Poignant Goodby to a ‘Very Special Lady’ : Funeral: 250 mourners accompany Evelyne Marie Lobo Villegas’ casket in a traditional Juaneno procession.

Amid the clanging of the old mission bells Wednesday, more than 250 mourners accompanied the casket of Evelyne Marie Lobo Villegas--a Juaneno who was crowned the city’s matriarch--during a funeral procession to the Old Mission Cemetery.

In a poignant service rich with tradition, Msgr. Paul Martin eulogized the beloved Villegas, who died last Friday at age 69, as a “very, very special lady.”

“Our neighborhood, Little Hollywood, lost another legend,” said pallbearer Dennis Sommer, 49. “In fact, San Juan lost another legend.”

Sommer joined five others selected as pallbearers for the symbolic procession. All grew up in Little Hollywood, one of the city’s oldest sections, and shared kind remembrances.

“I walked over to her house the other day and it wasn’t the same,” said pallbearer Joseph Lopez, 35. “She wasn’t at the kitchen window. She was always at the kitchen window, checking to see who was coming. If she wasn’t at that window, you weren’t at the right house.”

The descendant of a family that lived here before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1769, Villegas was one of eight children born to John Edward and Esperanza Lobo. Her brother was Clarence Lobo, chief of the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians who died in 1985.

The half-mile procession on foot to the cemetery Wednesday follows a tradition for descendants of Juanenos, Native Americans who helped build the Mission San Juan Capistrano for Spanish missionaries.

“What I see here is tradition,” said David Belardes, Juaneno Band chairman. “It’s something we’ve done for more than 200 years. Some 3,000 to 4,000 Juanenos were buried right here all around the east side of the mission. But in the 1860s, they started burying them east of town.”

Villegas, Belardes recalled, was a warm and spirited woman who retired after helping found the Head Start program, which provides meals, instruction and health services to poor children. She later became the first non-credentialed teacher in the Capistrano Unified School District, where she taught for 23 years.

Villegas told friends it was through her teaching that she learned to speak in public and stand up for what she believed.

In 1992, she said in a newspaper interview: “I am not afraid to talk. When you speak the truth, why should you be afraid?”

Though initially a reluctant candidate for the title of community matriarch, Villegas later took to her role and made the city’s children a priority as she explained the Juaneno heritage, Belardes said.

At the cemetery, Martin presided over a brief graveside ceremony that featured several Juaneno children. Accompanied by a drum, clapping sticks and rattles, the children sang Native American songs as a tribute to Villegas.

“The ceremony was wonderful,” said Villegas’ daughter, Valerie Villegas Cordes, 37. “She said she wanted the children to send her off and they did.”

Eddie Nunez, 11; Nathan Banda, 10, and Pearson Nunez, 7--all fifth-generation Juanenos--used the drum to mark a cadence symbolic of the heartbeat during the procession.

“She came to my school and talked about us being Indians,” said Nathan Banda, a fourth-grader at San Juan Elementary School. “She made me proud because she told class, ‘Nathan is my nephew.’ ”

According to Native American lore, although the body dies, her spirit lives on with the help of “Grandfather God.”

A recent photograph of Villegas displayed at the funeral depicts her carrying a white sage, which is used by Juanenos during spiritual cleansing.

On the side of the photograph were two hawk feathers, which served as spiritual helpers, and tiny abalone shells symbolizing the Juanenos’ coastal roots.

Villegas family members said they were saddened at her death, but glad that she had lived to see the state officially recognize the Juaneno Band, make an appearance in the city’s Swallows Day Parade, and also attend last October’s groundbreaking ceremony for the Clarence Lobo Elementary School, named after her brother, in San Clemente.

The Juanenos formally applied for federally recognized tribal status in 1982.

The procession to the cemetery Wednesday was mostly symbolic. Villegas, who had suffered a stroke, will be cremated and her ashes interred at a brief 11 a.m. ceremony today at the cemetery.