100-year-old shares special date with newborn

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Not too many people are born on New Year's Day. Not too many live to 100, either.

Manuela Cortez can now make both claims to fame. Her family gathered Friday at her side in celebration of her 100th birthday.

Meanwhile, across town, Yesenia Romero and Eladio Gonzalez celebrated the birth of their third child, Giovanny, who entered the world at 1:08 a.m. and in the process became Yakima's first baby of the New Year.

"Happy, very happy," Romero said of her and her baby, who was born at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. "He just eats and goes right back to sleep."

That could describe a lot of couch potatoes over the holidays, but not Manuela Cortez, who was born exactly a century ago on New Year's Day.

Widowed for 33 years but blessed by a huge family, she was born Jan. 1, 1910, in Ciudad Victoria, the capital city of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

As a teenager she immigrated to the United States with her family and lived in south Texas before settling in the Yakima Valley with her late husband, Francisco, in 1945.

Mabton was their home for many years, and it was where she raised her children, eight of whom survive. Today she is abuelita to 25 grandchildren and 17 great-children.

Since 1985 -- the same year she became an American citizen -- she's lived by herself at the Sun Towers in Yakima. Her eldest son, Rudy Cortez, the 80-year-old former mayor of Mabton, said she prefers it that way.

"She's always been independent. She never wanted to live with any of us," he said.

The way her family figures it, her only vice is a fondness for Legends Casino. She doesn't drink or smoke, and any insinuation that she does or ever did draws a quick set-the-record-straight retort.

"You've got a big mouth," she laughingly rebuked her son, Francisco, a retired Washington State Patrol trooper, moments after he joked about how much tequila she drinks.

Back at Memorial Hospital, Yesenia Romero and Eladio Gonzalez embodied the immigrant experience that Manuela and Francisco Cortez played out decades ago.

The couple have two older children, a 7-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy.

An orchard worker, Eladio Gonzalez is between jobs. Speaking through a Spanish interpreter, he said he's not a fan of changing diapers but tries to help out around the house.

"I do the dishes," he said, while Romero, her baby sleeping peacefully in her arms, looked on with what appeared to be a somewhat dubious expression on her face.

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 509-577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.