Bay Area jazz icon Pete Escovedo and wife Juanita celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary

OAKLAND, Calif. - Bay Area music royalty, legendary Latin jazz musician Pete Escovedo and his wife, Juanita, are celebrating 70 years of marriage together. 

Anniversary celebration 

What we know:

On Oct. 21, they marked their platinum anniversary.

On Sunday, surrounded by about 130 family members and friends, a party was held for the couple in Walnut Creek.

Folks traveled from around the country, including from Georgia and Texas, with many also coming in from Los Angeles, to honor the Escovedos, their exemplary union and to celebrate a rare milestone that not many couples reach.

Celebrity tributes

The festive gathering included a surprise video with star-studded tributes collected by their daughter, Grammy-award-winning artist Sheila E. 

"She got all these videos from all these celebrities, like Snoop Dogg, and, you know, Gloria Estefan, and she has this whole video of tons of celebrities wishing Moms and Pops a happy anniversary," shared Zina Escovedo, the youngest of the Escovedos' children. "It was so fun!" 

Pete Escovedo, lovingly referred to as "Pops," is 91. Juanita, known widely as "Moms," is 89.

Started dating in high school 

The backstory:

They both grew up in Oakland and first met back when they were only in middle school. 

Juanita still remembers the day she first laid eyes on the boy who would be her future husband. 

"When I saw him, I told my girlfriend, I said, that is the cutest boy," she recalled. "He was so little, but he had on a white shirt and a brown jacket over his arms and brown slacks and brown…"

And as longtime couples are known to do, the husband joined in to add to the memory, noting that it was brown suede shoes he was wearing. "I was cool," he said, smiling. And he shared his own memory from that first meeting: "One look at her, and stole my heart away."

They didn’t begin dating until later, when Juanita was a student at Oakland Technical High School and Pete was attending nearby McClymonds High.

Marriage followed not long after high school.

"I was 19 when I got married and Pops was 21," Juanita Escovedo shared. 

But their differing cultural and ethnic backgrounds would be something both families had to accept. 

"Her family's from New Orleans, so my family's from Mexico, so it was a little different there, you know," Pete Escovedo said. 

His wife said his parents wanted him to marry a Mexican woman and her parents wanted her to marry a Creole man from Louisiana.

"There weren't very many Creoles in Oakland, a lot of Latin, but my mother told him that he would have to ask my dad if he could marry me," Juanita said.

Pete remembered the day he went to Juanita's father's for his daughter's hand in marriage.  

"That was the scariest day of my life," he said as the couple laughed.

In 2023, he posted to Facebook, sharing an iconic sepia-toned photo of him and his wife from their early days. 

"My wife (Juanita) and I, when we were young. Her father didn’t approve of me being a musician but that’s all that I knew," he wrote. "I am thankful to my wife for believing in me and sticking with me through all of these years. You are the strength of this family." 

Marriage takes work

When we asked Juanita Escovedo what the secret to their successful and long marriage was, her response was a very real one, as she pointed to the changes people undergo, especially when marrying at such a young age.   

"It just takes work. You have to talk to each other. You have to do a lot of laughing. You have to be happy, and it's not easy to be happy when you cannot pay your rent if things are rough and, you know, the devil kind of jumps in there when you think you're doing okay, and so, like I said, it takes work," the Escovedo family matriarch said.

And in the early days of working as a struggling artist, times were difficult. 

"I used to go to this place where I would get a box of food, canned goods and breads and everything, and then, you know, we had like bricks for our table tops," she said, adding, "We tell the kids how it was, and you know, we didn't have any money. It was really, really, really rough, and they said, 'I don't remember that. I didn't know that we were poor.'"

Family love at the center

At the center of the Escovedos’ successful love story is their family.

The couple raised four children, all musically gifted: Sheila, Peter, Juan, and Zina.

"We've been so blessed with our kids. They're so tied with us. We're so tied to them. They call every single day," Juanita Escovedo shared. "They call to see how we're doing, what we're eating. If we're okay, if we need anything." 

Zina Escovedo agreed that she and her siblings were brought up with family always at the focus, and with her parents being blessed with 12 grandkids and 19 great-children, and another great grandbaby on the way, that love just keeps expanding.

The daughter also said they all grew up in a household that loved God, lived by prayer, and there was always a lot of laughter.

She shared how her dad was even humorous about his take on the longevity of her parents' marriage. 

"My father always jokes, and he says, ‘I think it was because I was on tour a lot. We weren't seeing each other every day,’" the daughter said, laughing, adding, "It's about family. So we've just been really blessed." 

Musical family

With the blessings brought by their big family, the Escovedos also said they were bolstered by the music that was always there as part of the backdrop of their lives.

"It's been so an important part of our family, because all the kids, you know, are all musicians, they all want to play music, they're all doing very well… and we're so proud of them," the father said. "I think that's what keeps us really more together in a sense than other families, is the music keeps us together because we're all in the same profession. And it really helps that we support each other, we travel with each other, and it's just a lot of fun."

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The couple also expressed deep appreciation for the fans who have followed their family's music and supported them over the many years.

"Pops and I decided to always be together and to love each other and to take care of the kids as best we can. And it all worked out and through the blessing of our fans. They're the ones who kept us, you know, able to eat, or we have a car, we have a house, but it's because of our fans that we have this, we didn't do it by ourselves," the wife said.

Life can get difficult 

Big picture view:

They both acknowledged that it wasn’t always easy, as life will have its ups and downs, and living comes with trials and tribulations, with mistakes along the way. But the couple committed to putting in the work and said they leaned on God through it all. 

"It's the lessons that you learn in life, you know, that you go through, and hopefully you don't make the same mistakes again," the husband and music icon said, noting those rough patches only strengthened their bond. "Sometimes, some of those things made us even grow closer together because we said, ‘Well, if we would have went another way, our lives would have been different.’"

Juanita Escovedo said ultimately, there is really no real secret formula to staying together for the long haul. It's about deciding to stay the course throughout the journey, as dynamic as it can get. 

The couple said over the years, as people grow and change, it's easy to get complacent and let a marriage grow apart. 

"But because we stayed together, and we worked through the hard parts of our lives and got through it all. We started here in Oakland. And, you know, it was a very, very hard beginning," the musician said, "but, you know, luckily, God looked after us, and we're doing great."

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