Ties That Bind a Family : Reunions are a time for rekindling shared interests and values. Each type fills a psychological need, according to an expert.

Heads bowed, eyes shut, they solemnly clasp hands while the family patriarch, 75-year-old Antonio Hernandez, says grace in Spanish.

He thanks God for reuniting these three dozen or so Hernandezes around five picnic tables, beneath sprawling pepper trees that spell relief from the midday heat.

He prays for others who cannot join the crowd that will, by day’s end, swell to 127--spanning three generations--at this third annual Hernandez family reunion on a recent Saturday at Veterans Memorial County Park in Sylmar.

Then, Antonio Hernandez of San Fernando--who long ago migrated here from near Guadalajara in his native Mexico, scratching out a 25-cents-an-hour living by picking strawberries, dates, tomatoes, corn and other crops--expresses gratitude for this country ( “Gracias a los Estados Unidos” ).

And he and his wife, Victoria, 71, bless the homemade Mexican food: ceviche (fish, tomatoes, pure lemon, onions), nopales (cactus salad), jaiba (crab, tomatoes, carrots, onions), pollo asado (barbecue chicken) and carne asada (barbecue beef).

Finally, when all prayers end, Antonio and Victoria Hernandez’s eldest of eight children, Tony, 42, shouts--in English--the day’s battle cry:

“Let’s party!”

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Long before “family values” became cool, reunions--large and small--enabled families to discover and rediscover themselves, to rekindle shared interests and values, to connect dots that lay scattered across borders, continents and oceans.

This Hernandez family now stretches mainly from Tijuana, just south of the Mexican border, northward to San Jose, but most have settled in the Los Angeles area.

All day long, they come to this reunion--from San Fernando and North Hollywood, from Canoga Park and Compton, from Pacoima and Fillmore--an interminable parade of hugs and holas (hellos), of children spilling out of cars, of strangers introducing themselves.

They’re among more than 7 million, according to one estimate, who are expected to reunite this summer across America to toast birthdays or wedding anniversaries, swap reminiscences or simply share each other’s company, their reunions serving as catalysts to family bonding.

A Northern California reunion expert, Tom Ninkovich (co-author of “Family Reunion Handbook”), estimates that 200,000 family reunions occur each year nationwide--from barbecues at Grandma’s house to parties at resort hotels or aboard cruise ships. And that’s not counting 150,000 school reunions or 6,000 military reunions, whose popularity grows as the 50th anniversary of World War II’s end approaches in 1995.

Each type of reunion, he says, fills a psychological need, the family reunion weaving threads of continuity.

“For centuries, people stayed in one location--from birth to death--because everything they needed was in their own small community,” says Ninkovich, who resides near Sequoia National Park. “Now, with families so spread out, we all need to learn where we came from.”

Fittingly, his book is dedicated to the late Alex Haley, author of the best-selling book “Roots,” with an inscription: “who showed us why.”

It’s unclear, Ninkovich says, if reunions are proliferating or simply more visible. President Clinton put reunions on center stage in May when he invited his Georgetown University class of 1968 to the White House. And countless small businesses specialize in organizing school reunions and helping classmates find each other.

There’s also a national quarterly magazine, Reunions, published in Milwaukee; a Riverside firm, Reunion Specialties Co., that markets 100 items tailored to reunions (T-shirts, hats, tote bags, pennants, banners, steins, table decorations and bumper stickers: “Honk If You’re a Cantwell”), and a Family Reunion Institute at Temple University in Philadelphia, which conducts seminars on reunion planning.

The Hernandez family reunion originated after one of Antonio and Victoria Hernandez’s sons, Gabriel 30, a San Fernando church youth coordinator, sat down with a cousin, Leticia, and talked “about how we really didn’t know our family,” Gabriel says. “We agreed that we needed some kind of family support system--to help us know who we are as a family.”

Together, six reunion planners--one each from the families of Antonio Hernandez and his five siblings--met six months in advance, once a month at first, then every other week.

For some Hernandezes, Gabriel concedes, a reunion was a tough sell. “They said, ‘Why do we need a reunion? We always get together anyway,’ ” he recalls.

The committee agreed that the food would be potluck and that individual families would divvy up costs--one providing soft drinks, another the T-shirts, another the children’s entertainment by a clown, and so on.

“Someone wanted to hire a mariachi band,” Gabriel recalls, “but that was ruled out. We had to decide: Do we want to be entertained, or shouldn’t we really be entertaining ourselves?”

Today, the event is such a fixture that not even the death of one of Antonio Hernandez’s brothers--on the day before the 1992 reunion--could keep many Hernandezes from gathering quietly for a picnic, then rescheduling the reunion two months hence.

“It seems that most families see each other only at weddings or funerals,” says Luis Hernandez, 37, one of Gabriel’s older brothers and a philosophy and theology professor who drove from Tijuana with his wife, Miriam, 26, and their son, Jeremy, 3.

“Why does it have to be that way?” he asks. “Why can’t families make every effort to get together at least once a year?”

Gabriel himself good-humoredly notes that reunions bring together many Hernandezes who would otherwise be total strangers. If one accidentally bumped him with a car in a parking lot, Gabriel says, “I might not know that the guy I’m cussing out is my own relative!”

Thanks to Gabriel and others, this reunion is meticulously organized, with virtually everyone clad in jade T-shirts inscribed: “FAMILIA HERNANDEZ--REUNION 1993.”

As up-tempo Latin music blares from a tape player (“Quebraditas” by Super Bandido and “Sangolotiadito” by John Sebastian, among others), the park throbs with volleyball and soccer games, water-balloon tossing, pass-the-hat contests and entertainment by “Titino,” a Spanish-speaking clown who paints youngsters’ laughing faces. His appearance was supposed to be a secret, but the Hernandez children’s crack intelligence network sniffed it out hours before.

Hardly anyone notices that the paterfamilias , Antonio Hernandez, walks with a cane and sits pressing an ice bag onto his arthritic left knee, which, a son recalls, once crippled him so badly that “he had to use his hands to walk.”

Nor does it matter that some youngsters are too young to enjoy the fun. After all, Jessica Hernandez of North Hollywood had been born only one month before--and another Hernandez granddaughter was too busy elsewhere to attend. Born that very day, she was getting better acquainted with her mother at the hospital.

What matters, some Hernandezes say, is that this reunion helps reinforce their commitment to family, sensitizing them to their own place in an American culture of increasingly broken homes and fragmentation.

A few now also share the pain of dislocation.

Salvador Hernandez, 39, of Compton became a casualty of aerospace layoffs. Now, with a wife and three small sons, he plans to change careers, taking classes in computer science and machine shop.

Raul Hernandez, 37, of San Fernando lost his job when the General Motors plant in Van Nuys shut down. He now works on a GM assembly line near Baltimore. His wife, Irma, 32, and their son, Louie, 11, and daughter, Casey, 6, soon will put their house up for lease and move across the country.

“Believe me, it’s going to be very, very difficult to move--to leave this whole family, to start over,” Irma Hernandez says.

She sighs, adding, “You do what you have to do to survive.”

Indeed, packing up and moving on is part of the Hernandez heritage. And even for some who don’t uproot, they struggle to cling to their roots--and to each other.

Salvador Hernandez says some Latino families now fall victim to what he calls “a very egocentric society in this country. Everybody just cares for himself. It’s like a cancer that spreads . . We start adopting this culture as our own, and soon we start losing our roots.”

A young mother--Lorena Hernandez, 27, of Mission Hills--worries that migration to America threatens family stability.

“It can be too easy to become so involved in a profession that we neglect our families,” she says, hoisting Hillary, her 2 1/2-month-old daughter. “It’s very important to be a success in life, but it’s also more important to be a success as families. So, getting together once a year is not too much to ask.”

Salvador Hernandez grins, joking that the family owes its togetherness in part to Latino machismo. “We don’t let the women talk,” he says.

Well, not on this day.

Two Hernandez wives excitedly announce that they and other women had just won a soccer game by a score of 5-4, defeating a team composed exclusively of men.

What they don’t say is that one of Antonio and Victoria Hernandez’s sons, Cruz, 32, jumped into the fray to help them win--and that Cruz is a world-class soccer player.

“OK, so I broke tradition--I helped the underdogs,” Cruz says, mopping his brow. “Hey, that’s the story of our whole lives. We came to America as underdogs. We really have nothing to lose in life. If we lose, we just pick up and go on. If we win, we’re heroes.”

The story of this Hernandez family is also a story of California, of America.

It begins in the 1940s, when 25-year-old Antonio Hernandez returns from working all day in the fields of the Mexican state of Jalisco.

There, on a ranch, a few strangers provide musical entertainment. One strums a guitar. Another is a woman of 21, named Victoria, who sings “Dos Arbolitos,” a romantic ballad whose title means “two little trees.”

“If you knew the song, you can appreciate exactly how we met,” Antonio says in Spanish through son Cruz, who serves as interpreter. “The branches of both trees blow in the wind. And as both trees grow, they caress each other.”

Their love-at-first-sight courtship would be interrupted by Antonio’s long, repeated tours of duty in the vegetable fields and citrus groves of Southern California, where they would settle in 1965.

During their marriage of 43 years, they’ve reared six sons and two daughters--and now share the joys of 18 grandchildren, who are traditionally introduced at each reunion.

Now, Antonio and Victoria Hernandez happily look forward to a new chapter.

They plan to be sworn in as citizens of the United States, the country that Antonio had blessed in his prayer that began this day.

Their journey together speaks volumes about their unshakable faith in family, just as Victoria’s parting words to a visitor on this day remind us of what reunions are about.

As she speaks, the twinkle in her eye is as bright as it must have been in Antonio’s on that day a half-century ago, down Mexico way, when he heard her sing “Dos Arbolitos.”

“Love you never buy,” she says now. “You always give it away.”