Fernandomania Forever 

“I feel like I lost an uncle or a cousin, a member of the family,” said Andres Rubalcava Rubio on the San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol Facebook page. 

While Los Angeles has lost an icon, for LA’s Latino community – the passing of “Fernando” is immeasurable. He has been so meaningful, so close and so loved that he’s always been mentioned by just his first name.

That same feeling is repeated over and over as people learn of his passing.

“My uncle called from Mexico, I hadn’t heard from him in two years,” said Miguel Angel Juvera. “He asked me if the news was true – that Fernando had died.” Juvera said his uncle told him, “All of us in Mexico are Dodger fans because of Fernando.”

“He was our working class hero,” said Minerva Garcia.

A makeshift memorial with candles and flowers is growing outside of Dodgers Stadium. 

Many turned to this newspaper’s online sites, as well as other sites, to share the pride and excitement Fernando brought onto their lives. 

“I remember watching him in the World Series 1988. We were a bunch of teeny boppers in front of the TV screaming his name,” wrote Senora de Perez. 

“You brought all our brown sisters & brothers, La Familia out to the ball games. You made Dodger Stadium hoop & holler the Mexican way!” said Liz Campos.

“My mom knew absolutely nothing about baseball, in fact, she could care less about sports in general. However, she LOVED Fernando Valenzuela,” Pete Navarro wrote. “Without exception, whenever the Dodgers were playing she’d ask if Fernando was playing, even if she knew he pitched the day before.”

Fernando did more than any public relations or marketing company ever could for the Dodgers.

With his talent, quiet strength and kind demeanor, he brought not only the Mexican American/Chicano community to the stadium but he brought the immigrant community who would all become lifetime Dodger fans proudly wearing jerseys and Los Doyers T-shirts.

Born in Etchohuaquila, Sonora, Mexico, Fernando was the youngest of 12 children. He made his Dodgers Major League debut at only 19 years old on Sept. 15, 1980, throwing 17.2 innings without allowing an earned run for the remainder of the season and becoming the first player in MLB history to win both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards in the same season. His influence and accomplishments continued, he never stopped, he contributed to baseball on both sides of the border. He worked in his final days as a Dodgers broadcaster.

He represented the “ganas,” the will to persevere on stolen land for many in the community who knew the unjust history of Chavez Ravine. Stepping onto Dodger Stadium was a mixture of emotions for many that he was able to partially ease.

“I don’t know if one individual can erase the pain experienced by the Chavez Ravine families. That experience with its complicated history will always be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the Dodger organization’s original sin. I think Fernando was able to bring together a city that over the decades has time and again been torn by division and strife,” said Ron Gonzales, a volunteer author of the Latino Baseball project. “Fernando on the mound, with that turn he took – toward the sky as he pitched, brought the city together as few others could,” he said.

Garcia said that even though she lived in Texas, the Dodgers became her team.

“If you were a Latino kid in the 1980s, but especially of Mexican or Mexican American descent, Fernando represented us. A brown chubby Mexican almost a kid himself who ‘showed not told’ or bragged about what he could do. I didn’t grow up in LA but I grew up in the southwest.” 

Garcia said she is grateful she could share “Fernandomania” with her immigrant father. 

“We could both root for Fernando and be close even if he didn’t understand his feminist U.S. born daughter. Thank you, Fernando, for giving me that gift.”

“I grew up in Echo Park right near Dodger Stadium which was Chavez Ravine and I am flooded with so many childhood memories at a time growing up when you felt shame for being Mexican and for me as a Salvadoran mistakenly called a Mexican,” said Leda Ramos. 

“Fernando appeared like a meteor. He was signed by the Dodgers in 1979, the year of the Sandinista Revolution victory, and started pitching in 1980, the start of the Salvadoran Civil War.

“We had our first Black Mayor Tom Bradley in 1980. LA was entering its ‘multiethnic, multicultural’ phase. My younger sister would sit with her transistor radio to hear the game with my dad and brother. While Valenzuela was not the first Latino baseball player, it was different. It was intimate, close to home,” Ramos described. “It was awesome to hear Vin Scully pronounce ‘Fernando Valenzuela.’”

“The ‘Fernandomania’ was insane. I was starting my first year at UCSB in the fall of 1979 when he started with the Dodgers and when I came back in the summer it was like LA finally had a popular hero in an apple pie institution – baseball – outside of the discourse of war, farmworker labor strikes, violation of human and civil rights, or police excessive force, that we Brown folks could be so proud of. We could be proud to be working-class immigrants and speak Spanish. We had Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Augusto Sandino, Farabundo Marti and we had Fernando Valenzuela.”

He changed more than just baseball.

“Fernando left his mark on journalism, too. News organizations dispatched their bilingual reporters to interview this phenomenal young man. At a time when journalism was awakening to the need for more diverse staff, Fernando was an agent of change,” said Gonzales.

“I wish you all could feel what we all felt when he took the mound on Opening Day in 1981,” said Tomas Benitez, development director of LA’s Plaza de la Raza.

“It was pride and joy measured in tears. Take a look around at the crowd at the stadium these days. He did that. He changed the game. He lifted his people. He was a hero.”