Otoniel Azañon Alvarado
48, Petaluma
The car, everyone knew the car. One of Otoniel Azañon Alvarado’s great loves was his 1992 Toyota Corolla, with its slightly tattered seats and a greencolored exterior that had long lost its luster.
“My dad had enough money, he could have bought a new truck or whatever, but no, that was his car,” said his daughter Noemi Azañon. “He would get so excited in recent years, being like, ‘My car passed the smog check!’ ”
It’s fitting, though, that the father of four who worked tirelessly for most of his life had a fondness for the aging but reliable sedan that shuttled him to those jobs.
Born in 1971 and raised in Retalhuleu, Guatemala, Azañon Alvarado and 11 siblings worked on the family farm growing tomatoes, watermelons and corn. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
By the mid-1990s, he migrated to the U.S. as a young father in pursuit of providing a better life for his family. He ultimately settled in the Northern California city of Petaluma, with no legal paperwork, and found work fixing refrigerators and washing machines, and other manual labor jobs, before finding his calling as a craftsman of decks.
His burly hands, roughed and callused, were marked up with his handiwork, which spruced up backyards for residents throughout Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties over the 12 years that he worked at Deckmaster Fine Decks.
It was a skill he was passing on to two of his sons, Josue and Raymundo, mentoring them on the job and trying to instill his attention to detail.
“He took his work really seriously,” Noemi said. “He worked like hell through that darn heat. He made beautiful things. I kept telling him, ‘When I get my own house, I want you to build us a deck with gorgeous wood.’ He loved working with things created by nature.”
It had long been his dream to move to Alaska and build a house.
“He would always say: ‘I want to go on the snow, get a snowmobile’ or ‘I want to go fishing.’ I’d always just be like: ‘OK, dad.’ But he enjoyed the idea of going to see what the beauty of this world was because my dad couldn’t travel. I know that was something he wanted to do, yet he couldn’t.
“And so he dedicated himself to working and just deciding on how he was going to help us do those things.”
It was while working, on July 22, that Azañon Alvarado collapsed. He had been coughing and was experiencing shortness of breath. He went home, but later that afternoon, with the cough still raging, his son Josue, who lived with him, called for an ambulance despite his father’s pleas not to.
On Aug. 31, Azañon Alvarado died at Memorial Hospital after a six-week battle with COVID-19. He was 48.
Azañon Alvarado will be remembered for more than his dedication to the job. Known to his family and friends as “Muco,” he was the dad who would ring the doorbell incessantly to make his presence known; and if you didn’t answer your phone, he’d call up everyone to find out why. His favorite dishes were caldo de res and tamales. And anyone in the car with him while he was driving, likely heard “Ayúdame” by Mi Banda El Mexicano.
He is survived by his children, Noemi Azañon, Josue Azañon, Alexander Azañon and Raymundo Ayala; and a granddaughter, Aryana Delgado.