Mourners honor activist-- Memorial: Friends, family and city officials gather to remember community leader Beltran Navarro
<a href=www.sunspot.net>Baltimore Sun By Kimberly A.C. Wilson Sun Staff
June 4, 2003
Thirty-seven cars trailed Beltran Navarro's gray hearse through Baltimore yesterday, wending past settings of the dynamic community leader's professional triumphs and personal delights.
The processional rolled past the northern tip of Fells Point, where Navarro, a Charm City-raised Venezuelan, united members of disparate Latino communities and helped create a business district that reflects the diversity of the city's Hispanic population. It passed the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, a spot so central to Navarro's childhood in Baltimore that he settled in an apartment with an unobstructed view.
When the memorial ended, city officials, extended family and friends from around the world bid a reluctant farewell to a man Mayor Martin O'Malley eulogized as "a revolutionary spirit."
"He was never afraid to speak truth to power," O'Malley told a standing room-only crowd packed into the Kaczorowski Funeral Home in Dundalk.
Heads nodded. Loved ones willed back tears. And for an hour, in both English and Spanish, mourners from Honolulu, Boston, Korea and all over South and Central America remembered a man so consistently in motion and so inexplicably energized that few imagined a future without him.
"He was like a magnet that attracts small bits of iron," said Oscar Caceres, flanked by two rows of national flags that served as reminders of Navarro's travels and the scope of his relationships. "He attracted people to him, languages, races, nationalities, all that crowded around Beltran."
Navarro's death May 24 - he suffered a heart attack as he and Young-Mi Kim celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary in Paris - stunned the friends around the world who had come to expect his scathing e-mails, whimsical cards and forthright phone messages.
Born in Trinidad in 1945 and raised in Venezuela's capital, Caracas, until the age of 5, Beltran Navarro arrived in Baltimore with an aunt in time for grade school. Educated at universities in Caracas and at Indiana University, he held scores of titles during his 57 years.
Variety of posts
He served on Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski's committee to review applicants for armed services academies in Maryland. He taught diversity courses at the city's police academy. He lobbied support for a capital bond bill for city museums before last fall's election. He ran the small public relations firm of Navarro, Kim & Associates out of a Charles Street apartment house, steps from the flat that he shared with his wife.
Navarro wasn't a big-name newsmaker in Baltimore, but his death was front-page news for readers of El Tiempo Latino, the region's most widely distributed Spanish-language weekly.
When word of his death reached the paper's Arlington, Va., newsroom, discussion swiftly turned to the proper headline for the obituary.
"Someone wrote 'Baltimore loses a Latino leader,'" recalled Alberto Avendano, associate publisher and editor in chief. "I just erased 'Latino.' He was not just about Latinos. He was about justice for America."
Carmen Nieves, executive director of Centro de la Communidad in Baltimore, called Navarro a friend for 13 years.
"If he had a hobby, it would have been people. He was a people watcher and a people connector, and he would sit back and enjoy where the connections would go," she said.
His legacy, said his widow, includes the young people he mentored. More than a dozen of them attended the funeral, each with a Navarro story of guidance and inspiration. Natali Fani was one.
When Fani enrolled at Goucher College four years ago, she filled her schedule with pre-med courses and dreamed of a career in medicine. A chance encounter with Navarro at a Spanish heritage celebration set her dreams onto a different path: She graduated Friday with a double degree in political science and intercultural studies.
"He was an inspiration," she said yesterday, waiting for the funeral procession to form.
He took special pride in the fruits of his labor on Fani's behalf: Last month, she helped organize a legislative summit between local members of Congress and immigrant teens from Patterson High School to discuss state bills that would have permitted undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Maryland universities. The measure passed the General Assembly but died when Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. vetoed it three days before Navarro died.
Final wishes
"I basically did [for them] what he did for me," Fani said as she waited for the caravan to leave the funeral home. "That was what he wanted."
There was something more Navarro wanted.
"He used to say when he died he didn't want people to cry, he wanted them to party," said Reinita Riemann.
Riemann, a math instructor and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom the childless Navarro proudly considered "daughter," said her mentor was such a force that few had the nerve to tell him no.
So after he was buried at Oak Lawn Cemetery, about 80 people gathered at Tio Pepe, the Mount Vernon haunt where Navarro had dined prodigiously on paella marinara.
Waiters served one final meal in his memory, covering his favorite table with a dish of saffron rice and seafood, a bottle of Carchelo wine and flowers from the funeral home.
A band struck a high note.
"It was a really lively party with a nice orchestra," said owner Miguel Sanz, as the last revelers left. "The only one missing was Beltran."