The past and the present gathered last Sunday afternoon on the north side of the city, and it all added up to the future. The occasion included the recognition of a former mayor and local Latino businessman with the christening of the Abel De Luna Community Center in his honor. It also included a recognition of the generations of Latinos who have come to Healdsburg, both before and since his 1970s local celebrity, and how impactful that population has been to Healdsburg.
The Healdsburg Community Center earned its new name earlier this year, but it took these past few months to pull together the official naming ceremony for the Abel De Luna Community Center, held on the afternoon of May 18.
The program included introductions, congratulations, testimonials and the unveiling of the sign on the front of the former Foss Creek School, boldly proclaiming the new name. Food trucks were present, a stage and concert PA set up, chairs in place, and media including local newspapers and Bay Area television arrayed for the occasion, as well as De Luna’s own film production crew on hand to document the honor.
Under it all lay a palpable excitement, a sense that something positive was about to happen—and in today’s world, that seemed exceptional.
Legacy and impact
A bit after 1:30pm, Mayor Evelyn Mitchell introduced the background of the event through the eyes of the city council, the ones who realized that giving the name to the community center was almost fated. “Through this naming process, the council came to better understand Mayor De Luna’s legacy and his impact on our community,” she said. “It also became clear this facility had become an extension of his legacy with the many services it provides to our residents.”
That clarified the importance and suitability of the honor. The people most fully served by the community center—the moms and their babies, the preschoolers, the Latino community interests represented by Corazon Healdsburg or treated by Clinica Alianza—this has become the community center for that community. Putting the name of Healdsburg’s first Latino mayor on the building seems only right.
Supervisor James Gore followed Mitchell, delivering a bilingual barnburner of a speech, capped by delivery of an outsize “cheque grande!” for $500,000—a non-negotiable check, but real money to upgrade the community center into a still-more-vital “multicultural center.”
Before long, the one person in the world who might upstage Abel De Luna showed up: a small, colorfully-dressed, still-sharp 95-year-old woman named Dolores Huerta. An icon in labor and civil rights history—with César Chávez she co-founded the National Farmworkers Union in 1962, and has barely slowed down since—she recounted landing a contract with wineries to protect farmworkers rights, and the young De Luna’s early work in the same effort.
Si se puede!
Huerta was clearly still ready to take up the fight—she coined the phrase, “Si se puede, Yes we can,” that people still chant at national demonstrations.
“Talk to farmworkers. They made this area famous, no?” she said. But with the grapes they pick selling for hundreds of dollars a ton, she continued, “You know the workers are not always benefiting from that. With a union contract they would. Because of the work the farmworkers did, then you have the kind of community that all of you have built here in Healdsburg.”
Abel De Luna—a dapper 78-year-old with a manicured moustache in a blue-striped suit—finally rose to acknowledge the honor with a compelling, bilingual speech. He easily captured his audience, allowing his emotions to show through as he told his story, from Zacatecas to City Hall.
He ran for city council in 1976, he said, not because he thought he would win. With seven candidates for three seats, he went door to door “to introduce myself, to let people know I wanted to be on the city council. Because I didn’t want to be last on election day.”
It might have been a trick he learned organizing farm workers 10 years earlier, as Chávez emphasized door-to-door recruitment for the National Farm Workers. It’s a technique that still works today.
“I got elected to the city council,” he said, as if still surprised that such a thing could be possible in a city with only 5% Latinos at the time. “I didn’t believe it myself, like today when I get a real building with my name.”
Showing both honor and respect, De Luna said: “This is a dream I didn’t think I would have. But it not only belongs to me, it belongs to all of us. This is something—this is history—this is Healdsburg making history.”
Not the last time
While he was justifiably proud that this would be the first government building name for a Latino, no one thought it should be the last. Part of the accomplishment De Luna epitomizes is the election of Latinos to local office. Accordingly, he was able to point to the current 1st District Supervisor Rebecca Hermosillo, Windsor Mayor Rosa Reynoza and former Mayor Esther Lemus, new Cloverdale City Council member Andrés Marquez, and another former Latino mayor for Healdsburg, Ozzy Jimenez.
As the crowd dispersed to the food trucks following the speeches, Jimenez said he had spoken with De Luna recently about the job of mayor in Healdsburg. “It was interesting to hear him from his time on council and then my time,” he said. “People will say, well things have changed a lot, but I think our experience is still kind of one and the same.”
De Luna’s time on the city council was brief. He did not win re-election in 1980, and moved more actively into his media career.
To learn about the activities at the Abel De Luna Community Center, 1557 Healdsburg Ave., visit healdsburg.gov/924/Community-Center.
