PORT ANGELES — In the face of a series of tests and one brutal crime, Jaime Bautista has constructed an American dream.
Bautista, 40, is the owner of the newly enlarged Fiesta Jalisco restaurant in Port Angeles, a place with flamboyant Mexican music and murals and 14 employees — or make that “15, with me; sometimes I work,” he tells a reporter.
Just then, a man named Bruce leans out from a Fiesta booth and remarks that he rarely sees Bautista as he is for this moment: Sitting down in his own restaurant.
Bautista, a compact man with cafe-con-leche skin, was the victim of a vicious assault earlier this year.
On the night of March 21, a man wearing a ski mask and brandishing a 6-inch knife attacked Bautista outside his restaurant.
The man grabbed Bautista by the shoulders and struck him, knocking him to the asphalt.
He then kicked him several times in the head, took Bautista’s wallet and escaped on foot, according to Port Angeles Deputy Police Chief Brian Smith.
The assailant had already punctured one of the rear tires on Bautista’s pickup truck, Smith said, and was waiting for the restaurateur when he walked out of the back door at about 10:45 p.m.
Bautista went to Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, where he stayed overnight.
The next day, a Monday, he went home to his wife, Angeles, and their three young children.
It was “a shock,” to have this happen in his adopted home town of Port Angeles, Bautista said.w
He’d had $16 in his wallet along with his credit cards and said he would have handed them over had the robber merely asked.
“I still feel like he took something [else] from me. It’s difficult to describe,” Bautista said.
His wife, whom he married on Valentine’s Day in 2006, “was very sad,” he added. “I always told her, ‘We’re safe'” in Port Angeles.
“I don’t blame her for being scared.”
But Bautista, who’s been sole proprietor of Fiesta Jalisco since 2005, speaks of the assault only when a reporter asks about it.
He’s much more interested in talking about the life he’s built here.
Bautista was fresh out of high school when he left his native Mexico City. The 18-year-old, looking for adventure, came first to Portland, Ore., amid a rainstorm.
The weather and atmosphere weren’t hospitable, and he thought about turning back.
“But I’m stubborn” and not dampened by a little challenge.
Still, “I didn’t think it was going to last long,” Bautista said of his crossing into the United States in 1988 — without legal immigration documents.
It took him 10 years to become a naturalized U.S. citizen; during that period, he moved from small town to town, from Lincoln City, Ore., to Eugene, Ore., and then to Forks, where a friend wanted him to come work in a restaurant.
“I don’t care for the big city,” he said. “There’s too much crime.”
In 2002, he and a business partner left Forks to open two restaurants: Fiesta Jaliscos in Port Angeles and Port Hadlock.
The partnership didn’t work out, and Bautista took over the Port Angeles restaurant at 636 E. Front St. in 2005. Pedro Arceo still owns the Hadlock Fiesta Jalisco.
This September, as the recession lingered in the form of high unemployment in Clallam County, Bautista took a risk.
He expanded his place into the adjacent vacant space, nearly doubling the seating capacity to 150.
The move “shows my commitment to the community,” Bautista said.
Right after opening up the remodeled space on Labor Day weekend, he and the summer crew found themselves with a bustling crowd of tourists and locals filling every table.
“That blew my mind. I never thought we were going to fill it that quick,” Bautista recalled.
There have been some good, busy days and nights since, and Bautista said he hasn’t had to lay off all of his summer workers.
Instead, he trimmed their hours. If it were him, he said, he would rather have something than no job at all.
Clearly, Bautista relishes his work, especially the interaction with people.
But ask what gives him the most joy, and he tells the story of getting to know Angeles, a woman from the town of Tonaya, Mexico, through letters and long talks on the telephone — before they had met face to face.
No, the Bautistas did not meet on the Internet. A mutual friend put them in touch, and they started out as old-fashioned pen pals, while he lived in Port Angeles and she in Tonaya.
“I fell in love with her just talking to her” on the phone, he recalled.
“She didn’t send me a picture until about a year after we started talking.”
When they met, Bautista said, he knew she was the one.
They had a church wedding in Mexico, and then he brought her here on a fiancee visa for their U.S.-legal ceremony.
At first, “she had a hard time. She has a big family down in Mexico. She left them to come up here to a different world,” Bautista said.
Now Angeles has settled in; she’s the mother of Selena, 4, Sebastian, 2, and Julissa, 1, a “stay-at-home” mom who doesn’t stay home much.
Bautista believes Port Angeles is still a good place to raise children and looks forward to watching his children grow up here, then go to college.
“I don’t feel any prejudice here” against his Mexican ethnicity, Bautista said. “I’ve never felt that.”
As for the attack of last spring, “I’ve put that ordeal behind me.”
The Port Angeles Police Department is actively investigating the case, according to Smith. Over the past nine months, “we have invested quite a bit” of detective time, Smith said.
Jason Viada, the department’s detective supervisor, added that a witness was interviewed “just the other day” and that he is confident that the police have a suspect, though he declined to estimate when that suspect may be arrested.
Bautista said he believes he knows who his attacker is.
“When I go out, I’m more aware of my surroundings,” he said.
“But I’m not going to let that stop me from doing what I have to do and what I like to do.”
Fiesta Jalisco is “like my first baby,” he said with a smile.
“I love this country” for the opportunities it has given him Bautista added.
Bautista’s friend and accountant Duane Wolfe said the restaurateur has also put considerable effort toward improving his operation.
“Most people don’t work their businesses as hard as he does. He works extremely hard,” Wolfe said.
He remarked, too, on the landscaping and design of the restaurant, which he considers some of the best-looking in Port Angeles.
The Fiesta Jalisco building used to be “just a small box,” Wolfe said, adding that it used to be The Big Scoop, an ice-cream parlor, in the 1980s.
Bautista, for his part, said the holiday season has started off well: After the Nov. 27 tree lighting downtown, Fiesta Jalisco saw a healthy rush of patrons.
“It’s a good feeling,” Bautista said, “being busy.”
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
