San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mario Aranda — immigrant rights advocate
“He was constantly engaged, constantly talking to other people. ... He’d go through volumes and volumes of books. His mind never retired.”
Throughout the 1980s and ’ 90s, Mario Aranda, an advocate for immigrant rights, was a vocal and visible presence in Chicago, appearing in local media and fighting political battles.
“It was advocacy all over the place,” is how Mario Aranda Jr., Aranda’s oldest son, described his father. “He saw need and jumped in.”
Aranda in those years was head of bilingual education for the state of Illinois. He served as executive director of the Latino Institute, a policy and advocacy organization. He worked on Harold Washington’s successful 1983 mayoral campaign, bringing out the Latino vote for Chicago’s first Black mayor. In 1993, he was named president and publisher of Exito!, a Spanishlanguage newspaper owned by the Chicago Tribune.
A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, Aranda was also a leader of his local church and the father of seven children. He was on the commuter train to work before dawn each day.
Then in the early 1990s Aranda underwent what his family and friends described as a distancing from that life. His marriage of nearly 30 years ended, and he came out as a gay man. He left his corporate job and activist roles in Chicago and around 1996 moved to California, where he built a new life in the Bay Area and eventually remarried.
“I remember him telling me, very clearly, he never wanted to wear a necktie again,” his daughter Xan Aranda said. “The last 10 years or so he came into his most beautiful incarnation. He had a lively laugh and a cleareyed, vibrant smile.”
Aranda died Aug. 26 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He was 79.
His daughter said the cause was COVID19. Mario Jaime Aranda was born on July 14, 1941, in Bella Vista, Chihuahua, Mexico, to Salomón Aranda and Angela ( Carrasco) Ivey. The family lived in a Mormon colony and immigrated to the United States in the 1950s when Salomón was hired at Brigham Young University to teach painting.
Mario Aranda enrolled at BYU, cleaning toilets to pay his tuition. He married a fellow student, Dana Rosado, in 1965, and the couple moved to Chicago a decade later when Aranda was hired by the Illinois Department of Education to institute bilingual classes in schools.
Greg Hinson, Mario Aranda’s husband
Early in his life, Aranda’s mother got him to read Gandhi and focus on peace, activism and literature. The discrimination that he and his family faced as Mormons in Mexico and then as Mexican immigrants in America further sharpened Aranda’s resolve to question power structures and give dignity and opportunity to marginalized people.
“It strengthened him to speak truth to power,” Mario Jr. said.
In addition to his son and daughter, Aranda is survived by his husband, Greg Hinson; daughters Xiomara Sanchez
and Ximen Christiansen; sons Julian, Jacob and Joseph Aranda; two stepchildren, Kai Hinson and Xena Hinson; three sisters, Gloria Lewis, Lili Davis and Teresa Aranda; and six grandchildren. Hinson met Aranda in 2000, when he was working as a clinical director at a women’s shelter in the East Bay. The person he came to marry was still committed to improving people’s lives and became devoted to his new family, and helped to raise Hinson’s children from a previous marriage. By then, Aranda had left the Mormon church and was on a kind of spiritual quest.
Finally able to slow down a bit in retirement, he was reading philosophy, swimming, hiking and meditating.
“He was constantly engaged, constantly talking to other people and seeking advice. He’d go through volumes and volumes of books,” Hinson said. “His mind never retired.”
Steven Kurutz is a New York Times writer.
“He’s done about every job in the church except the sisters’ jobs,” Cheryl Pettus said.
The full range of Pettus’ skills were called upon when he volunteered as a disaster relief worker. He outfitted his pickup truck with an arsenal of equipment, including extra gasoline for his chain saw, a generator to recharge his power tools and a tractor with a front end loader.
Several years ago, when a nearby area was hit by tornadoes, the Pettuses were on the road the next day, even though Pettus had recently suffered a heart attack. They arrived at a church member’s home that had been severed by a fallen tree.
Cheryl Pettus was concerned about her husband’s health, but she got lost for a moment in conversation with fellow church members. She looked up, and there was Pettus, on top of the tree with his chain saw, looking for the best place to make an incision.
“He loved it,” she said, “because he could use his knowledge, his skills and his equipment to bless the lives of people.”
By Alex Traub is a New York Times writer.
Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs and jailed. The charges were subsequently dropped. They’ve also served time in other states for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.
A report in a Dominican Sisters newsletter provided by Gilbert says Platte grew up in Westphalia, Mich., and in 1954 entered the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids at 18. She was a Dominican nun for 66 years. The newsletter calls Platte a “justice preacher, peace seeker, teacher, compassionate neighbor and friend who stood with people on the margins.”