SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez, a San Diego music institution who gave voice to the barrio, has died, his family said Saturday.
Sanchez ed away on Friday, his eldest daughter Ixcatli Sanchez announced on Facebook. He would have been 65 on Sunday.
“Que Viva El Chunky y que Viva La Causa,” she wrote. She asked for privacy for the family while they make funeral arrangements.
Recognizable with his iconic handlebar mustache and guitar often in hand, Sanchez was an activist, artist, musician and educator.
He was among the many founders of Chicano Park in Barrio Logan and became one of its strongest protectors. Los Alacranes, the band he founded with his younger brother Ricardo, has been a fixture in San Diego’s Chicano social and political community since 1975. It has played countless festivals, fundraisers, rallies, school assemblies, weddings, baptisms and youth-intervention programs.
“I think he was one of those transcendental figures,” said longtime friend Steve Kader, a music talent buyer who has booked Sanchez for local music festivals such as the Adams Avenue Street Festival. “He really spoke for a lot of different people, always spoke from the heart and the soul.”
Farm labor leader Cesar Chavez loved his music so much that he invited Sanchez often to play at United Farm Workers union rallies to inspire and excite the crowd — first with the band La Rondalla Amerindia and later with Los Alacranes, or The Scorpions.
Favorites such as “Huelga en General” (“The Strike”) and the bilingual “El Picket Sign” sung at those rallies remained in the band’s repertoire long after.
Sanchez was born October 30, 1951, in Blythe to farm laborer parents. He and his brother learned to sing and play traditional music from their mother, a talented singer, and their uncles.
He spent much of his childhood in the fields.
“At that time,” Sanchez recalled in a 1998 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, “I thought I’d become the best tractor driver in the valley. I was refueling the tractor one morning and my dad and the boss were watching. And the boss said: ‘You know what, Ramon? Your son will make a good foreman on this ranch when you are gone.’
“I heard that, and I thought: ‘This guy has plans for me already. I better start making my own plans!’ It was then that I decided to go to college. And to this day, I haven’t been back to that ranch.”
Sanchez went to San Diego State University as a Mexican-American studies major. It was in college that the brothers played publicly for the first time.
His appetite for activism was kickstarted as a college student in 1970 when he ed hundreds of barrio residents in a march toward a small plot of land under the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Politicians were planning to put a California Highway Patrol office there, and the residents wanted it for something different.
“I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but when we got there I was part of the Chicano Park takeover,” Sanchez ed in a previous interview. “I grabbed a pick and shovel — I was very familiar with those tools! — and started turning the dirt. I knew they were going to plant something.”
The park celebrates Chicano heritage and is known worldwide for its colorful murals of icons such as Ché Guevara, Cesar Chavez, Frida Kahlo — and later, Sanchez himself. He has served as a leader preserving the park’s history.
Reaching out to troubled youth was another of Sanchez’s ongoing projects.
In the 1980s, Sanchez directed the city’s Street Youth Program, which used street-wise counselors to steer kids away from gangs and crime. But the program was axed by the city, which claimed the effort was not effective. Sanchez said at the time that the program was a scapegoat for the city’s rising gang numbers.
He was later the education coordinator for Critical Hours, the after-school program at Barrio Station Youth Center in Logan Heights.
In 2013, Sanchez was one of nine recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowships, the country’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts. He is among the few Chicano artists to earn the recognition in the fellowships’ history.
Los Alacranes’ devotion to Mexican folk music traditions and to social activism provided a key early inspiration for Grammy Award-winning Los Angeles band Los Lobos in its early days. The two bands often shared stages together in the 1970s, and Los Lobos would give shout-outs from the stage at its performances here to Los Alacranes, including just last month when Los Lobos headlined the annual San Diego Blues Festival. In 2013, Los Alacranes and Los Lobos David Hidalgo and Louis Perez performed together at that year’s Adams Avenue Unplugged festival.
“One of the greatest things about Los Alacranes is they never lost sight of their beliefs, their culture, their family, the whole cause of Chicano people and the struggle of what was once a Chicano movement,” Los Lobos guitarist-singer Cesar Rosas said in a 1998 U-T interview. “I give them a lot of credit.”
In the song “Rising Souls,” the band pushes for investing in youth and community: “We’ve gotta educate, not incarcerate/ The souls of humanity will shine/ Vamos, mis amigos, let’s try some brotherhood/ No need to kill another over a neighborhood.”
Even though his music was heavy with social causes, Sanchez liked to lighten things up with humor.
“We find if you can make somebody laugh, they’ll listen to you. And laughing is also good therapy to release things, like tension or ailments,” Sanchez told the U-T.
That good humor is what resonates most with longtime friend Kader.
“He always brought happiness and joy to what he did and to other people,” Kader said. “He was not in the best health, but he always put that forth. That will live on in a lot of us.”
Condolences poured in Saturday, from friends, noted artists, community leaders and citizens who encountered Sanchez over the decades.
“Chunky was an inspiration to so many people including my students,” said vocalist and SDSU instructor Coral MacFarland Thuet. “Semester after semester Chunky would visit my class and inspire them through his music and storytelling. He was very humble and had a very big heart. He was the heart and soul of the Chicano community. “
State Assembly Speaker Emeritus Toni Atkins wrote on Twitter: “His music & words will live on for generations. Godspeed.”
“A true treasure for our community,” state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez tweeted. “May his soul Rest in Peace.”
He is survived by his wife, Isabel, five children and many grandchildren. He is predeceased by a son.
Staff writer George Varga contributed to this story.
Twitter: @kristinadavis
