'Everyone has someone to cheer for': Inside Fernando Mendoza's Miami homecoming

MIAMI — On Saturday evening, exactly 48 hours before kickoff of the College Football Playoff National Championship Presented by AT&T (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN), an alley draped with strands of white lights and tucked into the hustling heart of Coconut Grove was packed with Mendozas. Granted, any location where Mendozas choose to gather, it always becomes packed. That’s how they roll. Deep.

Every five years they hold a family reunion, and the last one, in 2022, drew 850 kinfolks, an assemblage of such mass it landed them on the front page of the Miami Herald. They wore color-coded T-shirts, a dozen different hues signifying which of the 12 branches of the family tree was theirs. At that reunion, the official Mendoza head count of direct descendants was 2,836, backed by a genealogy flowchart so detailed that everyone on it receives a designated number that tells their story.

But this particular meeting of Mendozas, which after 30 minutes had already surpassed 100 attendees, featured only a few different shirts, and most were football jerseys. An impromptu rally of support for family member No. 314111. He of Group 3, aka the descendants of Don Claudio Gonzalez de Mendo and Dona Maria Teresa Feyre de Andrade and their firstborn, Fernando, aka No. 31, who begot No. 314 Fernando II and so on and so forth until landing on Fernando Gabriel Mendoza V, who himself will be donning a football jersey Monday night.

Around picnic tables between bars and boutiques, the Mendozas hugged, they nursed beers and laughed aloud. A few of the younger cousins tossed a red Indiana Hoosiers football. When one of them sprinted through a post route that ran a bit too deep, he nearly crashed into a family of four, all of them dressed in the orange and green of the University of Miami Hurricanes, the campus only three miles away. When the kid in the red No. 15 jersey dropped the ball, the dad in The U gear picked it up for him.

“I hope your boy plays great Monday night,” the man said, handing the ball to the kid and immediately throwing his hands into a “U.” “But not too great. Go Canes.”

The Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback that this “Mendoza Mania Meetup” had been organized to support, Fernando V, was not among the crowd. Neither was his little brother, backup QB Alberto, aka No. 314112. They were at the Hoosiers team hotel, having completed a day of media appearances and practice. So, in their stead, the focus of attention here on Fuller Street was the woman with the stylish gray hair, Indiana red glasses and a “Mendoza Mania” T-shirt. Marta Mendoza, or as she’s known on that flowchart, Dona Martha G. Menocal y Simpson, is the paternal grandmother of the Indiana signal-callers.

“It is always fun seeing family but also seeing everyone so excited about the game,” Marta said between hugs with new arrivals. “Everyone has someone to cheer for. It is very Miami.”

A national title game played in Miami at the home stadium of the University of Miami, a team with a roster that includes more than two dozen young men who played high school football in Miami-Dade or Broward counties. Three of them played at Christopher Columbus High School, which also happens to be the alma mater of their head coach, Mario Cristobal, who went on from Columbus High to become a star lineman for the Canes. His former high school teammate, Alex Mirabal, is now his offensive line coach. As Explorers, they played in the trenches alongside teammate Fernando Mendoza IV, No. 31411, the father of the quarterback they must figure how to stop Monday night.

“I don’t know if everyone feels the same way about their hometown, but when you are from Miami, you are a unique person because this is a unique city,” Mirabel explained Saturday morning, standing near another Columbus alum, one of his O-linemen, Ryan Rodriguez, who blocked for Mendoza in high school. “Whether it is Mario, or Fernando Sr. or both of his sons at Indiana, no matter where you went to high school or college, being from Miami is a connection. When you tell someone you are from Miami and so are they, we just know, hey, our history is a little different. No other place has the history that this city does.”

An hour later, repeating that last sentence to Fernando Mendoza caused the quarterback to pause. And smile. And want to give us a history lesson of his own.

“My grandparents have always worked hard to teach us that history, so that we know where they came from and where we come from,” he explained, nodding. “But when you see it for yourself, when you stand there in it, it changes you.”

The Mendoza boys stood there in it in 2019. Fernando was in 10th grade, Alberto in eighth. Their maternal grandparents were going back to Cuba for a church-sponsored relief trip and took the boys with them. Alberto and Alicia Espinoza hiked their grandsons throughout Santiago, on the eastern end of the island, and through the Sierra Maestra, the mountain range from which Fidel and Raul Castro launched their overthrow of the Cuban government. That was in the 1950s, when the eventual grandparents were kids themselves.

“We saw where my grandfather lived and we went to my grandmother’s house,” Alberto recalled Saturday. “We saw where they went to school. The church that he went to. It truly made you very sad, because it’s so run down, but you can see how truly beautiful it was and how great Cuba was. He told us about the Bay of Pigs. How he had to leave when he was 9. How she had to leave when she was 11. But, like Fernando said to you, when you see it for yourself, you don’t look at yourself the same way. You don’t look at anything the same after your eyes have seen it.”

The redshirt freshman who won back-to-back state titles at Columbus caught himself getting emotional.

“When Fernando thanked our grandparents during his Heisman speech, and did it in Spanish, maybe people will be curious about that and they will want to learn more about us, and then learn more about what happened in Cuba, too,” he said.

On Saturday afternoon, sometime between CFP media day at the Miami Beach Convention Center and Mendoza Mania at Coconut Grove, a few people were indeed seeking that knowledge. At the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, a couple from Indianapolis, the McClains, dressed in matching Mendoza jerseys, held hands as they moved through the museum’s displays. Those exhibits that start out so bright and hopeful descend into darkness as patrons follow the timeline of Cuba and Miami’s conjoined yin-yang of a history. The island losing track of democracy due to struggles for power and resources throughout the early 20th century. The fleeing of president-turned-dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro’s initial promises of restoring the nation’s 1940 constitution but instead reversing course on freedom to install a Soviet-backed regime of control powered by fear.

Among the museum’s displays are newspapers from Jan. 2, 1959. A history juxtaposition that feels apropos this football week. The headlines that share the front of that morning’s Miami Herald are “Mobs Pillage Havana: Castro to Take Over?” printed next to the story of the 1959 Orange Bowl, “Sing, You Sooners — It’s 21 to 6” as Oklahoma defeated Syracuse in the stadium that the Miami Hurricanes called home.

Across from that exhibit is a replica of an execution wall. The sounds of gunshots rattled a lone pole that stands in the center of the room, riddled with bullet holes and framed by the faces of dozens of people whom Castro had killed by firing squads. That’s what Mendoza’s grandparents witnessed as children. There are also cramped, rusted recreations of the cells where Castro imprisoned anyone whom he viewed as a threat. Both of Cristobal’s grandfathers were held in those prisons before fleeing to Miami.

In stark contrast to the endless images of warring adults is a child’s suitcase packed with nothing but a pair of dolls. It, too, is surrounded by faces, but they are of the children who were airlifted out of Cuba between December 1960 and October 1962. When Castro seized control of all churches and schools, he began a “reeducation” of Cuba’s youth. Panicked parents who were unable to secure exit visas sent their children to the United States via an effort devised by the Catholic Charities of Miami and the Eisenhower White House, titled Operation Peter Pan, or in Cuba, Pedro Pan. The idea was to get the kids out first and find them shelter through camps, foster care or family who already lived in the United States until their parents eventually could join them.

A total of 14,048 boys and girls were flown 90 miles north to Miami and freedom, but also into a frightening, uncertain future. Among them was 13-year-old Marta Menocal.

“I traveled with my brother,” Mendoza’s grandmother recalled at Coconut Grove on Saturday night. “We had family in Miami, and my parents had arranged for them to get me. Then my parents were able to get out about nine months later. I was one of the lucky ones.”

Her siblings were initially spread out around Florida, unlike thousands of others who were scattered throughout every corner of the nation. Eventually, though, Marta’s family, like a large majority of the Pedro Pan kids, found their way back to Miami, including a pair of future Miami mayors and a U.S. senator.

That’s where she met her Fernando, aka Fernando III, or No. 3411. The Havana that Mendoza’s grandparents knew was like Miami today. A growing, bustling, playground of the rich. It was Miami that was the quiet town behind the times. The people who once powered Cuba now power South Florida. And more increasingly, South Florida football.

“The world we grew up in, it was baseball first, because in Cuba it was always baseball first,” Fernando IV explained around his son’s Heisman ceremony weekend. “Then we got into the ’80s and you had Dan Marino and the Dolphins. And when Miami became The U and all of that happened, the championships and the swagger, now football wasn’t just a game they played at other schools. At Columbus we were like, I think we want to be football players! Now, maybe because of what Miami kids have seen this fall, that will only increase.”

At Columbus High on Saturday afternoon, fans posed with the brand-new banner that hangs from the wrought iron fence lining the school’s main building: “FERNANDO MENDOZA CLASS OF 2022 HEISMAN WINNER.” And the three-story wall that overlooks the football field is adorned with a massive modern tapestry of seven individuals, split with the five Explorers-turned-Canes players and coaches on the left and the Mendoza boys on the right. A football shrine and a school that has become a football factory, right smack in Miami’s Cuban heart known as Westchester, long the domain of hardball and soccer.

Back in Coconut Grove, that ratio felt about right. For every person in a Mendoza jersey or Hoosiers T-shirt, there were three repping the hometown team over the hometown hero. Except, of course, for that little block of Fuller Street, where grandma was still hugging every neck she could find, surrounded by all red, all No. 15 and all Mendoza as far as the eye — or “IU” — could see.

“I know people might be torn, and we get it. We used to go to Miami games all the time as kids. Our mom played tennis there,” Alberto said that morning to a semicircle of three reporters, including one from Columbus High. Meanwhile, a hundred yards away, Fernando V could barely be seen behind all of the cameras and reporters.

Little brother pointed to that crowd, the one that resembled any old run-of-the-mill Mendoza family reunion.

“I guess if you are from Miami, then you can’t lose.”