
How many people live in your neighborhood that has become vitalized by immigrant-owned and operated small businesses and whose tax dollars are used to improve living and working conditions for all in your community?
How many people have learned about cultural and religious traditions different from your own and have made friends from other cultural and ethnic backgrounds to the benefit of all?
How many of you who reside in the United States are working for safe and humanitarian immigration policies?
Thank you, Woody Guthrie, for your legacy of intercultural understanding.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
Don’t forget to share:
This article includes links that may result in a small affiliate share for purchased products, which helps support independent LGBTQ+ media.
