Alejandro Anzaldo Diaz's Obituary
Obituary for Alejandro Anzaldo Diaz
Alejandro Anzaldo Díaz was born in the small town of Zacoalco de Torres, Jalisco, México on the 24th of April in 1935. At 90, he passed peacefully in his sleep at home, dying of natural causes.
Alejandro was born unto father Silvestre Díaz and mother Francisca Anzaldo Díaz who are now both in heaven with Alejandro. He is also reunited there with his late granddaughter Francisca Raquel Díaz Thompson who passed at 26 years of age. Having helped raise Raquel since the age of two, Alejandro and his granddaughter were very close, and he would do anything to help or protect his children and grandchildren. He was devastated by her passing in Ecuador while she was there on vacation, and he helped his daughter Nellie Jr. bring Raquel back home in ashes on a plane from Ecuador.
As a happy, healthy boy in Jalisco, Alejandro loved growing up on his family’s ranch in Zacoalco de Torres. Even up to his passing, he would talk about how free he felt on the ranch and how hard he worked alongside his father Silvestre and older brother Dionisio or “Nicho.”
His younger siblings Ernestina, Silvestre Jr. and Francisco later joined them in doing ranch work. In addition to carrying and storing heavy sacks of corn, beans and garbanzos, and after tending to the family’s three horses, two cows, pigs, and chickens, Alejandro and Dionisio still had to walk or ride on horseback to the big well a distance away and bring back big buckets of water for cooking, washing, and irrigating the crops.
Alejandro loved his dark, brown horse named Tantarria. Dionisio’s copper-colored horse was Colorín, and father, Silvestre had a white beauty of a horse named Paloma who would come from afar whenever Silvestre whistled for her. To Alejandro, the three horses were their loyal best friends.
There was no TV in those times, but aside from work, there were plenty of adventures to be had, games to play, jokes and stories to be told, and of course, the favorite Mexican rancheras to sing. Alejandro absolutely loved to sing and did so for the rest of his entire life performing anywhere for anybody. After a long day of work on the ranch, the family would eat dinner and then listen to shows on the radio. One
favorite was a comedy show about some brothers called “Los Hermanos Lelos.” These radio characters were dumb as rocks but super funny, and Alejandro and his three brothers often imitated the goofy Hermanos Lelos for years afterwards bringing tears of laughter to whomever got to watch the Díaz brothers perform the silly Lelos skits.
Alejandro loved working with animals on the ranch, especially dogs and horses. He loved doing tricks with the farm animals and lassos. He learned how to continually swing the lasso circle over his head, how to jump side to side through the vertical lasso circle, and other tricks. He perfected the trick of catching running animals by throwing the lasso over their heads, and in later years would still practice this skill by lassoing all the generations of children in the family much to their squealing hearts’ content. It could be said that Alejandro got his passion for jaripeos, charreadas, and rodeos from his father Silvestre who often rode wild bulls in local competitions in Jalisco, doing so competitively for prize money. He rode the jumping powerful bulls fairly well but often came home quite beat up from the wild rides. One day, he came home so injured and bruised that his wife Francisca put a big stop to Silvestre’s bull riding.
“Ya no mas!” she said, worried that he might get injured badly, get paralyzed or even killed. Then what would the family do? In those days, families depended greatly on the father to provide for the entire family.
A big move happened in Alejandro’s childhood when times got hard, and the entire Díaz family moved from Jalisco to the hot inland city of Colton, in Southern California. There they did farm working for an Anglo farm owner who was kind to them. The Díaz children did farm work as well as their father. However, one day, the authorities caught the children working and they were forced to go to school by law. It was the 1940s ,and racism ran strong in those times in the United States. The bullying and racism Silvestre Sr.’s children encountered in the school and in America bothered Silvestre to the point that he finally moved his young family to Tijuana to make sure his children grew up without the injustice of racism in their young lives. In Tijuana, the family bought and worked at a small store to earn their living. It was in this border city that Alejandro met the love of his life during his teens. He fell in love with a very pretty brunette with a big smile named Nelly Lucero. They made a
good-looking couple and soon married. Not long after, the very young newlywed couple moved from Tijuana to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was culture shock for Nelly, but with Alejandro’s love, care and hard work, they established their roots settling in the Bay Area town of Redwood City. There they had three children Guadalupe Ruth, Nellie Jr., and Alex Jr.
As a young father, Alejandro was a go-getter believing strongly in being a good provider. He worked 16 hours a day as a laborer, went to trade school at night for four hours and slept only four hours until the next morning, only to do it all over again the next day. After a few years, he began what would become a highly successful career as a master carpenter, renowned among the construction world in the SF Bay Area and other parts of California. He credits his success to his strong faith in God and La Virgen de Guadalupe and to the belief in hard work, both being beliefs that his Mexican parents instilled in him. Alejandro also had a natural artistic talent for carpentry, and with different crews, he completed admirable projects such as Ghirardelli Square and Pier 39 in San Francisco, the original Apple headquarters in Cupertino, many malls such as Stanford Mall and several hospitals such as Kaiser and Sequoia. Because of his reputation as a highly talented carpenter, he was even hired by quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young to build additions to their homes.
But if you asked him, Alejandro would say his favorite project of all was the big playhouse he built for the children with life-threatening illnesses at Stanford’s Ronald McDonald House (RMH). He felt blessed to meet the children and see them play happily in the colorful creative playhouse he built. It won first prize amongst the others that were built for the RMH, but what truly touched Alejandro’s heart the most was that the children could really enjoy his creation and smile despite being in the fight for their lives. It made his heart full.
Alejandro, his wife Nelly, and their three children are one small nuclear family out of a huge extended family of 600, with some living in Jalisco and Tijuana, Mexico, others living in San Diego County, a few living in East Los Angeles, and the majority living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
One of the commonly repeated remarks about Alejandro stated by his family and friends is that not only was he hardworking, but he had an uncommonly huge
heart for people. He could make a good friend out of a random person he chatted with on the street, rich or poor. His family once saw him chatting with a man he met while killing time outside Wal-Mart as Alejandro’s wife shopped inside. The man was sad because of a lost job and pending divorce, but Alejandro naturally cheered him up and encouraged the man not to give up. He told the man to pray, and everything would be okay soon. As the man began to depart, he received a big hug from Alejandro. The man said, “You didn’t know this, but I was planning to go home and kill myself. But because of you, I think I changed my mind. Thank you so much. I can never repay you.”
Another common trait people remember about Alejandro is how he loved to cheerfully entertain people by singing to mariachi and ranchera songs. He became nicknamed “El Rey” because he sang that song shouting Mexican “gritos” with all his heart, and people remember him singing it with a big, big smile.
But it was his singing of a particular song one time that was unforgettable. It was Rocio Durcal’s “Amor Eterno” that he sang as his beloved mother’s casket was being lowered into its grave in 2006. Alejandro gathered his emotions to try to sing this painful song for his sweet, gentle mother Francisca, but when he came to these lines below, his voice cracked and tears flooded his sad hazel brown eyes:
“Como quisiera—ay/ que tu vivieras/Que tus ojitos jamas se hubieran cerrado nunca/Y estar mirandolos” “Oh how I wish your eyes had never ever closed—never,And I could be looking at them”
And now in 2025 with Alejandro’s passing, our hearts mourn as he did that year in 2006. We will mourn but never forget a good solid Mexican man, a man who taught us all about believing in God, never giving up (“Jalisco-no te rajes!”) hard work, life dreams, good friends and the importance of love and unity in family.
We will not say goodbye, but say “until we meet again,” and “hasta luego Alejandro Diaz. Allá nos vemos en el cielo.”
What’s your fondest memory of Alejandro?
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Describe a day with Alejandro you’ll never forget.
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