Reckoning with the American Dream in Las Vegas

Las Vegas, Before an Election by Monica Macansantos

On my first trip down the Strip, while sitting inside the car of my mother’s friend, I find myself performing the futile activity of counting hotel room windows floating above me at night. My imagination does the work of multiplying the number of people inside their climate-controlled rooms switching on their faucets, taking showers, and disposing their take-out containers, as though to punish my mind into acquiescence. In the daytime, the land is bone dry, floating upwards and sticking to the soles of my shoes, the membranes of my nostrils. And yet this city maintains a boundless faith in what many have called the American Dream, bullying the land into supporting an illusion of limitless resource and wealth.

“Welcome to Las Vegas,” my mother’s friend says behind the wheel.

I let go of a chuckle, allowing my apprehensions to fade beneath these blinking lights. 

A few weeks later, on what I’ve been told is an unusually warm October evening, I follow a new friend’s lead through a maze of gambling tables and slot machines, guided by signs that direct us to the casino’s back garden where a circus tent takes shape behind a decorated archway. We step outside the casino’s airconditioned air into the Las Vegas heat, and weave through a crowd of tourists before walking beneath the archway where guards check our IDs. A large fake tree invites me and my companion to take a selfie together beneath its neon canopy, before we claim an empty table. We wait for my companion’s friend, an acrobat who performs for Absinthe, a show that takes place nightly beneath the circus tent. He can get us in for free, according to my companion, a writer who’s doing research on Chinese acrobats in Las Vegas. I notice the softness of the plastic turf beneath our feet, how it sinks under my heels like an indoor carpet. A few days later, while I listen to the local NPR station, a man begs Las Vegans to stop using artificial turfs—they contain carcinogens, he says, that float into the air as the plastic material disintegrates in the desert heat. But on this evening, I have no clue about the carcinogens I may be inhaling, and my cluelessness allows me to be simply astonished by this fake garden in the desert, as I stare at this tree that glows instead of providing shade.   

My companion’s friend materializes in a t-shirt and jeans, and insists on putting our dinner on the company tab before disappearing into the tent to fetch us bottles of water. When he returns, he sets down the bottles in front of us with a proud nonchalance before taking his seat, leaning back in his chair while the broad muscles of his torso push at his t-shirt’s material. He and my friend have spoken before, and they speak to each other in a mixture of English and Mandarin before my friend turns to me and shares that her friend has worked as an acrobat since the age of ten. Apparently, this isn’t unusual for Chinese acrobats who perform in numerous acrobatic shows across the Strip: They are initially recruited by the Chinese government to train in state-run acrobatic troupes, before eventually being lured to Las Vegas with the promise of better wages. For our acrobat friend, it all worked out. “They pay me well and I get to choreograph my own routines,” he tells us, eager to share his immigrant success story. “I bought my own home, and I brought my mom to this country. She’s an American citizen now, and she’s very happy.” He possesses the athletic grace of a ballet dancer as he matches his fluid gestures with the limpid resonance of his words. Speaking in English, perhaps for my benefit, he talks about investing his money because, as he says, “Taking risks is the only way you can build wealth.” I think about the gamblers we walked past on our way to this artificial garden, cloaking themselves in cigarette smoke while sliding dollar bills through slot machines and slapping them onto tables laden with chips. The glowing tower of Ceasar’s Palace looms above us, pushing itself into the darkening sky with an audacity that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

Later that evening, my companion and I are sitting inside the circus tent, watching our acrobat friend and his female partner holding each other by the hand while forming various shapes and lines in the air. I find myself holding my breath while they catch and release each other, their bodies in perfect sync as they flow as one. How many accidents have these acrobats had in their years of training, before finally pulling off these feats without distrusting themselves, their partners, or the air in which they rise and fall? The pair ends their routine, rising through the air and through the tent’s eye to the sound of our clapping, and I ask myself why I’m here, in this tent pulsating with lights and music, surrounded by drunk tourists who scream and cackle at the bawdy jokes of a bowtied emcee.  

Like many new migrants to the city, I came to Las Vegas to chase an opportunity made possible by its wealth—though in my case, it’s a writing fellowship hosted by UNLV, offering me support for a new book I’m writing, and not a job in a casino or in the city’s various resorts and restaurants. This isn’t my first time in America, since I have been to this country for graduate school, as a visitor on writing fellowships, and during my childhood, when my family accompanied my mother while she pursued her PhD on a Fulbright. I navigate my new home with a mixture of familiarity and a newcomer’s wariness. My first few days in Las Vegas have me pulling out the accent I acquired during my graduate school years in Texas, and performing day-to-day tasks with the feigned confidence of a newcomer who nervously awaits the inevitable mistake that will lead to their exposure. I know the assumptions Americans make of people with foreign accents who don’t have the usual catchphrases at hand when purchasing an item or talking to someone on the street: these are assumptions my own parents have had to deal with during their own visits to America, cementing their status as outsiders when navigating the most quotidian of interactions. 

My accent gives me a tentative pass, but also creates confusion: My chatty Uber drivers are in disbelief when I tell them that I came here straight from the Philippines. I fill the uncomfortable silences that follow with convenient explanations: that I’d lived in Austin, and had spent my childhood in Delaware. “So you’re from the East Coast,” one driver says, which seems to make him feel better. He then tells me about the other cities where he has worked as an Uber driver before finally ending up in Las Vegas: Like many Uber drivers I’ve talked to, he’s a fellow traveler, finding a home in this city that welcomes more than its fair share of drifters. “The money’s good, but you wouldn’t believe how many weirdos I’ve picked up,” he says, steering us down the sinuous, illuminated curves of Paradise Road. “Two weeks ago, I picked up a guy who’d completely forgotten his name.”

I knew there were Filipinos in Las Vegas, as there are in other cities outside the Philippines where I’ve lived—we are a nation of voyagers, bravely packing up our lives and chasing opportunities in far-flung parts of the world. Throughout my own travels as a writer chasing grants and fellowships to support my writing, I’ve met Filipinos at ice cream parlors in Austin, inside restaurant kitchens in rural Maine, and in thrift stores in Nashville. But I didn’t expect to encounter the largest Filipino community I’d find abroad in Las Vegas until my program director took me to Seafood City, a Filipino grocery chain in the US, after picking me up from the airport. I didn’t quite know what to feel when I saw a country I had left behind nearly twenty-four hours before represented in nearly identical form as I stepped into the supermarket’s entrance, spotting familiar chain restaurants and bakeries before taking a cart and pushing it down aisles stocked with familiar products. I’d run into Filipinos in the days and weeks that followed, at the fitting rooms of clothing stores and inside a crowded bus, at restaurants and pharmacies where I found myself blurting out words in Tagalog to cashiers and waiters, who’d likewise respond in kind.  

Back in the Philippines, I’d sometimes hear of Filipino immigrants going straight to Las Vegas to find work at the casinos upon their arrival in America, and as I walk across casino floors, I see Filipinos, mostly women, stationed behind gambling tables in their regulation bowties and black vests. I do not get the chance to talk to these dealers since I’m not a gambler, and usually just find myself in these spaces because of a restaurant or show inside a casino that I want to get to. But during one of my Uber trips, I get the chance to talk to a Filipino driver who worked at a casino upon his arrival in Las Vegas in the early nineties. “The money’s good, and the benefits are also good,” he tells me in Tagalog. “I had a friend who was a journalist back home, and came here looking for work before becoming a dealer. He went up the ranks very quickly and is now a cash manager at a casino.”

“And so you can just go in with zero experience,” I say, while we make our way from Seafood City. I have been in town for about two months by now, and taking a bus to Seafood City before returning home in an Uber with my bags of groceries in its trunk has become a regular routine for me. This grocery run, however, has been made surreal and dream-like by the shock of meeting Bill Clinton and shaking his hand while waiting for my Uber beside a cartload of groceries.

“All of us had zero experience,” my driver continues, steering us past rows of orange cones sweeping across Maryland Parkway, the same way he steers clear of Bill Clinton’s visit to Seafood City with a deftness that I nonetheless notice. “And that’s the beauty of working at a casino. They don’t expect you to know anything, but they know you can pick things up on the job.”

“Did your friend ever practice journalism here?” 

After a short pause, he says, “No, as far as I know. But he was a journalist back home.”

It’s one thing I notice about Filipinos overseas, whether I meet them at a party or at a store, in the dry, open landscape of Austin, Texas or in the lush, rolling hills of Wellington, New Zealand: an eagerness to name the occupations they once held in our motherland, or else a curiosity in regards to the roles I once occupied in a country they also unhesitatingly call “backward,” “corrupt,” and “poor.” Sooner or later, their criticisms of our shared homeland fall away, revealing a sentimental attachment to the lives they left behind and the identities they shed to survive in a land that promises new beginnings. They may be Uber drivers or salespeople in this new country, but in the Philippines, they were engineers, accountants, bankers. Those who tell me, “Pride can’t feed you,” when they begrudgingly learn that I’m an artist in this country, and not a nurse, will also randomly mention the prizes they won for their research back home and the businesses they helped start from the ground up, their eyes turning wistful as they stare into a past that remains invisible to other people’s eyes. If they’ve resigned themselves to taking their pride down a few notches in these faraway lands, their memories of their past selves remain intact, waiting to be pulled out like museum pieces preserved in glass when they meet a fellow countryman who carries a similar burden of memory, and knows the full weight of their loss. 

My Uber driver then says, “You’re a writer. I assume you’re good at giving speeches, that kind of thing.”

“I get by” I say, unprepared for this sudden turn in the conversation. 

“It’s just that I want to improve my public speaking skills,” he says, while turning into my downtown neighborhood. “Do you have any advice as someone who’s good at that?”

Amused by his overestimation of my skills at public speaking, a task I often loathe, I tell him about my experiences as a college instructor in the Philippines before mentioning Toastmasters, a group I’m hoping he joins to get the answers I cannot provide. “It’s a skill you get better at over time, just like driving. At some point, it becomes second nature to you,” I say, as we approach my building. 

“And it’s a skill all of us should have,” he says, before pulling up in front of my building’s entrance. “Who knows,” he adds with a smile, “It might come in handy when we decide to run for president.”

I try to stay calm when I’m walking with two writer friends down Fremont Street and we see a large mural with Trump’s face rising, God-like, from an ocean wave of stars and stripes. “Don’t look,” a friend says, and I turn away, but not without stealing a quick glance at the mural. I tell myself that the mural will still be there even if I look away, and that all the Trump signs I’ve seen behind car windows and draped on fences won’t disappear, even if I close my eyes and pretend they’re not there. I am afraid when I see these signs, but I must also acknowledge this hate and fear when it makes itself clear to me.  

My cousin, her husband, and her childhood best friend fly in from the Bay Area for a weekend getaway. While my cousin’s friend feeds hundred-dollar bills into a slot machine at the Venetian, my cousin complains about her parents, lifelong Republicans who have been sucked into conspiracy theories about vaccines and the federal government. 

“This is what makes me scared,” I say, as I watch the dollar amount at the bottom of the screen slowly rise to the tune of a button push. “Normal people believe these things.”

“I’m hopeful,” my cousin’s friend tells us, pivoting on her swivel chair to briefly face us while images of fruit, treasure chests, and gold numbers cascade down neatly drawn columns on a screen. Her words give me some hope, even if she eventually loses all the money she has fed into the slot machines. She proceeds to lose even more money at craps before staying on to recoup the money she has lost. 

My cousin and I leave her, finding our way toward the elevators in this maze of gambling tables and slot machines. There’s nothing about her friend’s losses that makes me doubt her optimism for the elections, which I find slipping from my mind amidst the cheery, jangling sounds and bright, colorful lights. After taking the wrong elevator that takes us to the wrong set of floors, we take another elevator back to the ground floor and get onto the right elevator, which takes us back to my cousin and her husband’s hotel room. I take a seat beside a window that offers panoramic views of the Wynn’s golf course thriving in the 100-degree heat, and I listen to my cousin as she reports her friend’s losses to her husband. It’s only later, when I’m back at my campus office, regaling officemates with this anecdote about my weekend on the Strip, that I begin to wonder if this woman may have wound up losing more money. “There’s a point where you just have to cut your losses and walk away,” the director of my program says, and I agree with her. 

The promises of this city remain glimmering in the distance, out of reach but never quite out of sight, as I sit in my bus heading back to my apartment from the university, watching the towers of the Wynn and the Encore turn gold in the waning afternoon light while blue collar workers, some still wearing their company uniforms, settle into the seats around me after their daylong shifts. Maryland Parkway runs parallel to the Strip, a row of imposing casinos and resorts that rises from the city’s flatness to slice through the sky with its gleaming metallic lines. Along that thoroughfare, I see run-down strip malls, trash-strewn bus shelters, and men and women who drag scuffed, dirty suitcases containing their life possessions like travelers with nowhere to go. A woman in shorts and tank top crosses the street in front of the bus like this, her pale skin clinging to her bones while the wheels of her suitcase judder across the sidewalk, sending quivers through her skeletal face. A woman I’ve come to know as a regular on my bus line bobs up and down over the handle of her metal cart, her wrinkled mouth twitching helplessly over her toothless gums. I tell myself that turning away is a form of respect, and that these people with visible markings of drug abuse on their bodies do not want their own degradation to be turned into spectacle. I’m like others in this bus who stare outside the window or at their phones as we sit and stand beside everyday signs of despair. For many of us, we have our own personal struggles to grapple with, leaving us with little energy to contend with the sufferings of others. I hear a man seated behind me mention to his friend that he has just been released from prison and is looking to start over, while I overhear from another man in a blue Greyhound uniform, who has offered his seat to me before spending the rest of his trip standing, that he hopes to hold onto his new job for a while because he has three kids to feed. When fights break out at the back of the bus, many of us keep our gazes fixed ahead, sharing the implicit knowledge that the shouting will ease before one or both participants voluntarily get off at the next stop, if the driver doesn’t kick them off. Some of us are simply more vocal in our frustrations, and this, too, we learn to accommodate in this cramped, shared space. 

I can afford to buy a car with the money my host organization pays me, and even have a parking spot delegated to me in the gated apartment complex where I enjoy free housing. And yet I choose to take the bus to campus for my weekly office hours, ever mindful of the money I’m able to save while taking public transportation. This is the most I’ve made as a writer, and I attempt to live frugally in this city of many temptations, having witnessed how one’s luck can easily run out. If I were driving a nice car past the many homeless encampments that dot the streets outside the Strip, I wonder if I’d merely be deceiving myself about the invisible line that supposedly keeps many in this city safe from the bad fortunes of others.

I begin taking early morning walks around my neighborhood, getting my body to move in the open air before the intense desert heat begins to beat down on the pavement. I am warned by people working at my host program, as well as by locals I meet, that the neighborhood in which I live isn’t the safest, but I cannot stand the sense of disconnection I have from my new surroundings when I keep myself sequestered inside my apartment. 

The building is new, the neighborhood is generally quiet, and my fully-furnished unit contains all the conveniences of first-world living, making housework easier, even soothing, when I take breaks from my writing to cook, clean, and do laundry. There are trees in the complex’s fenced courtyard and a bookstore downstairs, inviting me to peruse its shelves for books that are hard for me to find back home in the Philippines. It feels like a far cry from the dangerous neighborhood I can already see another new friend visualizing with slightly narrowed eyes, when I mention where I live at the tango festival where we meet a few weeks after my arrival in the city. “Are you sure you feel safe there?” she asks me, while pairs of dancers swirl past us beneath low lights. “Because it’s not the safest neighborhood.” 

The usual morning hush envelops the streets when I step outside for a walk, and I am comforted by the sight of trees and manicured bushes planted in the front lawns of law offices occupying what were once residential homes. That they’re almost all accident and injury law firms amuses me: one wouldn’t suspect, by the emptiness of these streets, that it’s a city where their services are needed. Perhaps it’s the deceptive sense of safety I draw from the law’s heavy presence in this neighborhood that helps me briefly forget the troubles of this place. When I see traces of unhoused lives on these streets, like an empty plastic tray and dirty fork tucked beneath a manicured bush, or a pile of clothes hastily shed, I remind myself of what a friend whose brother was unhoused for some time told me: The vast majority of homeless people aren’t violent, but are simply forced to live out the most private aspects of their lives in the open. 

It’s when I come across an abandoned encampment with an assortment of glass bottles and needles that I put a halt to my morning walks. “You should find a gym,” the assistant director of my program says, when I tell her what I saw. 

I feed my body’s hunger for movement at the university pool when I’m on campus, and at a pilates studio in the arts district where I seem to be the only student who doesn’t drive to class. I pump my muscles and strain my lungs to the sound of energetic pop music issuing forth from stereos tucked away from sight. I grow addicted to this rush of endorphins as I push my body towards an invisible goal, in this country of enormous swimming pools and cheerful pilates instructors who gently prod me past my limits. As I float on my back at the university pool, darting through the water with every kick and stroke, I can almost feel my spirit pulling my body toward a future that this country, with its seemingly infinite possibilities, has opened up for me. 

I carry this optimism with me when I come home to my apartment and return to my desk, no longer feeling like that version of myself from my graduate school days who felt watched and monitored when I sat down to write. I have moved past that, or at least this is what I believe while I sit in an apartment I could have only dreamed of living in when I was younger. I slowly come to accept this apartment, my position, and the respect people have for me as a power I now hold. I am reluctant to call it this, but it’s the only word I can find that describes my newfound confidence in what I do. While I watch the afternoon light sharpening the fringes of the mountains beyond from my window, I feel a renewed hope in myself, in this country that has allowed me to harbor this hope, in this city that, for all its nauseating excesses, has thrown some of its luck at me. Is it possible to share this luck with everyone, including the people who sleep rough right outside my apartment when I slip into my warm, comfortable bed at night? I struggle to reconcile what I want to believe with what I have seen, though I want to convince myself, based on what America has been willing to provide to a foreigner like me, that this country is also capable of shining its grace on those who have rarely felt it. 

I’m not sure if I should be reassured or frightened by the veneer of politeness that Trump supporters maintain while openly wearing the codes that communicate their spite. Nonetheless, I am shocked when the friendly, chatty Black man seated at the back seat of my shared Uber gets off at a Trump rally, which is the first time I see the red hat he’s wearing. 

Then again, don’t I have Filipino relatives and family friends who are Trump supporters, who justify their political leanings by launching into rants about “illegal” immigrants sitting around and getting free housing, healthcare, and education, while they sacrifice everything to reap these benefits for themselves and their children? I have seen this selfishness before, from people who haven’t necessarily been left untouched by the munificence of the American Dream—I’ve sat inside their large houses as a welcome guest, while they complained about how unfair it was that they’ve had to pay such steep a price for the life America has given them, while others, by virtue of their disadvantage, have it easy. 

I’m reminded of a visit I once paid to a family friend in the Houston suburbs more than a decade ago, during which she complained that her son’s high school classmate could go to college for free, “just because his mother’s a drug addict,” while her son had to take out onerous loans from Sallie Mae. “I’ve been a law-abiding citizen throughout my life here, and this is what I get,” she said, while we sat inside her high-ceilinged living room. I remember its windows above us letting in so much light, it almost felt like a church, though I hesitated to ask what god this was all dedicated for. 

Though I’ve tried to reason with my countrymen who complain about the sacrifices they’ve made to give themselves and their children a fair shot in this country, I’m unable to get past their unwillingness to see past their own struggles. When they think about America, they don’t think about the people they share this country with, but about the promises this country has made to them that have only been half-fulfilled. They left behind careers, friendships, and possibilities in the old country to chase a dream America promised them from afar, and so I understand their disappointment when America extracts even more from them to make a fraction of its promises come true. But must the fulfillment of a dream come at the expense of other people’s happiness, those who can only afford to catch glimpses of that dream while struggling to get by? 

Thanks to someone who works at my host program, I get tickets to another show on the Strip, and I bring along another new friend, a Filipina I met at a book club I am organizing as part of my fellowship. I wait for her at a busy alleyway beside the Linq Hotel on the evening we’ve chosen to see the show, and just as the sun is beginning to set, I see her striding toward me, past a tall topless woman with tasseled pasties on her nipples, who asks us if we’d like to take a picture with her while my friend and I embrace. We ignore the topless woman while we turn in the direction of the restaurants lining the alleyway, and we exchange the usual pleasantries, asking each other what we want for dinner and how our day has been. With the elections a few days away my friend mentions seeing AOC at the university museum where she works. She knows I shook hands with Bill Clinton the previous week at Seafood City, and we talk about our shock when meeting these stars of the Democratic Party in the flesh—with the polls being so close, though, we understand why they’re flying across the country to talk to people and get out the vote. We talk about this before conversation inevitably takes us down another route, in the direction of what we hesitate to say aloud. 

My friend is afraid, and so am I; while we walk past twinkling restaurant signs toward a giant Ferris Wheel that dominates the sky, I tell her about a scene in Buster Keaton’s One Week where he and his new wife cover each other’s eyes while a train rushes toward their portable prefab home. “That’s how I feel,” I tell her, as the evening deepens and the lights around us shine brighter. She seems distracted, and I can’t fault her: I, too, find myself distracted by the cheery music floating toward us, the sound of laughter, the smell of food.  

At the restaurant where we choose to eat before the show, I complain about the size of the quiche I’m served, which was an item I chose from the menu because it was listed as an appetizer. “You’re not used to the sizes of the servings here?” my friend asks me, a question I get asked no matter how many times I visit the US. It’s true that I can never get over the portion sizes here: It’s as if they’re made intentionally to taunt the capacities of our stomachs. The portions are impossible to consume, and we’re made to accept this excess as a fact of life as our leftovers are carried away and disposed of far from our sight.

My new friend trained as a folk dancer in the Philippines before putting her training on hold when she immigrated with her family to America. She’s excited about this show’s unique premise as we make our way to the entrance and I pull up our tickets on my phone, because it will give her the chance to dance on an illuminated floor, alongside the show’s regular performers. Disco music from the ‘70s pulses around us while we walk up a glimmering staircase that takes us to a ‘70s-themed bar. While we look for a spot in the room to get settled, performers on roller skates begin encircling us, performing tricks on a spot on the floor that the audience obediently vacates, before they guide us toward the dance floor at the other end of the hall. But we aren’t allowed to walk through its doors before a drag diva extends us a formal invitation. While I listen to her profanity-laced spiel, I tell myself that the world will be all right, as long as we keep telling each other jokes and laughing at the people who attempt to stamp out our joy. With a glittery swish of her gloved hand, the diva proclaims that disco’s not dead, and we loudly give our assent before she leads us inside. 

After the performers retreat to the corners of the square stage that surrounds us, I try to match my friend’s fluid moves with whatever I can think of, while the dance floor continues to flicker and pulsate beneath our feet. My friend shows no signs of fatigue as other audience members begin their shy retreat to the door, and I try to match her energy with mine, moving with the music while I go through my limited repertoire of moves. We dance like no one else is watching us, like the DJ will never run out of songs to play, like the illuminated squares beneath the glass floor will never stop coaxing our bodies into joyous movement. I hold onto this moment for as long as I can, before my friend yells, through the music, if I’d like to get dessert at the restaurant outside. 

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