For 24 years, Juan Dominguez has been the head housekeeper at the Centreville Hall dormitory, home to nearly 545 students at the University of Maryland. He moves quietly with his broom and vacuum throughout the building’s lobby each day while his team of four others clean bathrooms, empty trash cans and mop floors in the common areas of the eight-story building.
“I try to help my coworker… I like it because I feel those people look happy,” said Dominguez, 60, as he rubbed his wrinkled, calloused hands together while processing the most accurate choice of words.
He is rarely greeted by a passerby. Students, like freshman Ari Abramovitz, say they may recognize the person who cleans on their floor but, “That’s about it,” he said.
Meanwhile, Dominguez has built relationships with a few students over the years. Eventually, he has to watch them move on from their studies.
“I love to see the graduation because everyone look[s] happy, emotional… with their father, their mother, their whole family,” he said. “I love it completely.”
Dominguez came to Maryland from Los Angeles after fleeing the civil war in El Salvador more than 40 years ago. Some 1.4 million Salvadorans have also come to the United States to escape the war and enduring instability, according to the Migration Policy Institute. In 2021, about 45 Hispanic employees worked on the university’s 141-member housekeeping staff, according to university data. Dominguez has worked on the Centreville staff longer than anyone.
On the first Friday of the university’s family weekend, Dominguez swept the building’s lobby with a push broom from a small storage room. Despite the presence of two coworkers, he kept to himself.
At the lobby’s desk, a student employee blasted indie music. Other housekeepers tuned it out with their own earbuds. Dominguez seemed satisfied with the sounds of vacuums and an 18-year-old’s playlist.
That same day, Dominguez’s wrinkled chin rested on his hands atop a broom handle as he admired the sunrise through one of the dorm’s arched windows.
“I feel comfortable, I try to stay as long as possible,” he said about his job at the university.
Dominguez grew up about a 45-minute drive southeast of the capital of San Salvador in rural San Pedro Masahuat, home to 25,000 people, where everyone knew their neighbors. He still prefers the simpler life there – one without the thrumming of car engines and the hustle of work commuters.
At age 19, he left his family in 1980 to find employment in the United States. Just a year into the Salvadoran civil war, Dominguez started his journey to meet his cousin in Los Angeles.
For three months he was stuck in Mexico City with no way to communicate with his family. Dominguez said he was lucky to find someone who gave him housing and food.
The family who provided him shelter in Mexico cautioned against his journey.
“They said: ‘don’t go to the United States because you take the risk of them putting you out and sending you back’,” he recalled being warned.
He eventually took buses to Los Angeles, but he had no idea where he was going. He remembers having to ask others for help and studying maps posted at different bus stations to find his way.
“We have to suffer a lot. The food is different, language is the same. Spanish but different words,” he said about the barriers he faced during his travels.
Dominguez didn’t have money to pay for the bus ticket and neither did his cousin, who arranged to have someone else pay off the fares for him.
“Somebody give me money to pay it off, it was a terrible situation,” he sighed.
In Los Angeles, he worked as a machine operator in a sewing factory. Dominguez knew very few people, he said, and wasn’t a fan of California’s weather. He first met his wife while living in an apartment with her cousin.
His two daughters and a son were born in Los Angeles.
In 1995, Dominguez and his wife decided to find better jobs. His wife moved to Maryland first and he followed. His children attended local schools.
“When we came here, I didn’t know the places or the people,” he said. “The hard part is we had no idea how we get started.”
He was hesitant to take a housekeeping job at the university because he had never worked a cleaning job before. The department offered three months of training to help him.
After 24 years, Dominguez now thinks it’s time to retire which he plans to do next year.
“I would like to continue here, but my time is coming,” he said.
Like many Salvadorans who left during the civil war, he hopes to return to El Salvador with his wife to live out his life.
Fleeing a Destructive War
But El Salvador has sunk deep into criminal activity over the last four decades. Home to about 6.5 million people, it has become a transit country for drug trafficking from Colombia to the United States.
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that rural areas in El Salvador have experienced an increase in gang activity and presence since the end of the civil war.
The gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18 account for 84% of the forced displacements, according to the Civil Society Roundtable Against Forced Displacement by Violence and Organized Crime in El Salvador. Out of 144 specific cases of displacement, 11 were in the La Paz department, where Dominguez is from.
The harsh law enforcement policies of President Nayib Bukele has helped decrease the crime rate since he was elected in 2019. He introduced a state of emergency to crack down on gangs that have terrorized citizens with executions, extortion and kidnappings. But Bukele’s campaign also suspends some civil rights and bans journalists from reporting on gang activity. His approval rating is nearly 85%, making him the most popular president in El Salvador’s history.
Since August 2022, more than 50,000 Salvadorans suspected of gang involvement have been detained.
Begun in 1979, a 12-year civil war between the government and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, cost 75,000 lives. The United States, in the name of fighting Soviet-backed Communism, provided more than a billion dollars in military aid to El Salvador from 1980 to 1990, according to the General Accounting Office.i
The war displaced more than a million Salvadorans within the country. The U.S. government granted 195,000 Salvadorans Temporary Protected Status visas until the Trump administration removed protections in 2018.
Found Family
Packing up his life has been no easy task for Dominguez, who has traveled great distances in search of stability. He remains hopeful about returning home to his mother.
In 2003, Dominguez bought a truck that he plans on driving to El Salvador, despite how old it’s gotten.
“It don’t look good, but it’s working good. I keep it,” he said.
Until he leaves, Dominguez is content at Centreville Hall, 24 years on. “It’s fair and I love it.”
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