Transcription:

Host: All migrant stories have a piece of heart, a little piece of soul and a lot of skin, blood, sweat and tears. But there are some stories that are special, there are stories that deserve to be told in books or podcasts or videos, and this is one of them. This is one of those stories that we want to transmit to you on a very special day, it is the story of Doctor Pablo Romero Beltran, who is an immigrant, who became a soldier, and then a medical doctor. Doctor Pablo Romero Beltran, it is a great honor to listen to you, greet you, and to know a little more about your story.

Dr. Pablo Romero (invitado): El placer es mío.

Translator: The pleasure it’s mine.

Host: Doctor Pablo Romero, how old were you when you came to the United States? When did you arrive at California?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Pues resulta que tenía 14 años, fue en enero del 65, resulta que yo terminé…

Translator: I was 14 years old; it was in January of 65, it turns out I finished my elementary school in Mexico when I was 11 years old, and the following years I spent working in construction, and that was because it was impossible for me to go to high school, then one day my dad came to visit us, and said do you want to go to California? And I thought it was a good idea, so we went to the embassy, they gave me my permit, and we came by second class train from Queretaro to the California border, and we arrived there, we left our papers, they bought me a ticket on the greyhound in Calexico, and from there to Salinas, California with a stop in Los Angeles.

We arrived at the center of California, Salinas, and from there my dad knew someone that was from here too, he said we were going to look for work in the fields, which there are none anymore, and we went from here in Salinas to a camp nearby, to a camp for adults obviously. I was about 14 years old, and there were about 40-50 people, but I was the only boy, and I prepared myself, the next day we went to the camp to work.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Me preparé, al día siguiente vamos al campo a trabajar.

Host: January of 65, Queretaro- Calexico- Los Angeles – Salinas. Who did you arrive with doctor? Because you talked about your dad, but did you come with someone else? Another family member? A neighbor?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Pues no, éramos ocho niños, hermanos pues, pero no, mi papá y yo solitos.

Translator: Well, we were eight boys, brothers, but no, it was just me and my dad. He came so we could save some money then return for the rest of the family, but it was just me and my dad, and then many adults at the field.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Nomás éramos mi papá y yo y puros adultos en el campo laborando.

Host: And were you the oldest of the eight little siblings?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Segundo, el mayor varón, mi hermana me ganaba…

Translator: Second, the oldest boy, my sister was older by a year and a half, but she was a woman, so she stayed there a little bit longer.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Pero ella era mujer, se quedó un poquito más.

Host: Of course, to help your mom and the younger siblings.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Exacto.

Translator: Exactly.

Host: Were you able to go to school? Because you talked a lot about work and being the only teenager in that field. Were you able to go to school?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Nada de escuela. La única escuela era aprender lo que tenía que hacer.

Translator: No, no school, the only school was to learn what I had to do. How to do my work better, how to try to make progress. I could hear in my first work it was harvesting broccoli, which I didn’t even know, at that time I had no idea what broccoli was, so no, it was just a matter of making sure there were no problems and working hard and learning to work. Right? But no school, zero.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Y pues, aprender a trabajar ¿no? Pero nada de escuela, cero.

Host: And tell me a little more about your life Doctor, did you speak English when you got to the field and had do work surrounded by adults and were you the only minor? Did you speak the language?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Cero, cero de inglés.

Translator: Zero, zero English. It was just Spanish.

Host: Nothing, no course like English without barriers, nothing?

Dr. Pablo Romero: No, no había nada. Ni siquiera… después llegamos al tema, pero no…

Translator: There was nothing, not even… well we will get to that subject later, but no, no. We were here and with time we learned a word or two, but in this part of the world people only speak Spanish. They never learn the language and stay on this place all their life, many of us have to learn to get out of there, but there was no way, really. With time they started having classes. Luckily one day I was in Arizona, I went to work by myself in Arizona, with the lettuce, and migration find me there at midnight and they said, hey you are 16 years old, and you are here with the adults, why you are not at school? I don’t know I said, and he said in Spanish, think about school someday. And you don’t think about school, but if you must work to support, eight, seven brothers you can’t do it.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Yo tenía que trabajar para ayudar a ocho, siete hermanos. No se puede.

Host: So, you started working at the fields when you were 14, started with broccoli, that you didn’t even know how it looked, and then you worked with lettuce in Arizona, like you just said. What other crops did you had to do? Or where did you had to work and how were you doing during that time?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Sí, lo que siguió del brócoli fueron las fresas, la fresa fue bastante…

Host: Yes, after broccoli came the strawberry, and the strawberries were also to be harvested, right? They are harvested in baskets and whatever. I also learned how to harvest lettuce, here in Salinas, California, we follow the growing seasons, what is understood here is that the growing seasons go from here to the south, and the winter here it is not very cold, and lettuce doesn’t grow, if you want to specialize in lettuce you have to follow it from here to the Central Valley, and then to Valley in the west, and then to Arizona. There was lettuce and then the asparagus in the middle, there was also the short hoe, the famous short hoes, who was eventually removed from the history of California when Brown and Cesar Chavez met to establish the right that this hoe was causing the person to walk with a bent back, it hurt the spine a lot, so eventually this was removed.

So, there was the lettuce, everybody lived of lettuce, the hoe, the celery too, there was a seasoning in which they filled the wooden boxes with celery, and you had to close the wooden boxes with nails and hammer, that was my job, and you learn to be almost a carpenter, yes with the hammer and nails.

Dr. Pablo Romero: carpintero sí, con el martillo y los clavos.

Host: And do you still like broccoli and strawberries, asparagus, celery, and the hoe? Or do you want no longer to see them?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Lo único que aborrecí yo fueron las fresas ¿eh?

Translator: The only thing I hated was the strawberries, those ones, those ones you ate, the strain of strawberries have changed, now they say they are a little different, sweeter, last weekend we were in Los Angeles with my granddaughter, and we went to the farmer’s market to buy food, and the strawberries are also very good there, blackberries, you can find everything, California has everything.

Dr. Pablo Romero: hay unas fresas muy buenas también ahí, zarzamoras y hay de todo, California tiene de todo, ¿eh?

Host: And talking about a little bit of everything, your life had many flavors, textures, colors, and dimensions Doctor, because after all these harvests you joined the army, why?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Sí, ¿por qué? Porque había lo que se llamaba servicio militar obligatorio, esto fue en…

Translator: Yes, why? Because there was this thing called mandatory military service, this was in the 70s, it turns out that the Vietnam war was at its peak, you had to join, and it turns out they sent you to take the exams and well, you had to show up, when they called me I went, I made an arrangement, I had to go to the greyhound again from Salinas to Oakland, they took you, you did some things and you came back, and it turns out that there was a lottery in which they gave me a certain number, right? They gave me a low number and I didn’t know what it was, I went, I didn’t know what I had to do. So, I left my car at greyhound again, I arrived and went to Oakland, and this time the appointment was very long, there were a lot of questions but we had help from the translators, and then there was this event with these 50-60 people all crammed into one room, and suddenly someone says you have to take an oath, and those close to him put their hands on their chest, and those in the middle were sitting as they were Indians with their arms crossed.

The hippies were with their piece sign, others had their middle finger raised, and I was in the back, and I didn’t even notice it, I said, what happened? When the event was finally over, I went outside and found a military guy with called Muñoz or something like that, and I said to him, hey what happened? What do you mean what happened? Don’t you know any English? And I said well, no, oh you’re going to have to learn menso, you are not going to do well, you have to learn.

After everything was over, we went back like at two in the morning, and we stopped to take some coffee, and the bus too, we were coming here near Salinas to a place called Forth Ord, and I called my dad and I said, hey I left my car in front on the greyhound, can you pick it up? And he said why? Because I’m going to the army now, and what are you going to do there? I’m going to the army, and he said, is this a joke? No, it is not a joke, and he finally went and picked up the car and I stayed two months in Forth Ord, and I was very lucky in Ford Ord, I was with a group of guys that were from Chicago from the national guard, they all were college students or whatever, and they made it their purpose to help me learn English, so we had our military class and my English lessons and I helped them with the physical stuff, because they were a little fat, it worked out well, I helped them with some things, and they with… well, yeah.

So, when I was finishing my eight weeks at Forth Ord, I learned a lot, from Forth Ord I went to Oklahoma, and I stayed there. The army decided that I had to learn the language, and I saw all the movies that were in there, and with the help of people in the library, asking, asking, and asking, that’s how I learned. And I learned there it was a different world than lettuce or broccoli.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Claro aprendí que había un mundo diferente al de la lechuga o del brócoli.

Host: ¿Quite different, no? And what decision did you take after leaving the military service? What did this make you think, react, or realize, these new friendships? So many movies in English? This world beyond lettuce and broccoli? Why did you do what you did next?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Varias cosas ocurrieron, lo que pasa es que cuando estaba yo en Alemania, terminé en Oklahoma y me fui a Alemania…

Translator: A couple of things happened when I was in Germany, when I finished in Oklahoma I went to Germany to drive trucks and such, by then I had a license and I learned enough German to pass the test, and once in a while I talked to some of the officers and they took some intelligence test and they realized that although I was limited in the language I had some intelligence, so one of the officers told me, when this ends, it is only two years, when this ends, you have to study, you have many possibilities, if you don’t do it, it is nonsense, I will look for you and I will give you a good one.

Obviously, it was a joke, when I got here in January at Salinas, and I entered my service, it seemed the growing season was in Arizona, I was a little tired, I didn’t want to go to Arizona, so I thought I better stayed here, and someone said, why you don’t go to community college here in Hartnell and ask them what they have? And they did have a special program for people who didn’t have a high school diploma, if you had a GED you could apply. They examined you and put you in the appropriate place.

And they did examine me, and I ended up at the lowest level of arithmetic, but they gave me the opportunity to hurry up and catch up to arithmetic to quickly get to algebra, quickly get to trigonometry, and yes, I started with arithmetic and ended up with calculus in second year. I started with introduction to science, and with advance physics, and also chemistry and all that, so what I did was to take many units, work a lot, and of course someone taught me that the key to get ahead was that I had to have a high GPA.

So, I was always looking for that, I didn’t want to get just an A in class, I wanted a higher grade in the class, and sometimes I could do it, and sometimes I couldn’t, and that caused me to leave. I did work a couple of seasons in the summer with the lettuce, working a middle shift with my dad, he worked in the afternoons, and I worked in the morning, and the rest of the time I was at school, so, I was getting back more from school than when you are just fooling around with nothing to do.

Dr. Pablo Romero: retornos en el estudio que andar uno de tonto cuando no tiene uno nada que hacer.

Host: That is an interesting and fascinating story Doctor. You tell us basically that in eight weeks you learned English based on what your friends told you about the movies you watched, you were self-taught literally, and then you learned German. All right, look at all those languages you spoke.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Y resulta que el alemán era una tragedia porque…

Translator: It turns out that German was a tragedy, because when I left Germany it kind of worked and then I was very hooked at school and at medicine, medicine it’s a completely different school and when I got back to Germany I couldn’t speak German anymore, I remembered very little of it, part of it, it is practicing, right? So, I looked up a couple of things and you ask here and there, once we were a little lost in Czechoslovakia and we looked the words in German, because there was a guard there and we asked him about the war, and I don’t know what else, and it turns out that these Czechoslovaks knew Spanish, and well, with the Spanish we managed then.

Host: That was incredibly lucky, very lucky.

Translator: Yes, life is interesting.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Sí, muy interesante la vida.

Host: And how did you decide to go to college? And why did you decide to go to college? To go to a university, to do medicine? The medicine career…

Dr. Pablo Romero: Resulta que cuando fui aquí para empezar a Hartnell college, un colegio de…

Translator: It turns out that went I went there to start at Hartnell college, that is a two-year college, I went, and I didn’t have anything decided, I said, I look for one, I was looking to see what I could find here and there, and I thought there quickly that I liked science. I’ll stick to science; I’ll do what I can with science. Someone taught me in my second year that maybe here is a city of 150,000 habitants, there was a doctor or two that spoke Spanish, I know that my mother could never talked to the doctors, she had to have a translator, so I thought maybe it is worth thinking about this, but I wasn’t sure.

I fell in love with science, I said well I’m going to look for science, and if medicine counts, then we will look for more, so, from Hartnell I went to the university of California in Irvine, and I also followed the career on the side of science, a little more Spanish literature, and on those three years it was somewhere when my friends told me all that, you should look up into medicine, it is needed in your community, they offered me a spot at the university of California at Irvine, and I said, I’ll look it up, maybe like a test and then I can go back to science, chemistry it was what interested me at the time.

So, I decided to give it a try, but since my parents were still here in Salinas, I thought maybe instead of going to Irvine, or Los Angeles, I should go near San Francisco, it is a 100 miles to San Francisco, and from here it is great, because that university it’s one of the best in the world, and most of them come from Harvard. And in there we were at the same level, we were all the same, there was not I have more, I have less in there. Some of the guys went to the library and bought all the books they recommended for the course, and I barely bought one since they were very expensive, right? They had everything, but at the time of the test, we were the same, and I was ahead of them, there are ways to answering these things, so I looked at medicine seriously and I thought this is worth, and I can go back to my community and practice something like this, on this field.

Dr. Pablo Romero: … me sirve para regresar a mi comunidad a practicar algo así en ese ramo.

Host: And why did you want to specialize in family medicine? Because you told us that you saw the need in your community, people who did not have interpreters or translators, so they could tell the patients what was happening with their diagnosis and treatment, but there was something else in your mind, in your heart, that made you embrace this branch of medicine.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Pues resulta que cuando yo hice la solicitud para el posgrado…

Translator: Well, it turns out that when I applied for graduate school, the residence, I had enough possibilities, interests, and all that. I thought about going to Hopkins and Harvard and whatever, but it was more because I was looking into surgery, I wanted to do surgery, but it turns out my parents were still here in Salinas, California, and they wanted to return to Mexico. So, I thought why don’t I try to residency in family medicine here in Salinas, and I did, I did it as a test, to see if I like it, and I found out what I was looking for was here, and I finished the residency and when I finished it, I thought well, what am I going to do now?

There wasn’t any private practice, everybody worked for the county and I said, well, in order to have control over this, maybe we have to establish a new medical group, and that is what I did, so I finished my residency and we looked for a way to build a practice, all of the sudden it became a bigger group, than it is, and that it has been, so really it was a series of small changes, accidents of whatever, but it was the best thing I could have done in life.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Realmente que fue una serie de pequeños cambios, accidentes o lo que sea, pero fue lo mejor que pude haber hecho en la vida.

Host: Doctor when we listen to you, I hear you and I am amazed, I’m excited and touched with your story, and moved by your humbleness, you could put cream in your tacos, like my friends in Mexico say, you could be snooty and brag about your achievements, but since your humble origins from that January of 65, from Queretaro to Salinas and then to Germany, and San Francisco, you are living the American dream, I imagined you must have been the first of your siblings or your family with a university education, with your own medical practice, but for you, the sense of community is important. And I would like to ask you right now about that part of your personality, why is it so important for you to stay involved with your community?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Pues siento que uno debe de agradecer lo bien que le fue en las cosas, claro que…

Translator: Well, it is true that you have to be thankful of how well things went, of course with the medical group that I had, and with the new one that I am right now, we provide a lot of services, but we also provide a scholarship in the university of California in San Francisco, for people who works in the fields, so they have a chance to get help with their expenses, so we have that scholarship, and also in Hartnell college we have another one too for the same thing.

The thing is that I could easily go to the store and buy five teslas and what am I going to do with all of them? They will be all dirty and I’ll have to wash them, and for what? So, I don’t have a tesla, not even one, I could have three houses and then what? If you don’t visit a house, it’ll break down and you have to… what do you get at the end? At the end of the day when you leave this planet, what are you taking with you? As far as I know you don’t take anything with you, so it is better to leave help for someone, help a person in need.

I get a lot of patients that ask me, what are you going to do to me? Do I need to put my things in order? And that’s ok, right? There are many cases diseases, accidents, there are very high cholesterol levels that people suffer, living crippled, there are uncontrolled level pressure that leaves them unable to walk, so, why not be able to do something to be able to say, hey, good thing I helped a person who was in trouble, and hopefully God will continue to help him.

Like I mentioned, at the end you do not take anything with you, right? And it’s true that you could have… I stayed, I could have easily stayed home all day and put cream on my tacos, but then what? You run out of tacos and what do you say? It is nice that I ate that cream taco, but it’s nicer to help someone move on, achieve something, that they move forward, come back as a language teacher, join the army, learn to fly drones, and it is good if they came back to Salinas, because there is drones in there too to check the agriculture, and it is something I learned at the air force or the army, so it’s a good idea to pass on, to reproduce, so people can enjoy those achievements.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Debe pasar lo que uno tiene para que pueda reproducirse, es la idea y de que la persona goce de esos logros…

Host: Doctor have you or your wife met a student who has been the recipient of one of those donations, that you and your organization make? Have you met a young person with whom you felt identified? Someone who has had a story similar to yours in terms of the efforts or sacrifices to get where he or she is today?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Sí, resulta San Francisco como está en el norte de California…

Translator: Yes, turns out San Francisco is at the north of California, when they think about agriculture they think that is going to be that Salinas is like the San Joaquin valley, and it’s not true, it’s very different, at the Salinas valley we have certain things, grapes, lettuce, asparagus, and all that, and the earth is very nice, at the San Joaquin valley there are fruits, trees, and that’s it. So, the universe here has a little more emphasis in helping them, sometimes they have introduced us to boys, a boy who received a scholarship, we have a scholarship that is given only for the interest earning so it would stay there for life.

It is not a scholarship that you can say you are going to receive 100,000 dollars, and that’s it, no. It is a smaller scholarship, but it helps them a lot for expenses, and all that, but it will be there for life. It can never disappear, so we have already met a couple of people, and we are very happy in that sense.

Dr. Pablo Romero: nunca se puede desaparecer, así que ya conocimos a un par de personas y estamos muy agusto en ese sentido.

Host: That’s nice, that’s nice. And to wrap it up Doctor, because I don’t want to steal more of your precious time and everything that you do to serve your patients, your neighbors, your community, your country, what would be your advice to the young people listening? For those who are immigrants like you? Or for those who are immigrants and young and have enlisted on the troops of the US army?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Hay que entender que todo en esta vida está lleno de problemas y de soluciones…

Translator: We have to understand that everything in life is full of problems and solutions, and we go to the army and they yell at you, they yell at you at the beginning, and the English I learned the first eight weeks was only bad words, so in English there are more than bad words, you can see movies and read the rest, same here, when you go to the army and they tell you are not good at that, well, then you are not, but you might be good for something else. I have acquaintances who have been at the front, soldiers, officers and whatever, you see they have the mind and have the desire for school in the army, and after ten years as sergeants they come as second lieutenants and then first lieutenant, and then captains, well, that is good.

Sometimes here I see patients that come with their uniform and they are lieutenant coronels, and they have their little boy and we help them, and from here they go maybe to Colorado, they go to DC or whatever, but the idea is they have a lot of help for the person who wants it, and the one who doesn’t want it, obviously not, when we were young, when we were in the military service people only went two years and that was it, but we learned there are many ways to get ahead in life, the G.I. bill helps, it helps for the payments, and all that, and it’s good to join and be in there for two or three years, learning who to drive the drones or the logistics, instead of sending bombs to Afghanistan, learn how to send UPS packages to Los Angeles, what’s the difference? Well, the difference is that you know how to manage things and you can get ahead at the job working at UPS or FedEx, or whatever is going to be a lot better paying than stuffing boxes, so people must learn that there are many drones out there, they must learn to appreciate them, and get ahead.

Dr. Pablo Romero: hay muchos drones enfrente pero tienen que aprender a apreciarlos y a salir adelante.

Host: What would be your final advice or words of encouragement for the war veterans that may be listening and maybe come discouraged, out of breath? Or they come a little bit hopeless? What would you say to them Doctor?

Dr. Pablo Romero: Yo les diría que nunca pierdan la fe, de que es cierto que las cosas no salen como uno quisiera…

Translator: I would say never lose your faith, sometimes things don’t come out like you want it, and it is true that there are things that are very sad, having accidents, people that are victims of war, people that lose one leg, which are traumatized, trauma in general has its time. Don’t lose your faith, give it your all, learn a different career and learn to maintain the pride of being human beings and move forward with everything you have in front of you, your friends, your neighbors, your relatives, lend them a hand a move forward, and don’t lose faith, not at all.

Dr. Pablo Romero: échenle la mano y salgan adelante y no pierdan la fe para nada.

Host: Doctor Pablo Romero Beltran, it has been a pride and an honor, and a privilege to interview you on this day. Thank you, Doctor, for your service, your words, your advice, your wisdom, and your good heart. And I wanted to wish you happy veterans’ day to you too.

Translator: Thank you very much.

Dr. Pablo Romero: Muchísimas gracias a usted.