A heart attack and subsequent surgery are preventing the Mexican-American version of Santa known to generations of Texas children as Pancho Claus from suiting up this Christmas.
Yet members of Richard Reyes’s community have taken it upon themselves to organize toy drives – and even don his iconic look – to keep his spirit alive for his scores of believers.
Wearing his signature red zoot suit and black fedora, the 73-year-old Reyes has been delivering Christmas presents to low-income children in and around Houston for more than four decades. But the man behind the persona whose last name is pronounced “Clos” has endured more than his fair share of difficulties throughout 2024.
As Houston’s KHOU tells it, Hurricane Beryl flooded his home in July. And then he had a heart attack in November, requiring him to undergo a double bypass surgery.
Reyes’s recovery from the operation is expected to take several weeks, and he spoke to KHOU as well as other outlets about how he feared he would miss his goals of distributing 20,000 toys to children across Houston and Texas’s Rio Grande valley.
“You realize you’re not Santa Claus and you’re not immortal,” Reyes said to KHOU. “So you have to snap back into the reality.”
Reyes was apologetic on Sunday on Facebook for having to take a step back.
“Very sorry,” read a post attributed to Pancho Claus. Describing “three little tubes going inside my neck, one pace maker … inside my left chest and of course the chest scar”, the post added: “I was in a lot of pain.”
A post Tuesday “another surgery”.
Fortunately for Reyes, his lamentation made its way back to a crew of little helpers, so to speak.
Organizers staged two separate events on the weekend after Thanksgiving meant to collect donations for those on Pancho Claus’s list.
At one of them, a pastor named Mike Gomez put on a zoot suit like Reyes’s, adopted the moniker Paz – or Peace – Claus and took photos with children as volunteers collected donated toys.
“Man, the shoes are too big to fill,” Gomez said to KHOU. But Gomez said he did his best to lighten some of Reyes’s worry because he wanted Pancho Claus to prioritize his health.
“Rest, take it easy,” Gomez said about his message to Reyes. “Because [your] legacy has been built, and other people have stepped up.”
At the other event aiding Pancho Claus, Carrie Rosas said collecting toys on Reyes’s behalf was no sacrifice to her because “he’s set the standard on how important it is to give back to those kids who need it”.
“Pancho Claus … would come to my school when I was in elementary school,” Rosas said.
Historians say the concept of Pancho Claus originated during the Chicano civil rights movement, according to the Associated Press. The Mexican-American studies scholar Lorenzo Cano of the University of Houston told the AP that Chicanos north of the border appear to have conceived of him as they sought to “build a place and a space for themselves” in the 1970s.
Back then, the AP noted, there was also an uptick in interest in Mexican art, Cinco de Mayo celebrations of a famous military victory over France on 5 May 1862, and Mexico’s Independence Day, commemorated annually on 16 September.
Pancho Claus typically has black hair and a matching beard or mustache. Sometimes he wears a serape, a poncho or – as Reyes preferred – a red zoot suit in the style that came to be associated with the Chicano movement.
As he once recounted to the AP, Reyes was called to be Pancho Claus in the 1980s as a result of his Hispanic heritage and his desire to work with at-risk, low-income children after his teenage sister was killed in a drive-by shooting.
It all began with his writing a theater play serving as the Mexican-American version of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and eventually morphed into the gift distribution that has been a staple of the holiday season in his part of the US.
Reyes nonetheless has always been conscious about how something like Pancho Claus goes beyond any individual. And he said as much as internet users spread word of a GoFundMe campaign aimed at keeping his gift-giving mission alive – which, as of Wednesday, had raised more than $11,000 for the cause.
“It takes hundreds of people – one monkey don’t stop no show,” Reyes said to KHOU. “I want my community to know they are Pancho Claus, and I need them.”
