How Weddings and Hospitals Forge Familia

We Show Up for the People We Love—In Times of Joy or Sorrow, Often With Tortillas

“Hija, you have to go. You’re going to miss the wedding,” said my mom, weak but urgent. My husband and I would be hosting my niece’s wedding in our home that April afternoon. My son Michael was setting up chairs in the backyard; my husband Ian, a judge, was getting ready to perform the ceremony.

Mom and I were in the county hospital ER, where we’d been for over 24 hours since she’d fallen outside her home.

I didn’t want to leave. But then two of my tias—my 90-year-old mother’s cousins, themselves in their …

by Natalia Molina | October 3, 2024

The Stories Doctors Tell

Physicians and Patients Stitch Together Narratives to Diagnose and Heal

by Jay Baruch | February 1, 2023

The belly pain is so bad that Mrs. Alves*, a woman in her 40s, is worming uncomfortably on the ER stretcher. “I need an answer,” she says. I promise her …

How Hospital Rooms Went from Airy Temples to “Inhuman” Machines

Architecture Used to Pamper Patients. Then Designers Began Prizing Efficiency.

By Jeanne S. Kisacky | June 7, 2017

In the March 1942 issue of the journal Modern Hospital, Charles F. Neergaard, a prominent New York City hospital design consultant, published a layout for a hospital inpatient department that …

The Dogged Determination Behind a Decade of Health Gains in South L.A.

Once in Competition, Community Health Centers United to Improve Access and Hold Community Leaders Accountable

By Nina Vaccaro | July 7, 2016

Health care, and access to it, has been quietly improving in South Los Angeles over the last decade. But, as I’ve seen firsthand while working with a collective network of …

National Oversight or Not, All Health Care, Like All Politics, Is Local

Leaders of Britain’s NHS and America’s Mayo Clinic Enviously Eye Each Other’s Domains

By Andrés Martinez | April 7, 2016

At first glance, America’s fragmented, private health care delivery system and Britain’s state-run National Health Service have little in common. But both nations’ contrasting approaches to caring for their populations …

Is Universal Health Care an Impossible Fantasy?

It’s Difficult to Imagine a Single-Payer System That’s Both Politically and Practically Viable in America

April 6, 2016

For more than a century, America has argued about how to share the costs of health care. Drawing from new government-sponsored insurance programs in Germany and England, Progressive reformers made …

Get More Zócalo