Doctor Tries to Mend His Own Life

Dr. Jorge Jaimes has arrived in time: There is a spot under a tree, in the shade. The ocean breeze trails the giggles of children playing at the beach. A young man walks his puppy, trying to make him heel.

The parking lot, just across from the Marine Institute in Dana Point, is nearly empty now, but the cars that rest here, also in the shade, have their windows rolled down. Their occupants are asleep.

“Look, there are Americans sleeping here, too,” Jorge says. “By now we all know each other. They come with campers, too. We all look for the shade. If they beat me to it, then I don’t sleep.”

Jorge Jaimes, a native of Mexico City, is a medical doctor, 45 years old. We speak in Spanish, because it puts him at ease, although his English is good. He carries photocopies of his Mexican medical diplomas in his car, a yellow Volkswagen bug.

For the past year and a half, this car has been Jorge’s home. He has lived in the United States two years beyond that.

“To me, this is nothing extraordinary,” he says. “Whatever immigrant who comes here, he suffers. This is nothing extraordinary. It is an immigrant’s story, nothing more.”

Jorge Jaimes is marking time, en route to a dream. Yet even as we talk, the dream can bring him to tears. It seems more quixotic every day.

It started, Jorge says, when he wanted something more. After practicing general medicine in Mexico City for 10 years, he went back to medical school, graduating in 1986 with a speciality in trauma and orthopedics.

Then he sold his practice, his home and his land, and moved his family to Sonora in northern Mexico, where his wife, Lucrecia, was born. He thought Sonora would be better for his kids, Nadia, 16, and Jorge, 10. He and his wife were ready to start anew.

But first, on the advice of his medical colleagues, Jorge invested in the Mexican stock market. It crashed, and Jorge lost nearly everything the family had.

His hopes of learning hand surgery, in demand in Mexico, fell too. Although a New York surgeon, a friend of Jorge’s medical professor, had offered an internship free of charge, Jorge would still have to pay for his room and board.

Then a friend offered a chance. The friend’s brother could provide a job in New York. Jorge figured he would come to Orange County, where he has brothers himself, for about three months. His earnings--wasn’t money supposed to be easy in the United States?--would sustain his family while he was in New York.

The U.S. government had already granted him a permanent entry visa and he’d used it often in the past; he knew Disneyland and Universal Studios well. On one trip, Jorge recalls, he loaded the family into a van. They had $11,000 to spend!

But when Jorge arrived at the border crossing at San Ysidro in December, 1987, alone, he was close to broke. A U.S. immigration agent asked Jorge for verification of the salary he earned in Mexico, something that had never been asked of him before.

Jorge had no proof, and to his astonishment, the agent marked his passport, denying him entry to the United States.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” he says. “I thought he was kidding. Then, when it happened, I didn’t know what to do.”

What he did, after staying in Tijuana for two days, was decide to enter the United States any way he could. He didn’t have money to pay a smuggler, so he called his brothers, who said they would pay.

“There were helicopters, horses, cars, everything that night,” Jorge says of his scramble across. “There were 15 of us, but I was the only one to get through. I ran. It felt very ugly. Lights shined in my face. There was mud. I slipped. Somebody told me to run through a tunnel. It was terrible. I never thought I would be in that situation. If I didn’t get through, I told myself I would never try again.”

Jorge Jaimes stops here and gazes off. He likes it here by the harbor, he says. It’s cool, and nobody bothers you. Now his eyes cloud a bit and he wipes at them with his hands.

We talk about Mexico City, where I’ve lived too. He tells me where he was born, a Red Cross clinic on the corner of Nicaragua and Brazil streets. His mother was a servant; Jorge was her firstborn. Out of 11 children, he was the only one to graduate from college.

“When I was growing up, my mother worked for a rich woman,” Jorge says. “She was my godmother. She treated me as one of the family. When I would visit, I would sleep in a guest room, not in the servant’s quarters. She took me to restaurants. She gave me books, magazines to read. She used to give me money for the bus. I tried to be better than anybody. She helped me a lot.”

Then Jorge gets back to where the dream went wrong.

The brother of the friend in New York had no job. So he stayed with relatives here, worked as a busboy, and then the restaurant closed. Something better, he assumed, would come up. He was loathe to give up.

He paid nearly $800 to different organizations that promised to legalize his stay. His work authorization came, but Jorge worries what will happen when it expires at the end of the year.

A job at a carwash, at $4.25 an hour, was next. His employment applications at hospitals--”I told them I would scrub floors, anything, hoping to meet somebody and work my way up”--went unanswered. In the meantime, he studied English at school.

He completed a state-certified course in phlebotomy, but when he tried to get a job drawing blood, he was told he needed a car.

Which, of course, he has now.

It took two years of work, but it has allowed him to move from his brother’s home--where he paid $150 a month to sleep in a closet under the stairs--and got him a job pumping gas in Laguna Hills. He makes $7 an hour, more than he would have earned drawing blood, and now he’s found a second job at a nightclub in Glendale.

He is a bathroom attendant.

“I don’t like the work because it is with drunks and all, but it’s money,” Jorge says. “If I reach my goal, that is what’s important. I want to work and set a good example for my children. That is the most important thing in the world to me.”

He says he has $5,000 more to earn so that his family can buy an $11,000 house. After that, he will start saving for his expenses in New York.

“I don’t want to leave until I do that course in hand surgery,” he says. “I have to finish what I start.”

Except Jorge hasn’t been in contact with the New York surgeon since he arrived. It’s been 3 1/2 years.

“I’m embarrassed,” he says. “I haven’t talked with my professor either. How can I tell them that I’m out here, failed? I just have to keep working. Even though it is very hard. . . . “

Later, I called New York. The surgeon’s office said that the offer still stands.