Enacting Woody Guthrie’s Vision of ‘The Land’ to Embrace You and Me

Throughout my life into my 78^th year, I have felt inspired by the insightful lyrics and melodies of one of my cultural heroes, U.S. folk music singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) whose themes include topics of 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.

He succumbed to Huntington’s Disease in 1967. His first two daughters also died from this inherited condition.

Most people have heard his most popular song, an anthem of sorts of 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

Woody Guthrie’s iconic song, without 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” has the potential for us to reflect an overarching but yet-to-be realized mission statement of the United States, or whether the nation simply embraces the propagandist pablum we are fed and which dominant elites on this land promote around the world that allowing immigration jeopardizes the nations’ “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 coming from 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.

In this the 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 up to the current moment as 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 are welcomed on this land.

Is it “make 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 were 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 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 and actual violence inflicted against them.

In fact, the framers of the U.S. Constitution framed enslaved Africans as constituting only 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 by 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 divisions, who targets people as “invaders,” “criminals,” “rapists,” “breeders,” “eaters of dogs and cats” 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 this president’s 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 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. Woody, 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.

Over the past few days since the news outlets have reported the results of the 2024 presidential, statewide, and Congressional elections, and recurrent echoes 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, another of Guthrie’s remarkable and poignant ballads has 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 in his lyrics to issues that many people heard about simply in passing in generalized terminology in the news and in casual conversation.

For anyone who supports Trump’s mass deportation plans, who believes that undocumented immigrants are traveling thousands of miles through harsh conditions, as many die 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, to eat your cats, to eat your pets of the people that live [here],” I ask you to listen to Woody Guthrie’s song, “Deportee,” a few times sung by his son Arlo Guthrie and fried Pete Seeger. Here is the song’s chorus:

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 have 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? How many of you outside of the United States are working for safe and humanitarian policies in your country?

Thank you, Woody Guthrie, for your legacy of intercultural understanding, which can certainly apply to countries across the globe.