SANTA ANA – Councilwoman Michele Martinez may have lost her bid for an Orange County supervisor seat in November, but her campaign brought her something that turned out to be even more life-changing.
It was the month leading up to the election, when Araceli Diaz – a Torrance resident who had glossed over the councilwoman’s Facebook page for supervisor several times while looking for anyone with the name “Michele Martinez” – finally clicked on the campaign page and found a familiar picture of a 7-year-old Martinez wearing a pink dress.
Diaz recognized the photo was the same as one at the home of her father, Miguel Angel Diaz, 57, who was due for open-heart surgery two days later.
Araceli Diaz, 33, sent a Facebook message to Martinez and her twin brother: Their long-lost dad was trying to get in touch.
That day, Oct. 10, Martinez called her father and heard his voice for the first time in three decades. They talked for two hours.
“It was unreal. He was kind of in shock; I was in shock,” Martinez, 37, recounted. “Something came over me – it was like this calmness, it’s so hard to describe. I just felt so peaceful, and my life changed.”
SEPARATED BEFORE BIRTH
Martinez grew up without her parents. Her mother, who died six years ago, was in and out of jail, while her father was never spoken of by her great-grandmother, who raised the twins. Martinez never asked about them. “Maybe because I was angry that I grew up without a mom and dad,” she said.
But Martinez and her brother were always on Miguel Angel Diaz’s mind.
“I never stopped looking for them,” he said recently in Spanish.
Miguel Angel Diaz lived in the Harbor Hills housing project when, at about 17 years old, he met Maryann Olivia Martinez, who lived in nearby Harbor City. Miguel Angel Diaz soon moved to Oxnard; when he returned to Harbor City a few months later, Maryann Olivia Martinez was gone. A friend told him that four people – two men and two women, one of them pregnant – had been looking for him.
“I was thinking, I don’t know who it would be,” he said.
His uncle later told him the pregnant woman, Maryann Olivia Martinez, gave birth to twins, and they were his.
When he eventually found the children in Wilmington, they were under the care of their great-grandmother because their mother was incarcerated. He kept the arrangement that way, waiting for the day their mother would be released.
Miguel Angel Diaz said he visited his twins periodically, one day giving money to their great-grandmother to take them for their school photos – including the one in which Martinez wore a pink dress.
On another visit, the children and their great-grandmother had disappeared. This time, he had no luck finding them.
SOCIAL MEDIA SEARCH
One Christmas Day more than a decade ago, Araceli Diaz noticed that her father looked very sad.
“We were opening gifts up. He got up and went into the hallway area and I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I love you guys, but I wish I had my other two kids here opening gifts as well.’”
As the years passed, Miguel Angel Diaz asked his daughter to look for his twins online. She searched on and off, to no avail.
Two days before his heart surgery in October, Miguel Angel Diaz sat in the yard of his Las Vegas home thinking that if something happened to him during the procedure, his twins would never see him again.
“I was crying,” he said. “I started thinking, why didn’t I call Araceli a week ago … then the phone rang in my hand.”
It was his daughter, saying she had found Michele Martinez, and sent the pink dress photo electronically for confirmation.
“I guess the shock was more that the whole time I didn’t think it was that person and that’s who it really was,” Araceli Diaz said. “I didn’t open her (supervisor campaign) page because I just thought, no, I’m looking for a regular Michele Martinez.”
Michael Martinez, 37, executive chef of 5000 Pies in Long Beach, was on the freeway on his way to put up supervisor campaign signs for his twin sister, when he received the Facebook message from Araceli Diaz.
“It’s kind of like the call you’ve been waiting for your whole life,” he said.
The Martinez twins visited their father shortly after his successful surgery, spent Thanksgiving together, and have remained in constant contact since.
Growing up in Santa Ana, the Martinez twins witnessed close family members and friends fall victim to drug abuse and gang violence. But both worked hard to forge a different path. Their father said it didn’t surprise him that Michele Martinez made it into politics.
“I admire her,” he said. “I am proud of what she is.”
Michele Martinez said her failed campaign was a blessing in disguise.
“I may not be the next supervisor for District 1, but it was probably the most changing moment in my life to meet my father,” she said. “My life is now complete.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7762 or jkwong@ocregister.com or on Twitter: @JessicaGKwong
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