189 Descendants of 2 Mexican Brothers Attend 1st Family Reunion in 7 Decades

A little girl dressed in purple stood twisting her long, dark hair with the vulnerability of a lost child.

Milling around her were adults wearing a panoply of colors. There was red, white, two shades of blue, green and yellow.

Finally, a woman in turquoise stooped down, grasped the girl by the shoulders and asked, “Where’s your mama?”

When Zenaido and Federico Magdaleno left their small village in Mexico on a journey toward the United States, it wasn’t clear whether they would survive the perils of poverty and political uncertainties in their homeland.

But almost seven decades later, at the first reunion of their descendants, the progeny of the two orphaned Mexican brothers born in the 1890s had become so numerous that a 5-year-old great-granddaughter could become lost in a sea of family members.

In fact, so many Magdaleno descendants--nearly 200--gathered Saturday at Veterans Memorial County Park in Sylmar that they had to wear color-coded shirts to keep track of themselves. There were 12 different shades for the 12 children of the Magdaleno brothers--and their children.

Wearing the turquoise assigned to her line, Delia Alvidrez, 52, soon recognized the little girl, Serina Barraza of Van Nuys, by her purple shirt. The color meant she was a descendant of Zenaido’s oldest daughter, Rosa Ybarra-Cano, 70, also of Van Nuys.

“Her great-grandmother’s my sister,” said Alvidrez, who lives in Sylmar. “We live not very far from each other but the family’s so big we never see each other.”

Ybarra-Cano said the reunion was called because the family had gotten so big and spread out that a great-aunt wouldn’t recognize her own niece.

But her son, Joe Ybarra, 40, saw a higher purpose. An administrative analyst for the city Community Development Department, he said he hoped the gathering would underscore the similarities between his family and other Latinos who have recently fled civil strife or economic uncertainties for the United States.

“Let all those that are now attempting to obtain legal status know that it is worth every ounce of time and effort to accomplish it,” Ybarra said. “This is a great nation, and they should be able to reap the benefits they’re entitled to.”

The divorced father of Serina, Steve Barraza, 23, was more pragmatic about the importance of meeting relatives.

“I could cruise San Fernando and start talking to a girl and not know she’s my cousin,” he said, only half joking.

“Two cousins on my father’s side met and got engaged before they found out they were related,” he said. “They ended up calling it off.”

The Magdaleno brothers were running a small bakery when the Mexican Revolution of 1910 sent hostile bands of rebels through their rural pueblo of Penjamo, Guanajuato.

“Three bandits rode their horses into the bakery and broke everything up. Right then, he decided to leave,” Ybarra-Cano said of her father.

Zenaido tested the waters in California for two years, his daughter said. Then in 1918, his wife, Felipa, set out with their three children for Long Beach, where Zenaido had found work as a railroad laborer. From the window of the train she rode north in Mexico, “my mother said she’d see men hanging from the trees,” Ybarra-Cano remembered. A year later the family moved to the Valley.

The family pitched a tent on Amboy Avenue in San Fernando. They later built a rough-hewn, one-room house on the same spot. “The kitchen was in one corner and the beds in the other,” she said.

By that time, Federico Magdaleno had left Mexico with his wife, Eufrosina, and their 4-year-old daughter, Isabel, now 70.

The family settled first in Nebraska, then joined the rest of the Magdaleno clan in San Fernando, said Rogelio Magdaleno, a retired postal carrier from Van Nuys and one of Federico’s sons.

The Magdaleno brothers sold fertilizer to citrus groves, the family said, but when they lost their truck during the Depression, the two branches of the family split again.

“My folks heard there was farm work in Idaho and Wyoming,” said Rogelio Magdaleno. “We all packed up in a car with some belongings and we went up there.”

Zenaido’s family moved to Santa Ana, where he picked fruit.

But by the mid-1930s the families returned to the Valley, where Zenaido began contracting farm labor and Federico went into construction. The families had grown, and with them, the Amboy Avenue house expanded. Still, the first generation had not become American citizens.

“There was a rumor that, if you tried to become a U. S. citizen, you had to trample on the Mexican flag, and they would never do it,” said Rogelio Magdaleno.

Also, there was a language problem: although the first generation spoke English, they didn’t understand it well enough to study the Constitution. Citizenship tests include questions about U. S. history and the Constitution.

Finally, it was Rosa Ybarra-Cano who broke the ice. Feeling no allegiance to the country she had left at 2 years old, she successfully applied in 1939 for U. S. citizenship.

She found a woman who taught about the U.S. Constitution in Spanish and, most importantly, discovered that the rumor about stomping on the Mexican flag was a myth. The first generation became citizens shortly thereafter.

Any remaining questions about allegiance were settled in the 1940s, as four Magdaleno sons headed off to serve in World War II. Another generation followed them into Vietnam and a member of the fourth generation, stationed with the Navy in South Dakota, recently was called for duty in the Persian Gulf.

Between 1969 and 1979, the first generation of the family died. They had long been American citizens.

On Saturday morning, 189 descendants stood in awe of a family tree that was incomplete even after six months of research.

The family now has 198 members, including 51 grandchildren, 49 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren, according to Richard Magdaleno, a grandchild who is tracing the family tree.

The Amboy Avenue house, which is being rented by another family, has three bedrooms. “Now it’s a modern home,” said Ybarra-Cano.

By all appearances, the Latino descendants adjusted to life in America without losing the traditions of their homeland. Cheetos cheese puffs were served up with pan dulces, traditional Mexican sweet rolls. Potato salad shared the same plates as tamales. Portable stereos waited with pinatas.

A young man wearing a tag saying, “Hi, I’m Trini, Trino’s son,” introduced a woman who wore a tag saying, “Hi, I’m Marta, Trini’s fiancee.”

Boys played football while the youngest family member at the reunion, 2-month-old Ignacio (Nacho) Codero III, held the attention of the women.

In another corner, the old-timers gathered to debate the finer points of the family history. As memories reached further back in time, impeccable English melted into brisk Spanish.

“Tu sabes como sale el story,” said Isabel Yribe, 70, the oldest living descendant. Embarking on a version that would have taken Federico’s descendants to Barstow sometime before the Depression, she said, “You know how the story goes.”

“No,” insisted her brother Rogelio Magdaleno, 63. “Don’t you remember it was after we came back from Wyoming and Idaho?”

“It was Utah and Idaho,” she countered.