My Tío Santos would’ve loved how his funeral turned out Tuesday morning at Rose Hill Memorial Park in Whittier.
A sunny morning perfect for a game of baseball or round of golf, his favorite sports. A standing-room-only crowd, like the Dodgers games he regularly attended. Behind my uncle’s coffin were wreaths formed into baseballs or decorated with golf balls and clubs. On one side of him was a photo of mi tío in his 20s; on the other was a framed Shohei Ohtani jersey. In attendance were men in baseball caps or tejanas, representing both sides of our Mexican and American lives.
Santos Arellano Pérez died Sept. 5, a few days after suffering a heart attack. He leaves behind his wife Carmen, their children Rodolfo, Diego, Susana Ramirez Arellano and Leticia Navarro, and six grandchildren. He was 76, and the first of my dad’s seven siblings to pass away.
I will remember mi Tío Santos as the life of all the family parties, the Arellano who loved to belt rancheras alongside mariachis or karaoke tracks. He was usually the first person on the dance floor, as capable of dancing a stately waltz as he was a rousing zapateada. He brought hundreds of men to sobriety, and always made us cousins laugh with his witty remarks and great anecdotes.
More than anything, I will remember him as a sportsman with few peers.
In the 1980s, he and other men from the ranchos of Jerez, Zacatecas, began to play in Sunday league games against men from other Mexican states. When there were enough people from each rancho to field separate teams, they organized doubleheaders against each other in Holifield Park in Norwalk during major holidays, complete with tamborazo and torta vendors, beauty queens and dances on the diamond between games — just like they do back in the motherland.
The matchups, which regularly drew hundreds of spectators, continue to this day and now field teams with the grandsons of those jerezano pioneers.
My uncle was playing beisbol as recently as this summer, when he was the starting pitcher for his hometown of Jomulquillo in a game that featured expats versus those who never 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 told me as we gathered outside the SkyRose Chapel just before our uncle’s service. Ramón participated in some of the earliest Norwalk games while also pitching for Bassett High 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 friends shared stories about mi tío’s love for all things athletic. How he rode a bike everywhere and regularly went to the gym. His appreciation for legendary Mexican featherweight boxing champion Salvador Sanchez, whose fights he used to regularly stream on YouTube.
“Was it true Santos would beat you, Rodolfo and Diego in golf?” my dad asked in Spanish to Chuck Navarro, who’s married to my cousin Leticia. Chuck proudly nodded.
My papi beamed. “Ah, que hombre.”
What a man.
Santos Arellano Pérez was born in 1947 to Jose and Angelita Arellano. Baseball, not soccer, is the preferred sport in Zacatecas, so the Arellano boys played games on a makeshift dirt field in an arroyo with rolled up pantyhose as the ball, tree branches for bats and a mano pelona — gloveless.
He followed his brothers and other jerezanos to the United States in the 1970s — first in Anaheim, then East Los Angeles. During weekends, they played ball — my dad still remembers a game at Sycamore Junior High in Anaheim that featured single men from the ranchos against married men. The birth of my cousin Rodolfo — whom all us cousins call Rudy (I go by Guti) — amplified my uncle’s love for the game.
“We spent hours in the backyard practicing,” said Rudy, who went on to pitch for Schurr High 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 other cousins played games during the Holifield Park rancho doubleheaders at a small field adjacent to the main one before they graduated to Jomulquillo’s team, which my uncle managed for years (me, a veritable Moe Berg, watched from the sidelines).
“He was the linchpin,” said Joe Perez, a human services manager for the city of Anaheim whose parents are from Jomulquillo and who played shortstop. He and other former teammates showed up to the wake wearing their old jerseys to present Carmen with a plaque thanking my uncle “for spreading and supporting the sport of baseball” within 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!”
“But he knew how to get you to play,” added Arturo Arellano, also from Jomulquillo (no relation to me … I think). “He would say, ‘Remember that good hit you got in the last game?’ So you had to go show up and do it again.”
Although my Tío Santos was a Dodgers fan, he loved baseball, period. He always praised La Máquina Roja — Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine — and rooted for the Atlanta Braves during their 1990s heyday. In fact, the archives of this paper has proof of my uncle’s ecumenical approach — a 1992 article about him and Carmen buying their home in East L.A. features a photo of them and Rudy, with my uncle sporting an Oakland A’s cap while Rudy wore a San Francisco Giants hat.
My uncle loved baseball so much that when Diego asked if he could leave the sport and try out for the Schurr golf team his senior year, “my dad said unequivocally, no,” Diego said. “He thought it was a stupid game and a waste of time.”
He used the same argument when my uncle and Carmen accompanied Chuck and Leticia — whom we cousins call Leti — in 2009 for a wedding of Leti’s friend in Maui. One morning, Chuck woke up at 5 a.m. to play the Ka’anapali Kai golf course.
“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 said, cracking up at the memory. He convinced his father-in-law to at 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 could ever imagine that our Tío Santos would become a golfer. Un hombre de caballo — a man of the horse — in the world of wicking polo shirts and bogeys? But my uncle immediately took to it. He bought Nike irons and played most of the courses in Southern California, his favorite being the one next to the Industry Hills Expo Center, site of his 70th birthday party and the reception for his funeral.
Mi tío once even hit a hole in one at the Pico Rivera Golf Club, and loved to trot out the trophy he received for it every time Chuck — who has yet to hit one — came over for dinner.
“I was surprised at how quickly he was able to get good,” said Diego, who frequently joined his dad, Chuck and Rudy for games that usually devolved into side 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 last golfed in the summer, around the time Rudy and Diego took their dad to a Dodgers game for Father’s Day, where mi tío got his customary combo plate of a Dodger Dog, nachos and vanilla ice cream. I last saw him in August at a birthday party for my dad at our home in Anaheim, site of years of Arellano pool parties. I was supposed to go to the most recent Holifield Park baseball tournament, which happened on Sept. 1, but had to cancel at the last minute. My uncle attended, along with Carmen and Susana.
“I hadn’t been to a game there in 30 years,” Susana told me as people gathered to throw a fistful of dirt at my uncle’s coffin, which had been lowered into its grave. He was buried with the ball with which he got his hole in one. A mariachi played the Cornelio Reyna standard “Te Vas Ángel Mío” (You’re Leaving, My Angel).
Susana held a photo of her and her parents from that game. “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 heart attack that took him from us too soon.
When it was my turn to pay respect, I tossed dirt along with white and blue roses. I then joined Chuck to see videos of him and mi tío on the golf course one last time.
The clip we saw again and again was the two of them at the Monterey Park Golf Club. “A ver, Santos, ¿dónde la echaste?” an incredulous Chuck asks. Alright, where did you hit it?
My uncle laughs. He had just smacked the flag on the third hole, a 135-yard par three. “I nearly got a hole in one,” he responds in Spanish, pronouncing it like “a holy one.”
You were, tío. You were.
