SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – In the city’s Colonial District, a five-minute walk from the barrio of San Carlo, deportees stand on every corner, middle-aged men who speak perfect English and carry themselves with an inner-city swagger.

They congregate in the capital to market their English skills: guiding tours, selling pictures, changing money, sometimes dealing drugs. Work, particularly for deportees, is hard to find. Many frequently go hungry. They are healthier than the heroin addicts, not so desperate – but they are very far from content.

Most are drug offenders, who, the stories go, got involved with the wrong crowd as young men growing up in America’s rough neighborhoods. Among criminal deportees, nearly 25% lived more than 20 years in America, according to Nina Siulc, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at NYU who specializes in the people caught up in the deportation program.

With probably most of them leaving behind children in America, perhaps as many as 50% have already left the Dominican Republic, according to Ms. Siulc’s research, sneaking back into America illegally.

Manuel Padilla, an old-timer in the deportee community, can list more than a dozen deportees he knows who died after falling prey to drugs or AIDS. For Padilla, who arrived 12 years ago, keeping out of trouble is a daily struggle.

“I’m not going to use drugs to forget, I’m not going to waste my spirit, my soul,” Padilla said. “Here what you got to do is go along with the flow. I’m not going to waste myself. No way in the world.”

Padilla served 40 months in state prison in the 1970s when, facing robbery and drug charges, he accepted a plea bargain.

Here, in the land where he was born, he often sits alone among the tourists in a Colonial District cafe or at a park overlooking the tranquil Caribbean Sea and thinks back to his youth working at Mama Pizza’s on West 105th Street in Manhattan, playing ball with “Alfonso the Italian” at Riverside Park, or dancing at discotheques downtown.

“The tears go down and people go, damn, that guy is going crazy,” Padilla said, building the sentences with his hands. “I figure I got another 10 to 15. But I don’t want to do it here, I want to do it in New York with my family.”

Padilla insists his days as a “Curious George” troublemaker are long past. Growing up one of seven children in an apartment next to the Douglas Projects on the Upper West Side, he seemed to attract trouble. At 14 he started with marijuana. Three years later he was picked up on robbery charges.

Nearly 48 and infected with HIV, Padilla is not ready to accept that he will die alone in this steamy capital.

He went back to school to learn to read and write Spanish and has become a tour guide, introducing foreign visitors to Santo Domingo’s bright historic beginnings as the first city built by Columbus. The highlight of his year is in the summer, when he supervises an intercultural youth exchange between American and Dominican athletes.

His mother, Maria, is a proud woman who raised seven children in Washington Heights without ever taking a government handout.

“He was so small when he came to this country,” Ms. Padilla said from her apartment in Manhattan – and breaking down in tears. “All that he learned, he learned here.”

On a recent visit here in July, she found her son’s health had deteriorated. Now, almost 70, she wants to fight to get her son back to America, working with a lawyer to petition his case.

According to immigration lawyers, however, despite his illness and his family connections, his chances of returning to live in New York are very slim.

In Padilla’s tiny rented room on the main drag of the Colonial District, the book he has been reading, “The Purpose Driven Life,” a gift from his mother, is carefully protected in a Ziploc bag. The next chapter is “Reason for Everything.” In another box, stashed away in his neat room, he keeps his “green card” issued in the 1970s, with a picture of him wearing a huge Afro.

He has fully prepared himself for a visit by the Department of Homeland Security – even though the American agency does not make overseas house calls to meet with visa applicants.

“I’m ready to do my interview with the American authorities,” Manuel Padilla said, using a tour guide’s practiced motions to demonstrate his neat, drug-free room, and his religious-oriented self-help books. “Now that I’m going to be 50 years old, I’ll show them it’s not the same ignorance, the same stupid guy. Just get me back to the U.S., please.”