Descendants Will Celebrate What Don Pedro Chavez Started : Families: A San Pedro teacher went hunting for his roots and found more than 600 close blood relatives.

With all the talk these days about “family values,” Art Lopez is a man who really values his family--and he has a lot of family to value.

Lopez estimates his close family at about 600 or 700 people; his more distant blood relatives, he says, probably number in the hundreds of thousands, making his one of the most extended families in America.

And for the past 20 years Lopez has dedicated a lot of time and effort trying to find out who those family members are, plus getting as many of them as possible to come to a reunion to celebrate the joys of family ties.

Held once every five years, the reunion is scheduled to take place this holiday weekend in Santa Maria.

It’s something that Lopez thinks more people ought to try. To Lopez, such reunions are an American tradition that could go a long way toward solving the problems that afflict families today.

“I look at a lot of kids today and I see no families,” says Lopez, 54, a teacher at Hooper Avenue Elementary School in Central Los Angeles. “With the breakup of the nuclear family, a lot of kids have no sense of who they are. A reunion can help show people who they are; it can be like an extended support group.”

“It’s kind of like bringing back the extended family that America was built on,” says Lopez’s wife, Pam, 47, the principal of McKibben Elementary School in South Whittier.

Lopez traces his American roots to 1598, when a Spanish soldier named Don Pedro Gomez Duran y Chavez came to what is now New Mexico with explorer and colonizer Don Juan de Onate, who founded the city of Santa Fe. To put that into historical perspective, there were Chavezes in the United States more than two decades before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Descendants of Don Pedro went on to amass both wealth and fame as landowners and government officials throughout New Mexico. They also set to work producing more Chavezes. Lopez’s grandmother, for example, gave birth 20 times between 1895 and 1921.

It is because the family has been in the United States so long, and because of its startling multiplication powers, that Lopez estimates his distant cousins--the living descendants of Don Pedro--constitute one of the largest--perhaps even the largest--family in America.

For reunion purposes, Lopez concentrates on the direct descendants of his grandmother, Adelaida Lopez, who married a man named Jose Severo Chavez. (Both his grandmother and grandfather were descendants of Don Pedro Chavez, Lopez says; he admits it all gets a little confusing.)

Of grandmother Adelaida Chavez Lopez’s 20 births, 11 children lived to adulthood. The family moved from New Mexico to Los Angeles in 1925, where Art Lopez’s mother, Esther, married her cousin, Ray Lopez. Art Lopez, her son, grew up in South Gate, but the rest of the Lopez-Chavez family moved to Gilroy.

Small family reunions were held periodically in Gilroy over the years by the descendants of Esther Chavez Lopez--she had 36 grandchildren. But in an increasingly mobile--some might say rootless--country, the family began to disperse, mostly throughout California.

Then 20 years ago, Art Lopez and his mother and uncle, Ted Chavez, decided to try to bring the far-flung family together again.

“My grandmother had died in 1948, and after that it seemed like the family wasn’t keeping together the way it had before,” Lopez explains. He didn’t want to see that happen.

So Lopez spent months researching Chavez family history and driving through California talking to family members. He chose Santa Maria as the permanent reunion location because it is a geographical midpoint for the various California members of the Chavez clan.

The first Chavez family reunion brought about a hundred relatives together. This year about 200 are expected for three days of eating, singing, telling stories and meeting new family members--including Art Lopez’s new grandson.

Lopez hopes that the five-year reunion tradition will continue even after he and the other adult members of the family are gone.

“It’s a lot of work putting it together,” Lopez says. “But it’s worth it. To me, family values means having something to belong to. It doesn’t matter what kind of family it is, single-parent family or whatever. It’s the sense of belonging to something that’s important.”