Mourning a life amid a legacy

The grieving mother of Adan Sanchez, the Mexican American singing star killed in a car crash last month at age 19, still gets tense when she recalls being trapped inside a Norwalk church by a mob of frenzied fans rushing in at the end of a tumultuous memorial service for her son.

Desperate, she tried to make her way out, clawing past the screaming stream of mourners who mistakenly thought their teen idol’s body was still inside.

Maricela Sanchez, however, knew the coffin carrying her only boy was already outside being loaded into a hearse. She suffered bruises as she pushed against the hysterical tide of kids. All she wanted was to watch Adan leave, just as she had done after so many of his concerts over the years.

This time, she didn’t make it. The church doors slammed shut. Her son, who died March 27 in Mexico, was gone.

“I wanted to get out, but the people pushed me back in,” the mourning mother said this week. “At all of his events, I would just watch to make sure he left in his pickup truck, and then I’d feel at ease. It was something similar for me at the church. I just wanted to see him leave safely.”

Ten days after the memorial service, Maricela Sanchez agreed to sit down for an interview to reflect on the life and legacy of her son, whom she remembered as devoted, determined and destined to his stardom and star-crossed fate.

Sanchez’s mother declined to allow photographs for this story, worried that grief had made her look worn and weary. She chose to meet for a late dinner at a Denny’s restaurant in Paramount, close to the modest home where her son was raised.

Far from looking battered, however, the 45-year-old widow -- whose famous husband, corrido singer-songwriter Chalino Sanchez, was slain a dozen years ago -- appeared strong and self-confident. The only sign of stress was in her eyes, swollen from crying.

She said people were surprised to see her so composed (albeit heavily sedated) at the services.

“They expected to see a mother falling apart, full of tears,” she said. “But I was outside, consoling the girls, who had no idea it was me. As a family, we’ve always carried ourselves that way. We endured hunger, cold and humiliations, but we always were strong in front of people. Until the very end we were like that, calm and strong.”

With more resolve than anger, Sanchez says that she is determined to prevent the exploitation of her son’s death by unauthorized merchants, such as those peddling photos and T-shirts of him outside St. John of God Catholic Church, where the chaotic service took place.

Her son hadn’t even been buried, she said, “and people are already profiting from his name. They don’t care if his picture comes out with his eyes green or yellow, because they know the little girls loved him so much they’ll buy anything with his image on it.”

The family has hired an attorney to trademark her son’s name and likeness.

There are now plans for an Adan Sanchez foundation for musical education (one rule: no drinking or drugs) and an Internet store for authorized merchandise.

Sanchez is aware that critics might accuse her of commercially exploiting her son’s death, as some accused the father of Selena, the Texas-born singer whose murder in 1995 triggered a commercial avalanche of CDs, posters, videos and even a full-length movie. But she defends her right to protect future profits from her son’s legacy.

“If he struggled his whole life to provide for his family, and even died doing it, I don’t think it would be fair to let others profit from his work now that he’s gone and leave the family out,” she said, in her articulate Spanish. “That’s what we allowed to happen with Chalino.

“With my husband, everybody won, everybody profited -- except us. People jumped and danced all over us, all in Chalino’s name. We never protected ourselves legally, so people just did whatever they wanted, and the ones who least benefited were us.

“I don’t think Adan would want the same thing to happen in his case.”

Sanchez describes Adan as a very normal little kid who played touch football on the street with his cousins, fought with his little sister and didn’t like to study. But he was also an unusually determined young man whose career aspirations became galvanized by the trauma of his father’s death when he was 8.

Adan always had a clear vision of where he was headed, she says. He resisted a trend toward crude language and vulgarity in his sub-genre of Mexican music, sticking stubbornly instead to his smooth romantic style until he hit it big, primarily with teenage girls.

“He was one of those people who took a little step forward, but a solid one,” recalled his mother. “Then another little step, but solid. He didn’t ascend all at once only to burn out. He arrived little by little, almost without people noticing.”

On the short cul-de-sac where he lived, it was impossible not to notice the outpouring of sympathy for Sanchez, who would have turned 20 Wednesday. Mourners, who had turned the Sanchez home into a shrine, continued this week to pay homage to their fallen star, bringing balloons, flowers and votive candles for his birthday. A steady stream of girls, some weeping, others praying, stopped on the sidewalk outside the white wrought-iron fence around the front yard. One girl even took a snapshot of a tattoo of Adan with a cowboy hat, emblazoned on the thick arm of one of the singer’s cousins, Omar Gonzalez, 24.

His mother vowed she would never leave this house, acquired when her late husband’s music career started bringing in extra money.

Several times during the interview, she used the word “normal” to describe her extraordinary family. They were normal immigrants with normal jobs, a normal house and normal aspirations.

She was born in Mexicali and got a job in a Gardena clothing factory. Chalino (whose real name was Rosalino) was from Sinaloa and worked selling cars and whatever else he could do to scratch out a living. A “normal and ordinary couple,” she recalls.

They married in 1983. The following year they had their first child, a boy christened Adan Santos Sanchez Vallejo.

Adan was 4 when his father started singing professionally. Chalino always liked to sing and write corridos, Mexican-style ballads that traditionally recounted tales of revolutionary heroes and folk figures. Soon he started writing them on demand, often for drug dealers who wanted their exploits documented in songs.

Eventually, Chalino Sanchez became a king of the so-called narco-corrido. Some say his link to traffickers somehow led to his execution-style murder following a show in Sinaloa, but the killing is still a mystery.

Chalino and his boy went everywhere together, to nightclubs and TV shows and festivals, wherever the elder Sanchez performed. That happy period lasted four years. When his father died, Adan took it hard.

“His personality definitely changed, very drastically,” his mother recalls. “They took his father away, and he couldn’t understand why. He needed a lot of therapy and a lot of attention.”

His father had often told him that in his absence Adan would be the man of the house. And he took the responsibility seriously. With no life insurance or Social Security left by her husband, his widow says, the family has survived on the earnings of her son since he was 9.

“Adan would go to work [as a child singer], and he didn’t even know how much he was being paid,” says his mother, who served as the boy’s manager until he turned 16. “But he knew we were surviving on his earnings, and he was very proud of that.”

As a boy, Adan always willingly did what his mother said, says longtime family friend Martha Maravilla. Even to the end, when he had a separate manager and a big-label contract with Univision Music Group, his mother had the last word in his career choices.

“We always had a very good, very beautiful communication,” she says. “We were always together, always struggling together. He felt if he ever did anything wrong, it was wounding me. So I never saw him drunk, never saw him smoke. He never failed to come home to sleep, and he always checked in. I felt like he never let me down. Never.”

He didn’t like the direction Mexican country music was taking, with its violent themes and crude language. Neither did he want to be accused of copying his father, as so many second-generation singers have tried to do.

Adan developed his own style, suave and debonair. But despite several CD releases, his career floundered until a few years ago, when he matured into a strapping, stylishly dressed teenager and girls took notice.

Recently, frenzied crowds were common at his concerts. Fans jammed local clubs and police had to close nearby streets. Even the star had trouble getting into his own events.

“The sheriffs would stop his car and wouldn’t let him pass, because they had no idea who he was,” his mother says. “Imagine that! The nightclub had to send staff to get him through.”

As for conspiracy theories that suggest foul play because the son coincidentally died in the same state where his father was murdered, his mother remains cool and reasoned.

“Adan’s destiny has shocked all of us so much that we don’t know what to think,” she says. “Suddenly, we feel a little bit angry at life and we want to find something or someone to blame.

“But I don’t think that way. I just know that there must be a God, and there’s a fixed destiny that each of us must face. So I would like to think that he left because God needed him, or because that was simply his fate.”