The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Title: The Undocumented Americans

Author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Published: 2020

Type: Nonfiction

Pages: 172

It is not torturous for the government. They want us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same, our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead with the Lord until the end to give them an answer.

In Brief:

A really powerful, personal, and necessary book – Cornejo Villavicencio's voice is incredibly, fearlessly strong, full of anger and insight and sadness and unexpected humor. It's not only about undocumented Americans, but also gender roles, parenting, religion, generational change – really can't recommend enough, especially now. 

Rating: 4.3

Synopsis:

(sigh) Goodreads:

“Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants--and to find the hidden key to her own.

Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented--and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the nation of singular, effervescent characters often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.

In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.

In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.”

Where I’m At:

An unsettling aspect of reading this book for me was Cornejo Villavicencio’s anger. It’s not constant, but it lurks throughout the pages of the book, suddenly jumping out at you in passages like the one I quoted above. 

The anger is justified, that’s not my issue. It’s anger itself. I don’t know how to cope with the emotion – I often don’t even recognize it when I feel it myself (it doesn’t help that when I’m angry I usually cry, which is confusing both to myself and others). When I sense it from other people, even just a little bit (or if I’m imagining it entirely) I freeze up, hands shaking, immediately terrified and desperate to find a way to fix it (I usually cry then, too, or come close to it). It’s something I’m working on with my therapist. In this book, I just had to sit in Cornejo Villavicencio’s anger, wait for it to flare up – it wasn’t fun. 

But there’s another aspect to my reaction to Cornejo Villavicencio’s anger, one that has less do with whatever personal issues I have with anger. Though I’m a liberal, and agree with Cornejo Villavicencio on pretty much all counts, politics hasn’t really made me angry. Why? Because it’s politics for me. I’m white, I’m cisgender, I’m economically stable, I’m able-bodied, I live in the bubble of San Francisco. I’m outraged by many policies of the Trump administration (and previous administrations!), appalled by the ways undocumented Americans and people of color are treated in this country, I try to do my part to make it better – but am I actually angry, like Cornejo Villavicencio? If I’m being honest, I’m not. Perhaps because it doesn’t affect me.

I should be, though.

I don’t entirely know who this book was “for.” Sometimes it’s clear. But Cornejo Villavicencio didn’t seem to be trying to persuade anybody. She wasn’t reaching for the heartstrings of politicians who consistently vote in a manner we would consider human rights violation in other countries, people who sneer at “illegal aliens” stealing “American jobs” even as they uplift “The American Dream” and those who come here “the Right Way.” 

So (perhaps selfishly) I think the book was maybe written in part for me, or people like me. To shake us from our privilege and social media posts and remind us that these are real humans, real Americans, people with flaws and hopes and contributions to this country with flaws and hopes of its own. 

Getting Into it:

This book defies genre. In some ways, it’s a memoir. In other ways, it’s a collection of biographies. It’s almost like journalism, though she makes a point to say she’s not a journalist:

I am not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed to get involved in the way I have gotten involved. Journalists, to the best of my knowledge, do not try to change the outcome of their stories as crudely as I do. I send water. I fight with immigration lawyers. I raise money. I make arrangements with supernature spirits to stop deportations. I try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to solve shit for their parents because these people are all my parents, I am their child, if I wasn’t their child – and I was their child – I should be patented and mass-produced and distributed to undocumented immigrants at Walmarts. I am a professional immigrant’s daughter.

Sometimes it also veers into fiction. At one point, Cornejo Villavicencio tells the story of an undocumented American, an alcoholic laborer who died during Hurricane Sandy. She painstakingly, heartbreakingly describes his final hours, saving a dying squirrel, making sure it doesn’t die alone, only to end the passage with:

Did this happen?

Are we in gangs?

Do we steal Social Security Numbers?

Do we traffic our own children across the border? 

Is this book nonfiction?

Can we imagine that he was capable of kindness, even as he was drinking? That he was capable of courage, even as he was wounded? 

What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?

That blew me away. I can tend to be traditionalist (“I’m an institutionalist!” I recently shouted into the phone to a friend, making her laugh) and wary of too much experimentation in the form, but in this book, it works. 

The Undocumented Americans is its own “thing,” and that “thing” is deeply personal. It’s written sort of like an eloquent stream of consciousness, or an “aspirational inner monologue,” as my friend commented in Nonfiction Book Club. Cornejo Villavicencio lets us in – she swears, she shows her anger, her sadness, her empathy, her dark humor. She’s confident without being preachy, telling you the facts rather than persuading you to change your mind. She doesn’t talk down to you. She doesn’t glorify herself or her mental illness, doesn’t try to be any certain way other than herself. 

So the story felt very much hers to tell, a very necessary and new perspective (as compared to, say, Uncanny Valley), yet she doesn’t make it all about herself. She seems to focus on people first (in a way that reminded me of Disability Visibility) just humanizing the immigrants in her stories for readers. When describing different Undocumented Americans who died during 9/11, she writes:

There was also Fernando Jimenez Molinar, who worked at a pizza shop nearby, delivering pies and washing dishes. He was nineteen years old. (My brother is nineteen years old. Jesus Christ, the hair above my brother’s lip, he’s so proud of it that he doesn’t shave. He writes spoken-word poetry and keeps a dream journal. I bought it for him: it has Batman on the cover. He collects comic books.) ... Who wanted pizza that early? Probably a finance bro coked up after a long night lying with numbers. Maybe he was high on Adderall. Hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and was finally hungry, but only for pizza. Probably a little older than Fernando, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. Harvard grad. Bro, is that my pizza?

That anger again. 

Cornejo Villavicencio does a remarkable job giving the different people in her stories distinct personalities, making their personalities shine, even in the short amount of time she gives each of them – remember, the book is less than 200 pages, and it’s packed with stories. She challenges the notion of what makes a “good” immigrant. She highlights the evil of taking advantage of the disadvantaged. 

She also sheds a light on stories I thought I knew. Her chapters on 9/11 and Flint stood out to me – both events that I thought I knew, highlighted in our national memory. Yet, there’s a whole other side to the stories that I never heard, a side about how much worse it was for the undocumented Americans in New York or Michigan at their respective times. How many long-term health effects they suffer. How much they sacrificed for the rest of us. 

There’s more in the book that I don’t have words for. Cornejo Villavicencio gets into parenting, particularly motherhood – her own, other mothers, herself as a mother. She discusses the differences between generations, the vivid contrast between her experience and that of her much younger brother, as well as gender roles, who takes care of the family. She talks candidly about her mental illness and the mental health of other immigrants, as well as just people in general. She gets into religion – I’ll just quote this bit, which I found so revealing:

The first hour of the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but overall it’s super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness, because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry, but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I’m not going to be the person who is ruining faithful migrants’ experience of community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer. 

In conclusion: I recommend that you read this book now. It’s timely, and I guarantee you haven’t read anything like it before. Cornejo Villavicencio is only 31, and I can’t wait to read much more from her in the future.