Reyes's Pancho Claus debuted in a play of his own composition at Talento Bilingüe, the East End arts venue Reyes directed for decades. In the play, since there are so few chimneys in this subtropical clime, Pancho Claus delivered toys by sneaking in through the windows of homes in Houston's barrios. And since Reyes's play featured lines like "When what to my wondering eye should appear, but eight lowrider cars all jacked down in the rear!" it seemed a natural for him and Villarreal to team up on Christmas Day.
In 1991, over lunch at Spanish Flowers, around the corner from where both Reyes and Villarreal grew up, the two men agreed to do just that. Starting in 1992, Pancho Claus would stand in the back of Villarreal's pickup lowriders from Latin Fantasy (eight, because that was the number of Santa's reindeer) on the toy run. Precinct 6 Constable Trevino provided volunteer constables to escort the caravans. The elves and reindeer had their Santa Claus, at least for the next 16 years.
MECA in Old Sixth Ward is one of the places where Reyes mentors youths, and a young man appears by his side seemingly from nowhere as Reyes walks up the stairs clutching a sack of barbecue and fixings from Dickey's, a strip-mall joint near the Heights Target. After we walk in the converted 1912 school that houses MECA and pass a dozen or so Day of the Dead altars on our way downstairs, Reyes has an appointment with some of "his kids."
The veteran of decades of grassroots activism and work with at-risk Hispanic youths stops in the hall and talks about some of the boys. One is the teenage father of a premature baby who was small enough to hold in the palm of your hand when the child was born, and now is thriving, as is his father. Another, "a Puerto Rican-looking kid," punches himself in the face in self-directed rage deriving from his reading disability. A third is a hip-hop dancer in a world-famous Houston troupe. All came from at-risk backgrounds, and Reyes helped them all.
In a downstairs room, the three young men are preparing Pancho Claus gift receptacles for the upcoming holiday season. Reyes instructs them on the best way to fold some of his posters, on which he is prominently displayed in character. While the boys work, Reyes fields a couple of phone calls and offers the young men barbecue and soft drinks.
"Now, y'all be honest," he addresses the room. "Have any of you heard of any trouble between me and Shorty Villarreal from Latin Fantasy car club?"
Two of the boys shake their heads, but the hip-hop dancer, a tall kid who looks taller thanks to the fact that his dreadlocked tresses are tied in a knot atop his head, does know the story.
"Yeah, I heard y'all had a beef because you wanted to drive your taxi on his toy drive," he says.
Reyes looks a little nonplussed.
"Well, yeah, that is the story," he says. "I guess you heard that one when you were driving in the parade?"
The kid nods, and Villarreal and I adjourn upstairs to MECA's library. On the way there, he tells me that he was abruptly fired in 2003 from his job as director of Talento Bilingüe, where he had staged plays and concerts and many other events, most starring barrio youths. Over the next hour or so, he would return again and again to the subject; it appears to be the one great disappointment in his life. "After 22 years, they just told me my services were no longer needed," he says, still stinging, visibly and audibly. One old associate says that some within the organization believed that Reyes had gotten too autocratic. "They got tired of it being 'The Richard Show' over there," the man says. In the Fall 2011 issue of Houston History magazine, Reyes wrote a history of TBH. In his telling, TBH no longer had a youth-oriented mission, and so his services were no longer required.
In any event, the dismissal from TBH led him eventually to the position with Taxis Fiesta and so brought an end to his involvement with Latin Fantasy's toy drive, Reyes says. Villarreal says the two men argued when Reyes announced his plan to front the drive in the Taxis Fiesta car, and then, according to Villarreal, Reyes uttered a shocking statement.
"He was telling me how much money he gets from Taxis Fiesta, and I said, 'That ain't got nothin' to do with us,'" Villarreal says. "And then he said, 'I'm doing this as a business. I've got bigger fish to fry before I do these kids.' That was the last straw. We're not doing this for ourselves. We're doing it for the kids."
