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Immigrant says his success not so unusual
Immigrant says his success not so unusual
08/20/07 04:18:06
Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa began his working life as an illegal immigrant picking melons and tending cotton in Mendota.
Now, Dr. Quiñones performs brain surgery and teaches in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation's most prestigious medical schools.
He says some people call his tale an exception to the normal immigrant experience. He refuses to believe that.
And it hurts, he says, to see undocumented workers dismissed as not making a valuable contribution to society.
"We haven't been highly respected in the past, but recently it's been exacerbated," said Quiñones, 39. "I'm afraid that we are doing what we've done in the past, which is blaming other groups for the fact that we are going through a difficult time in our country."
Quiñones' tale of triumph was published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.
From his earliest years in Mexicali, his family knew he was destined for great success.
"He was different from the other kids," said his brother Gabriel Quiñones, who lives in San Ysidro and worked with Quiñones in Mendota. "He was very intelligent. ... He was hyperactive."
Alfredo Quiñones skipped directly to fifth grade instead of starting first grade in Mexico, because he was academically ahead of the other children, Gabriel Quiñones said.
"He always had straight A's," his brother recalled.
As a teen, Alfredo Quiñones would travel back and forth in the summer from Mexicali to Mendota. He did that for about five years.
But when he was in Mexico, he studied to become an elementary school teacher, Gabriel Quiñones said. After he completed his studies, the local college didn't seem to want to give him a degree, however, because he was underage. He eventually received his teaching license at age 18, Alfredo Quiñones said.
Fausto Hinojosa Jr., a cousin in Fresno, recalls Quiñones as ambitious and someone who viewed education as a bridge to success. Hinojosa, an accountant, keeps in touch with him by phone two or three times a year.
In 1986, at age 19, he once again crossed the border illegally from Calexico -- but this time he stayed.
He settled in a trailer in Mendota, where he operated cotton machinery for a year. Quiñones then moved to Stockton, where he worked as a welder and shoveled sulfur for a railroad company.
"I realized I needed to move on if I was going to make it in this country. I was driving a cotton and tomato picker, but I knew there was something better," Quiñones said in a telephone interview.
By day he worked for a railroad. At night, he studied English at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. He taught himself to read and write with the help of a dictionary.
Quiñones had to take a test to enter the college since he didn't attend high school in the United States, he said. English was difficult, but he excelled in math and science courses at the college, he said.
In 1991, Quiñones won a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a degree in psychology. He took several science and math courses, which propelled him to study medicine.
Quiñones became a U.S. citizen in 1997. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1999. Quiñones did his medical residency at the University of California at San Francisco. He chose to do his residency -- or medical training -- in the Bay Area, because a neurosurgery program was offered there.
Quiñones recalls translating for a Valley family whose 19-year-old son died of brain cancer. The young man had been a farmworker and was in his first year at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a patient.
"He never made it through college and died," Quiñones said. "I thought about it and thought it could've been me."
After his residency, he landed at Johns Hopkins University in 2005.
"Quiñones was among the best. He had excellent judgment of what to do with patients. He has an open personality. People like him. ... He's one of the many excellent people we've trained in neurosurgery around the country," said Dr. Nicholas Barbaro, residency program director at UC San Francisco.
Although Quiñones still has relatives in the Valley, he hasn't been back since college, because his parents live in San Diego. Quiñones has three children and a wife.
"I have a wonderful life, but it's hectic," he said.
Even if he hasn't returned to the Valley, he hasn't forgotten his roots. Quiñones said he mentors black and Hispanic medical students, because he remembers his hardships.
"We cannot find excuses," Quiñones said. "You have to sacrifice a lot."
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