The day after my father died in August in Washington, DC, I was taking out the trash in my parents’ apartment building when I was intercepted by a garrulous 60-year-old janitor from El Salvador – we’ll call him César – who in the very short time he had known my dad had reportedly clocked double-digit hours of conversation with him.
Hearing that my dad had succumbed to prostate cancer after his doctors had pushed counterproductive but highly lucrative chemotherapy treatments on him, César offered his condolences and proceeded to tell me of his own latest run-in with the US healthcare system. This transpired after he had a heart attack in the street and bystanders called the cops on him, assuming he was drunk.
He eventually ended up at the hospital, where he was presented with an $80,000 bill in exchange for the luxury of not dying. While hospitalised, he received a phone call from his employer, who informed him that he was fired for having a heart attack rather than showing up to work.
Having resided in the US for 20 years as an undocumented worker, César would just as soon return to El Salvador, he said, but his adult son still clung to the notion of “el sueño americano”, or the American dream. He shrugged with a smile of resignation and launched into an energetic recounting of another misadventure in the so-called land of the free. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.