What it means
In Scottsdale, a Charro is a member of the Scottsdale Charros, the club of local businessmen that has hosted spring training at Scottsdale Stadium since 1961. The word works the way “a Thunderbird” works in Phoenix: it names a person, a club and a kind of local standing at once. “He’s a Charro” tells you a man runs a business in town, spends March afternoons in a red vest, and sits in a network that has run the city’s baseball for sixty-five years.
The Charros also lend the name to things. The Charro Lodge is the hospitality pavilion at the stadium. The Charro Foundation is the giving arm. Since 2021 the club has run the Parada del Sol parade as well, so “the Charros” now covers a February Saturday on Scottsdale Road in addition to March at the ballpark. The Scottsdale Charros guide tells the full institutional story; this page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
At Scottsdale Stadium every March, in the white hats and red vests at the gates and the Lodge; on the Parada del Sol parade route; on plaques at schools and ballfields the Foundation has paid for; and in the club’s clubhouse at 4251 North Brown Avenue in Old Town. The founding room still exists: the Hotel Valley Ho.
Where the word came from
The club came first and the name a month later. Nine Scottsdale businessmen met on March 1, 1961, organized at the Hotel Valley Ho on April 6 as a special activity affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce, and spent the next month arguing about what to call themselves. The model was the Phoenix Thunderbirds, the closed club of young executives that ran the Phoenix Open, and the founders copied its shape: 30 active members, all under 45, chosen by the members.
The rejected list survives in the club’s own history and reads like a portrait of the town: Vaqueros, Caballeros, Roadrunners, Camels, Birds, Kivas, Wranglers, Brahmas, Ramrods, Segundos. On May 10, 1961, over drinks at the Lulu Belle, the Gay Nineties saloon on Main Street, they settled on Charros, the Mexican word for the skilled gentleman horseman of the charreada. It fit the West’s Most Western Town without requiring anyone to own a horse, and it had the advantage that no other club in Arizona was using it.
The word stuck because the club delivered. When the Red Sox left after the 1965 spring, the Charros went to Wrigley Field with Mayor Bud Tims and landed the Cubs for 1967, holding them through 1978; the Cactus League credits that courtship with helping keep the league alive. The A’s followed from 1979 to 1983, and then the Giants, who swapped parks with Oakland and have been Scottsdale’s team ever since. The Charros’ own history puts that arrival in 1982 and the stadium’s record puts it in 1984; this site uses 1984 and assumes the earlier date marks the handshake.
What it is not
A Charro is not a cowboy, a rodeo rider or a member of the Parada del Sol’s old sponsoring club, the Jaycees, though the Charros took over the parade in 2021. The charro of Mexico is a horseman in embroidered suit and wide sombrero; the Charro of Scottsdale is a man in a red vest selling you a Lodge ticket. Nor is the club part of the Giants or the city, both of which it works with and neither of which it answers to.
The fine print
The club’s legal life began in January 1964, when the IRS recognized Scottsdale Charros, Inc. as a 501(c)(6) business league; the Charro Foundation, incorporated in 1986 as the Scottsdale Charro Community Foundation, is the 501(c)(3) that receives and gives away the money. The giving is real and specific: $50,000 to restore the Railroad Park carousel in 1997, $1.7 million co-sponsoring a Miracle League field in 2011, $250,000 to the Museum of the West in 2014, more than $21 million all told to schools and charities, routed through roughly $4 million a year in spring training hospitality, advertising and raffles.
The money depends on a building the Charros do not own. The 1956 wooden stadium had 3,000 seats; on November 7, 1989, Scottsdale voters approved an $8.4 million bond to replace it, the same night San Francisco voters rejected a downtown ballpark for the same team. The new park opened March 12, 1992, the Charro Lodge followed in 1996, and the city put up to $35 million of hotel taxes into the 2019 renovation. The Giants’ lease now runs to 2044.
Two things the record shows plainly. The membership has always been male; the city’s own scrutiny in 2007 and 2014 did not change that, and the club has never voted in a woman. And the financial terms among the Charros, the city and the Giants sit in contracts this site could not open; press accounts describe the Charros as renting the city’s stadium. Pronunciation is the last trap: CHAR-ohs, with a hard English ch.