My Tío Santos would’ve liked how his funeral turned out Tuesday morning at Rose Hill Memorial Park in Whittier.
A sunny morning good for a recreation of baseball or spherical of golf, his favourite sports activities. A standing-room-only crowd, just like the Dodgers video games he usually attended. Behind my uncle’s coffin have been wreaths fashioned into baseballs or adorned with golf balls and golf equipment. On one facet of him was a photograph of mi tío in his 20s; on the opposite was a framed Shohei Ohtani jersey. In attendance have been males in baseball caps or tejanas, representing each side of our Mexican and American lives.
Santos Arellano Pérez died Sept. 5, a couple of days after struggling a coronary heart assault. He leaves behind his spouse Carmen, their kids Rodolfo, Diego, Susana Ramirez Arellano and Leticia Navarro, and 6 grandchildren. He was 76, and the primary of my dad’s seven siblings to cross away.
I’ll keep in mind mi Tío Santos because the lifetime of all of the household events, the Arellano who liked to belt rancheras alongside mariachis or karaoke tracks. He was often the primary individual on the dance ground, as able to dancing a stately waltz as he was a rousing zapateada. He introduced a whole bunch of males to sobriety, and at all times made us cousins chuckle along with his witty remarks and nice anecdotes.
Greater than something, I’ll keep in mind him as a sportsman with few friends.
Within the Eighties, he and different males from the ranchos of Jerez, Zacatecas, started to play in Sunday league video games towards males from different Mexican states. When there have been sufficient folks from every rancho to discipline separate groups, they organized doubleheaders towards one another in Holifield Park in Norwalk throughout main holidays, full with tamborazo and torta distributors, magnificence queens and dances on the diamond between video games — identical to they do again within the motherland.
The matchups, which usually drew a whole bunch of spectators, proceed to at the present time and now discipline groups with the grandsons of these jerezano pioneers.
My uncle was enjoying beisbol as lately as this summer time, when he was the beginning pitcher for his hometown of Jomulquillo in a recreation that featured expats versus those that by no means left. He walked two, struck out one, allowed a run and left after one inning to rousing applause.
“You should have seen it, primo,” my cousin Ramón instructed me as we gathered exterior the SkyRose Chapel simply earlier than our uncle’s service. Ramón participated in among the earliest Norwalk video games whereas additionally pitching for Bassett Excessive in La Puente. “My uncle was throwing like nothing off the mound. I couldn’t even hit the catcher!”
My cousins and my dad’s pals shared tales about mi tío’s love for all issues athletic. How he rode a motorcycle all over the place and usually went to the health club. His appreciation for legendary Mexican featherweight boxing champion Salvador Sanchez, whose fights he used to usually stream on YouTube.
“Was it true Santos would beat you, Rodolfo and Diego in golf?” my dad requested in Spanish to Chuck Navarro, who’s married to my cousin Leticia. Chuck proudly nodded.
My papi beamed. “Ah, que hombre.”
What a person.
Santos Arellano, second from left, in an undated picture along with his teammates in a Southern California baseball league comprised largely of immigrants from the Mexican state of Zacatecas.
(Household picture)
Santos Arellano Pérez was born in 1947 to Jose and Angelita Arellano. Baseball, not soccer, is the popular sport in Zacatecas, so the Arellano boys performed video games on a makeshift grime discipline in an arroyo with rolled up pantyhose because the ball, tree branches for bats and a mano pelona — gloveless.
He adopted his brothers and different jerezanos to america within the Nineteen Seventies — first in Anaheim, then East Los Angeles. Throughout weekends, they performed ball — my dad nonetheless remembers a recreation at Sycamore Junior Excessive in Anaheim that featured single males from the ranchos towards married males. The start of my cousin Rodolfo — whom all us cousins name Rudy (I’m going by Guti) — amplified my uncle’s love for the sport.
“We spent hours in the backyard practicing,” mentioned Rudy, who went on to pitch for Schurr Excessive in Montebello. “His thing was always about control and location. My dad would tell me, ‘You can throw 100 miles per hour, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t land them.’ It wasn’t just good baseball advice, it was life advice, even if I didn’t know it then.”
Rudy, myself and different cousins performed video games throughout the Holifield Park rancho doubleheaders at a small discipline adjoining to the primary one earlier than they graduated to Jomulquillo’s group, which my uncle managed for years (me, a veritable Moe Berg, watched from the sidelines).
“He was the linchpin,” mentioned Joe Perez, a human providers supervisor for town of Anaheim whose mother and father are from Jomulquillo and who performed shortstop. He and different former teammates confirmed as much as the wake carrying their previous jerseys to current Carmen with a plaque thanking my uncle “for spreading and supporting the sport of baseball” inside Jomulquillo’s diaspora.
“It was a way to form that identity of here and over there,” Perez continued. “And it was hard. The inconvenience of calling people in Orange County, L.A., the [San Fernando] Valley when everyone’s working or going to school, just to play baseball!”
Santos Arellano, heart, attends a recreation at Dodger Stadium along with his sons Rodolfo, left, and Diego this previous Father’s Day.
(Household picture)
“But he knew how to get you to play,” added Arturo Arellano, additionally from Jomulquillo (no relation to me … I feel). “He would say, ‘Remember that good hit you got in the last game?’ So you had to go show up and do it again.”
Though my Tío Santos was a Dodgers fan, he liked baseball, interval. He at all times praised La Máquina Roja — Cincinnati’s Large Purple Machine — and rooted for the Atlanta Braves throughout their Nineteen Nineties heyday. In truth, the archives of this paper has proof of my uncle’s ecumenical method — a 1992 article about him and Carmen shopping for their house in East L.A. contains a picture of them and Rudy, with my uncle sporting an Oakland A’s cap whereas Rudy wore a San Francisco Giants hat.
My uncle liked baseball a lot that when Diego requested if he might depart the game and check out for the Schurr golf group his senior yr, “my dad said unequivocally, no,” Diego mentioned. “He thought it was a stupid game and a waste of time.”
He used the identical argument when my uncle and Carmen accompanied Chuck and Leticia — whom we cousins name Leti — in 2009 for a marriage of Leti’s good friend in Maui. One morning, Chuck awoke at 5 a.m. to play the Ka’anapali Kai golf course.
Santos Arellano, who as soon as derided golf as a “waste of time,” performs the Coyote Hills Golf Course in Fullerton after his conversion to the sport.
(Household picture)
“He’s walking out right out behind me, telling me, ‘You’re crazy. This is too early for this — why can’t you do it at 1?’” Chuck mentioned, cracking up on the reminiscence. He satisfied his father-in-law to at the very least watch him play.
“We get to the first hole, and he saw me cream the damn ball down the fair[way]. ‘That’s like a home run,’ Santos then said. ‘Hey, you gotta let me hit the ball.’
“He can’t get the ball on the tee,” Chuck continued, laughing louder. “He’s standing all funny. I’m telling him, ‘That’s not how you do it.’ He said, ‘No I’m going to do it.’ On the first swing, he got on the green. When I saw his face, I said, ‘It’s over. He’s hooked on this.’”
None of us cousins might ever think about that our Tío Santos would turn out to be a golfer. Un hombre de caballo — a person of the horse — on this planet of wicking polo shirts and bogeys? However my uncle instantly took to it. He purchased Nike irons and performed many of the programs in Southern California, his favourite being the one subsequent to the Trade Hills Expo Heart, website of his seventieth party and the reception for his funeral.
Mi tío as soon as even hit a gap in a single on the Pico Rivera Golf Membership, and liked to trot out the trophy he obtained for it each time Chuck — who has but to hit one — came to visit for dinner.
“I was surprised at how quickly he was able to get good,” mentioned Diego, who ceaselessly joined his dad, Chuck and Rudy for video games that often devolved into facet bets and arguing about mulligans. “The baseball swing is more of a level swing, so transitioning to a golf swing is like night and day. But we’d play with random strangers, and they’d always be like, ‘Your dad is in his 70s? He swings better than we do!’”
Diego stayed silent. “That was my dad’s attitude. Play every minute like it’s your last.”
They final golfed in the summertime, across the time Rudy and Diego took their dad to a Dodgers recreation for Father’s Day, the place mi tío obtained his customary combo plate of a Dodger Canine, nachos and vanilla ice cream. I final noticed him in August at a party for my dad at our house in Anaheim, website of years of Arellano pool events. I used to be speculated to go to the latest Holifield Park baseball match, which occurred on Sept. 1, however needed to cancel on the final minute. My uncle attended, together with Carmen and Susana.
“I hadn’t been to a game there in 30 years,” Susana instructed me as folks gathered to throw a fistful of grime at my uncle’s coffin, which had been lowered into its grave. He was buried with the ball with which he obtained his gap in a single. A mariachi performed the Cornelio Reyna customary “Te Vas Ángel Mío” (You’re Leaving, My Angel).
Susana held a photograph of her and her mother and father from that recreation. “Everyone was talking to him that day — everyone. It was like if he knew it was his time to go, and he wanted to say goodbye.”
Two days later, my uncle suffered the center assault that took him from us too quickly.
Santos Arellano, left, along with his brothers Lorenzo, Gabriel and Jesús Arellano at Lorenzo’s house in Anaheim in August.
(Household picture)
When it was my flip to pay respect, I tossed grime together with white and blue roses. I then joined Chuck to see movies of him and mi tío on the golf course one final time.
The clip we noticed time and again was the 2 of them on the Monterey Park Golf Membership. “A ver, Santos, ¿dónde la echaste?” an incredulous Chuck asks. Alright, the place did you hit it?
My uncle laughs. He had simply smacked the flag on the third gap, a 135-yard par three. “I nearly got a hole in one,” he responds in Spanish, announcing it like “a holy one.”
You have been, tío. You have been.
