In 2010 — the same year that Machete was released and his profile as an actor reached its highest point — Danny Trejo was diagnosed with liver cancer. This is documented in his Wikipedia biography and in other sources, and it is worth noting in the context of a life that has had a consistent pattern of serious physical challenges survived: the childhood overdose, the prison violence, and then, at sixty-six, a cancer diagnosis.
He survived the cancer. The specific treatment and recovery are not detailed in the publicly available sources that form the basis of this article. What is documented is that he continued working through the treatment and recovery period, and that the cancer did not produce the kind of extended professional absence that serious illness often creates. The Machete sequel was released in 2013, three years after the diagnosis.
The survival is documented. What the experience meant to him — how it intersected with the broader arc of his life and the philosophy he had been developing for four decades — is not documented in the sources available here in any detail. He has spoken about his survival more generally across his career, in terms of the childhood overdose and the prison years and the sobriety, framing each survival as a kind of gift that came with an obligation: you survived, so you have something to do with the survival.
The cancer year is a data point in a life that has had a number of moments at which survival was not guaranteed. That he has survived them — that he was seventy-five years old and physically capable of crawling into an overturned car in Sylmar in 2019 — is the product of those survivals stacking up, one on top of another, into a life that has extended further than many of the people who knew him in the 1960s would have predicted.