The Immigrant

I first met him through his gallstones at the county hospital in the days when most physicians provided free and low cost care for people who could not afford the "private"care assumed to be better. He was a salty looking sixty-some man with a peg leg, a real one, the result of a farm accident in Texas when he was in his early thirties. His manner was closed and reticent, conveyed by a severe look he always seemed to carry, and an abrupt way of speaking. Born in Guanajuato, his family history, like many men of his generation, was punctuated by people who died young from infections and gunshot wounds. His wife was dead but he had a daughter in Leon, who was, he said, a lawyer. Still, he did not want to contact her during his illness and implied that they were not close anymore. The surgery went well as did his recovery, and I continued to care for him for eight more years.

I learned that he worked as a cook in a small restaurant near my office, and began to take my lunch there. At age 11 I had lived a year in Chihuahua, learned some street Spanish and had continued to learn, working almost every summer thereafter on an almond ranch in Northern California. What one learns in that way is, of course, not always useful in polite society, but as a young man I delighted in the gross humor and elaborate boastful or fantastic tales that then did not seem just the products of unfettered imagination. I noted that his Spanish was improper, like mine. The pages of his life, as they opened before me at restaurant lunches, told of a young man who had been born into an educated, but poor family; whose parents had died tragically in a wave of bloodshed of the time; who was orphaned at age four; who had lived with a relative for several years; who was unable to attend much school; who was married and fathered a child several months later.

There was little opportunity in his native town so that in time he began to travel north to Texas, working there, and later in the California "bracero" program of WWII. He took a year-round ranch job, realizing that he could support his wife and child handsomely and still have money in his pocket. He hoped to save enough to buy some farm land at home. Isolation and loneliness, however, prompted him to spend most of his extra money, and he lost his leg in a foolish, drunken tractor-overturn accident (not the innocent farm accident he had first described).

Ashamed, suffering phantom pain from his new stump, and unable to do farm work that paid well, he got a job in a restaurant which eventually led to cooking and allowed him to resume sending money home. In this way, over several states and years, he managed to maintain his wife, to send his daughter to the better schools, and finally to allow her to graduate with a law degree. When his wife died unexpectedly, he visited his now grown daughter, but they had little in common; she was frankly embarrassed before her friends when he was with her. He felt like a stranger after so many years away, and though he wanted to return to Mexico, he felt lost. After several miserable months, he came "home" to his job at the restaurant, and to the small circle of friends there.

About six years after we first met, his daughter, then a judge in Leon, visited. She came by private plane, and the immigrant hesitantly asked me to take him to the airport to meet her. She was a handsome, and commanding person. The three of us lunched together awkwardly before dropping her at a local hotel. The visit was brief, and the immigrant and his daughter quarreled about politics, among other things. She was a devout communist and spoke bitterly of the malevolence of the immigrant's adopted land, while he maintained that they both had lived from the benevolence of that country and that economic system.

The immigrant died suddenly several months later from a myocardial infarct. I was saddened but grateful to have known him. Recently a friend of mine from Argentina attended a summer course at UCD on production and marketing of fruits and vegetables. She observed that the lectures in English were very hard for her to follow, though she can read (English) well. On the other hand, when the study group visited packing houses over the state, virtually everyone who was working there spoke Spanish. Further, she noted that yards are maintained, dishes washed, and the garbage moved, in great part by non-native English speakers. Ours has been a nation largely built by immigrants, and judging by this man, and many like him whom I came to know in my medical practice, it is still so.

One of the privileges of a physician is that we are allowed occasionally to look into the life book of our patients. When we do, the pages often reveal a powerful and moving history, which helps us to better write our own epic of living.