Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and reference to suicide.

“As Red ran closer he watched a thread of black smoke unfurl from the mountain pass, where a fragile seam between two worlds had ripped open.”

The book begins in medias res, or in the middle of the action. Using the genre of historical fiction, it describes what witness Red Childers would have seen and experienced after the explosion of the airplane on January 28, 1948. The language “a fragile seam between two worlds had ripped open” emphasizes both that those involved were forever changed after the incident and that it was a rare moment of contact between American life and the lives of the migrant workers.

“Despite the investigation team’s best efforts, in the end, it was a patchwork job. Names were as dismembered as the bodies they belonged to.”

In this quote, Tim Z. Hernandez draws a parallel between his work and that of the investigation team while also highlighting the differences. Like the investigation team, Hernandez’s research is a “patchwork job” incorporating many different sources of varying reliability. Unlike the investigation team, he seeks to connect the names to the people and their stories.

“For Casimira Navarro López, time would knock on her door sixty-seven years later, almost to the day. Until this moment, she had never been asked to speak about her boyfriend, who was killed in ‘the worst airplane disaster in California’s history.’”

In this quote, Hernandez introduces himself as an oral historian collecting stories of “ordinary people,” stories that were otherwise overlooked by official accounts. Despite Casimira Navarro López’s connection to one of the victims, Luis Miranda Cuevas, no one had ever asked her to share her memories of him.