The day after my father died in August in Washington, DC, I used to be removing the trash in my oldsters’ rental development when I used to be intercepted by way of a garrulous 60-year-old janitor from El Salvador – we’ll name him César – who within the very little while he had identified my dad had reportedly clocked double-digit hours of dialog with him.
Listening to that my dad had succumbed to prostate most cancers after his medical doctors had driven counterproductive however extremely profitable chemotherapy remedies on him, César introduced his condolences and proceeded to inform me of his personal newest run-in with the United States healthcare machine. This transpired after he had a middle assault on the street and bystanders known as the police officers on him, assuming he was once under the influence of alcohol.
He sooner or later ended up on the health facility, the place he was once offered with an $80,000 invoice in trade for the posh of no longer loss of life. Whilst hospitalised, he gained a telephone name from his employer, who knowledgeable him that he was once fired for having a middle assault reasonably than appearing as much as paintings.
Having resided in the United States for twenty years as an undocumented employee, César would simply as quickly go back to El Salvador, he mentioned, however his grownup son nonetheless clung to the perception of “el sueno americano”, or the American dream. He shrugged with a grin of resignation and introduced into an lively recounting of some other misadventure within the so-called land of the loose.
Two decades, it so came about, was once the precise period of time I had so far spent warding off the United States, my nation of beginning, just like the plague – for more than a few causes, comparable to the will not to input into everlasting debt within the tournament of a clinical emergency. Avoidance had turn out to be tougher when my oldsters returned to the place of origin from Barcelona in 2021 because of a coronavirus pandemic-induced lapse in judgment.
After all, given my US passport, I had at all times been ready to take my pick out of alternative international locations during which to move my time – together with El Salvador, an more and more common vacation spot for the privileged gringo “expat” crowd however no longer this kind of protected position for the typical Salvadoran thank you largely to a large number of many years of US-backed right-wing state terror.
And but for plenty of Salvadorans and numerous folks at the receiving finish of US-fuelled distress, the entire “American dream” has by hook or by crook retained its mystique regardless of the truth that the truth at the floor in the United States itself is so frequently horrific.
For starters, a home panorama of poverty, homelessness, mass incarceration, mass shootings and criminally dear healthcare, schooling and housing choices must rarely represent the stuff of goals.
And for undocumented immigrants, the landscape will also be much more gruesome, what with pervasive discrimination, xenophobic vitriol, and US govt efforts to take youngsters clear of asylum-seeking oldsters and differently make lifestyles hell for other people who play an outsize position in maintaining the United States economic system.
In Might, 8 other people had been killed within the Texas town of Brownsville at the US-Mexico border when an SUV rammed into a bunch of basically Venezuelan pedestrians close to a refuge serving homeless other people and refugees.
In a while ahead of this incident, a staff of Venezuelan and Colombian pals of mine – whom I had met in February in Panama after they exited the huge refugee graveyard referred to as the Darien Hole en path to the United States – crossed into El Paso, some other Texas border the town. They had been detained by way of US immigration team of workers who, they informed me, communicated basically by means of curse phrases.
The Venezuelans within the staff had been sooner or later flown to Arizona and dumped again into Mexico; the Colombians had been launched into provisional “freedom” in the United States, which briefly proved to be underwhelming.
A couple of days into “freedom”, one of the most Colombians messaged me from the El Paso sidewalk the place he was once slumbering to inquire about returning to Colombia, the place, he mentioned, other people had been no less than no longer so petrified that they wouldn’t even talk to these in want. The United States was once an not possible nation, my buddy assessed, “particularly should you’re deficient”.
Such a lot for the “American dream”.
Why, then, does the dream persist within the international creativeness?
To make certain, fantasies will also be vital distractions from day by day struggling – and no much less in Colombia, the place US-backed right-wing state terror on behalf of worldwide capitalism killed 1000’s upon 1000’s of peasant farmers and different Colombians. In such scenarios, the dream of bodily and financial protection generally is a buoy, even supposing it occurs to be related to the rustic accountable for annihilating everybody’s goals.
There are different causes American dream mythology is so resilient. There may be the worldwide achieve of US “tradition”, ie, rapid meals, motion pictures and common soulless consumerism this is however understandably interesting to the have-nots of the arena.
The American dream could also be well-suited to the age of social media, which anyway is all about promoting false happiness. In spite of their categorically dismal cases in the United States, my Colombian pals promptly set about crafting upbeat TikTok productions – set to reggaeton song – to publicise an imagined model in their new lives to pals again house. In a single video, one in every of my pals sauntered down the sidewalk blissfully swinging buying groceries luggage.
Again in 2008, then-US president George W Bush remarked: “Loose marketplace capitalism is way over financial idea. It’s the engine of social mobility, the freeway to the American Dream.” To the linguistically challenged ex-president’s credit score, this was once all no less than grammatically proper.
However the fact of the subject is that US-directed loose marketplace capitalism – and its imposition, frequently at gunpoint, on different nations – is what drives a lot migration within the first position.
Disregard the “freeway to the American Dream”. The one position this freeway is going is a nightmare.
The perspectives expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.