San Juan Cemetery turns 100 next month
The old San Juan Cemetery on Moore Rd., just east of Veterans Blvd. (I Rd.), turns 100 next year and despite its age, it’s as beautiful as ever, with colorful flowers, plastic and fresh, in abundance no matter the direction you look. It’s almost as if every gravestone has some color added to it by loving family members.
No matter if a grave has a simple wooden cross standing straight up on hallowed ground, or a fancy marble headstone, almost every grave looks like it’s had color added to it.
There beside one of the gravestones is a guy now approximately in his mid-80s who refuses to give up manual labor and just go sit on a couch. Abelardo “Lalo” Arcaute, San Juan’s first Hispanic mayor (1971 to ’73, and ’75 to ‘77) and four-term Hidalgo County commissioner (1983 to 1999).
He’s been helping care for the cemetery ever since he retired from public life, and if Arcaute didn’t help out, the cemetery would be worse for the wear.
“It’s a fact,” says San Juan Cemetery Board Chairman Juan Maldonado, also a former SJ mayor, “our budget is always tight.”
Meaning, it’s hard to pay for equipment, gas, much less paid workers, which is why guys like Arcaute are so important — he’s a volunteer.
“Not only that,” says Maldonado, “but the state keeps changing the regulations for cemeteries, what we can do, what we can’t do. There are things that the state could do, such as change the way the cremation burials are structured, but it’s hard getting anything changed.”
Maldonado is in his mid-70s by now, but admits that he can’t believe Arcaute, approximately 10 years older, keeps up with the cemetery maintenance like he does.
“I’ll show up one day, and he’ll be up on this ladder ... and I’m thinking, he never slows down. I tell him, ‘Lalo, you need to take a break,’ but he ignores me.”
Arcaute admits that he likes to stay busy. Old school. Out in the hot sun, meeting people, handling complaints, and even sometimes some praise from those who have many family members buried here.
“There’s a lot of San Juan history here, that’s for sure,” says Arcaute. “A lot of family.”
Maldonado says he has a lot of history on file as it relates to the San Juan Cemetery, and once the new year begins, it might be a good time to bring out what he has and offer up a history about the old cemetery dating back to 1922 when an old farmer donated the land.
Then, it will be time to do another story on it and publish it in The Advance.
For his part, good old Lalo doesn’t have much fondness for reporters. He’s been burned a few times, mainly by a local TV station.
“One story they did made it sound like we were selling grave sites twice. Can you believe that? That got a lot of people upset, and the worst thing is, is that it wasn’t true, but they never included my comments explaining the real story behind it (a family disagreement), because I wouldn’t go on camera with the reporter. I know how they like to edit out things. So she got upset.”
Lalo has a special feel for the old cemetery. He surely knows most of the families buried here.
“That’s what got me so upset some years back. The county purchasing agent wanted to put pauper burials on a proposal basis for a two-year contract with a cemetery. I told her, you’re going to split up a husband and wife like that? They made plans long ago to be buried side by side, and now you’re just going to ship one spouse off to another cemetery where they won’t lie side by side as planned? The purchasing department finally backed off on that one.”
Guys like Maldonado, Lalo Arcaute and the rest of the cemetery board are still carrying the torch, so to speak, but there needs to be a younger generation coming up behind them, ready to take over future work at the cemetery, says Lalo.
“The thing is,” says Arcaute, “when we get a big rain, the grass can grow three inches tall before you know it. People want to complain that the grass is too high, I tell them, ‘The grass will get cut.’ What they need to see is how clean this cemetery is, how well it’s taken care of, considering that it’s almost a hundred years old.”