LATINO HISTORY IN NEW JERSEY
The Mexican Aviator in the Pine Barrens
A stone eagle in Wharton State Forest and the New Jersey story that keeps it standing
By Luis Contreras, LSRI
Past Tabernacle and deep into Wharton State Forest there is a clearing with a twelve-foot stone monument. It looks like it came from somewhere else because it did. Schoolchildren in Mexico paid for it with coins they collected after a pilot named Emilio Carranza came down here in a thunderstorm on the night of July 12, 1928. He was twenty-three years old.
Who he was
People called him the Lindbergh of Mexico. At twenty-two he flew nonstop from Mexico City to Ciudad Juárez. The following year he flew fifteen hundred and seventy-five miles from San Diego to Mexico City, which was at the time the third longest solo flight on record. He and Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator who had completed his own transatlantic flight the year before, had actually met in El Paso in 1927 and were friends.
The flight north
The 1928 trip was a goodwill tour, a diplomatic move meant to mirror Lindbergh’s trip south the year before. Carranza met President Coolidge in Washington, and then the mayor of New York City gave him a key to the city. After that he headed home. Over the Pinelands of New Jersey a storm rolled in and the plane went down. A local man found him the next morning, July 13, 1928, exactly ninety-eight years ago to this day.
The monument
The stone the children paid for was cut near Carranza’s birthplace in Mexico, then shipped over and set at the exact site where he was found. One face has a diving Aztec eagle. One has an inscription. One has an arrow pointing up. The fourth has footsteps. It has been in that clearing since 1933.
Why it still matters
American Legion Post 11 out of Mt. Holly holds a ceremony there every second Saturday in July. Mexican officials attend, and so do members of the Mexican-American community. A South Jersey Legion post has been keeping that tradition for close to a century. The crash is not necessarily the most remarkable part any longer.
For a project about the histories, present, and futures of Latinas and Latinos in New Jersey, it is aptly suited: a Mexican pilot, a monument built with Mexican schoolchildren’s coins, sitting in the Pine Barrens, with a Jersey Legion post showing up every July to commemorate it. It is a tradition sure to endure.
A note on the legend
Pine Barrens sites collect ghost stories and this one is no different. Park at the gate, flash your headlights on the monument three times, yell “Emilio” out the window, and you will see his plane, supposedly. There is also older talk about the crash itself: a telegram that pulled him from dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, a departure into a storm the weather bureau had warned against, questions about foul play that surfaced in the press afterward.
Sources: SJ Magazine, NJ DEP Carranza Memorial page, Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes (Mexico), WHYY coverage of the annual service. The featured photo is courtesy of Carranza Memorial, Tabernacle, New Jersey. Daniel D’Auria, 2010. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
