SANTA ANA : Performers Play Doctor to Educate

Maria is lying down on a gurney in a hospital emergency room, holding her swollen stomach and moaning.

“I thought that having a baby would be so easy,” she says to herself in Spanish, her face twisted with pain. “After all, my two sisters in Mexico had babies without ever seeing a doctor. I thought it would be a breeze.”

An emergency room doctor arrives to attend to her and asks Rita, a bilingual nurse, for Maria’s medical history and chart. Rita discovers that Maria has had no prenatal care. The doctor is incredulous and demands that the nurse ask Maria why she has not been to a doctor during her pregnancy.

“She said because she was never sick,” the nurse tells him.

The three are players on a stage, members of the bilingual street-theater group Teatro Cometa, who were performing the play “La Nina” for about 100 Spanish-speaking immigrants at Santa Ana’s Valley High School.

Written by Fullerton playwright Jaime Gomez, who also has a lead role in the play, the performance is targeted at Spanish-speakers who don’t have health insurance, may not understand the importance of preventive medical care or simply do not have the money to see a doctor until there is an emergency.

The Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, concerned about the growing number of immigrants without health insurance, asked Gomez to write the play to stress the importance of preventive health care. Last year, Santa Ana police arrested two men who had been practicing medicine out of a garage in a residential neighborhood, and coalition members say there are probably many more similar cases that go undetected.

“The immigrant community is very, very much in need of medical services, and many do not have services available through their employment,” said Teresa Mendoza, program specialist for the coalition. Many immigrants are afraid that requesting public health benefits will jeopardize their legal resident status, she said.

“Unless they are dying, they are not able to take their families to a doctor,” she said. “They depend on their curanderos (folk healers), or they go to people working out of garages.”

Gomez’s play is about Maria, a poor, Spanish-speaking woman who is in labor when she shows up at a hospital emergency room. An Anglo doctor who does not speak Spanish discovers that she has had complications during her pregnancy, and, burdened with other serious cases, impatiently tells her that some of the problems could have been prevented with prenatal care.

“I’ve got a heart attack over here, a stabbing over there, and her,” he tells nurse Rita when he learns that Maria has never seen a doctor. “What is she, stupid?”

In the next scene, which points to the importance of paternal involvement, Maria writhes in pain while her husband, Rodolfo--portrayed by playwright Gomez--is at a bar with a friend. A red-costumed devil, played by Gomez’s brother, Bobby Gee Gomez, tempts Rodolfo into having one drink after another while the friend reminds Rodolfo that Maria is about to give birth.

“I don’t like hospitals,” Rodolfo tells his friend. “If it were up to me, (instead of going to a hospital) you’d take your herbs and cure yourself.”

“Macho, eh?” the devil asks him.

At the hospital, the doctor tells Maria that her baby is malnourished but will recover with proper care.

“Don’t people here care about their health?” he asks his nurse, Rita. “Then why do they wait until they’re almost dead to come and see a doctor? We need our emergency rooms.”

Rita explains that Maria could not afford a doctor and that she feared that she would lose her resident status--and custody of her daughter--by visiting a public health clinic.

The play will be performed again Thursday at Spurgeon Intermediate School in Santa Ana.