March 2020
(Photo of Uncle Mingo at his 100th Birthday Celebration in March 2019)
My uncle, Domingo Orozco, the last of six siblings and all their spouses, the last of his whole generation within our family, passed away one day shy of being 101 years old, a long life by any standard, and one lived by him with grace, gentleness, and love for family. He embodied all the good qualities of the Orozco clan – kindness, generosity, goodness, good humor, and a clear-eyed and practical love extended to all who were family to him. Also, in addition to these qualities, he also possessed the Orozco stubbornness, a deep and abiding stubborn will to survive and move family safely through troubles and troubling times and thrive, a quality born in the family’s past roots as ranchers and peasants in Mexico’s turbulent past, his grandfather and father arriving in the US to find work in California in the early twentieth century, his mother, his oldest sister and brother, and one grandmother, following a few years later from the Mexican state of Michoacán to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution and marauding bandits. It is these qualities, plus his genuine Catholic faith, that made him the kind and generous man he was to many.
My uncle, who I always knew as Uncle Mingo, and my aunt Dora, and cousins, Peter, Angie, and Tillie, were an important part of my family’s life, and for years as a boy and a young teenager, along with my five sisters, my family would visit all of them in Stockton every year it seemed, and it was very natural and comfortable being with all of them. In many ways, my uncle and Dora and my cousins were an integral part of my early concepts of California, my home state over all these years, as we as a family traveled the old Hwy. 99 lined with red, pink, and white oleanders, which I sometimes tried to count to make the long, long trip go faster. During the summer, we usually traveled at night, through Bakersfield and endless small towns with names starting with “M”, arriving late at night and going to sleep but always waking in the morning to find Uncle Mingo in the kitchen cooking something wonderful with eggs and speaking with my dad in Spanish. Our uncle would also usually make menudo for the family, which my dad and my sisters loved, me not so much, which became a playful discussion between my uncle and me for years.
My uncle Mingo will be missed, because of the man that he was, because he was so much a part of the life of his immediate family, and because he was also a calming and generous blessing to the larger extended Orozco family. My wife and I would try to stop and see him in Stockton whenever we traveled to Sacramento to visit our daughter. My cousin, Richard, and I tried to travel up to from Los Angeles about two times a year to visit, and Uncle Mingo would always greet us warmly. We would then visit with him over parts of three days, usually managing to entice him out of the house a few times each trip by taking him to his favorite Mexican or Chinese restaurant. I was usually also able to get him to tell me of early family life and his words always brought the distant past of the family to vivid life. I miss now these opportunities to stop and visit him and hear him speak, but he is now at rest after ten years of deeply missing my aunt Dora, his beloved wife of 67 years, a woman also always warm, welcoming, and loving to me and my family, a wonderful companion to my uncle. And a final legacy of my uncle is the great value he placed on family that he instilled in many, a legacy that in its practical working out will now bring us back to Stockton to visit Angie and Tillie, our two remaining cousins in Stockton, who also share the generous and warm qualities of their father, my Uncle Mingo. He was a good man, may he rest in peace.
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