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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.
"Karla's book sheds light on people's personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard."--Selena Gomez
FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD AWARD * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL, AND TIME
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 singular, effervescent characters across the nation 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, Karla 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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Villavicencio draws on her background as an undocumented immigrant and Harvard University graduate to deliver a profoundly intimate portrayal of the undocumented immigrant experience in America. She speaks with Latin American workers who lack documentation to prove they helped to clean up Ground Zero, and therefore cannot get compensation for their health issues; women in Florida who share medications with each other and rely on clandestine pharmacies and botanicas for their health care; immigrants affected by the Flint, Mich., water crisis in "disturbingly specific" ways; families struggling in the aftermath of a parent's deportation; and undocumented people living in a church sanctuary in New Haven, Conn. Villavicencio interweaves her own story with these accounts, reflecting on her relationship with her aging parents and their decision to leave her behind in Ecuador for several years as they worked to pay off debts and save enough money to bring her to the U.S. She portrays her subjects' pain with messy familiarity rather than pathos, yielding profiles that are both exceptional and emblematic. Though she writes that she'd "honestly rather die than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe," Villavicencio's highly personal and deeply empathetic perspective serves as a powerful rebuttal to characterizations of undocumented immigrants as criminals and welfare cheats. Readers will be deeply moved by this incandescent account. (May)Correction: The author's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this review.
Booklist Review
Cornejo Villavicencio is an undocumented American, Harvard graduate, Yale doctoral candidate, and journalist who has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Daily Beast. She is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient born in Ecuador whose book shines as true testimonio (a classic Latin American genre combining fiction and nonfiction). Based on fieldwork from Ground Zero to Miami, solidly researched and footnoted, this chronicle is framed by her own family's experience with immigration and the relationships that blossomed between her and her similarly undocumented subjects. This valuable and authentic inquiry is powerfully embellished with magical imaginings, as when she envisions a man drowning during Hurricane Sandy's last moments. Cornejo Villavicencio's unfiltered and vulnerable voice incorporates both explosive profanity and elegiac incantations of despair, as, for example, when she internalizes the hatred toward brown people manifest in the poisoning of Flint, MIchigan's water supply. She gives of herself unstintingly as she speaks with undocumented day laborers, older people working long past retirement age, and a housekeeper who relies on the botanica and voodoo for health care. Cornejo Villavicencio's challenging and moving testimonio belongs in all collections.
Guardian Review
Icame to The Undocumented Americans thinking I already knew how it would read. There have been a number of books in recent years about people who cross borders without official permission - the refugees and the migrants, the desperate and the brave. Such reports bear a peculiar burden. They have to encompass extraordinary trauma and everyday humanity to wake us up to the violence inflicted on those who are not citizens, and to reassure us of our shared humanity. Laudable as these motives are, they can have a deadening effect on prose. Many such accounts are too aware of their moral purpose to indulge in fripperies such as wit or humour. And at times this book does drift into well-meaning reportage. The stories of undocumented people who worked at Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11, for instance, are recounted with mournful anguish. But what sets The Undocumented Americans apart and keeps you pinned to the page is its ferocity. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is undocumented herself, and her rage and courage provide the book's thrumming engine. Because she starts on a level of trust with the people she interviews, she finds the details and paradoxical twists in their lives that might escape a more distant observer. Villavicencio goes out drinking with older women in Miami and can't keep up, because they are catching up on lost time, which makes them move fast. "At some point it becomes clear we're taking a long trip out of town to a casino. I tell them I have a five o'clock flight the following morning, and so they downgrade their ambitions for the night." In the end, Villavicencio indulges their high spirits. "As I feel those white stares on us, I pour a drink on my head. The girls cheer and I let out a blood-curdling scream. My first ever." But that doesn't mean her relationship with her interviewees is straightforward, and she unpicks some of the knottiness. Villavicencio is, after all, the glorious exception that keeps the myth of the American dream alive, the undocumented child of undocumented parents who is, nevertheless, a Harvard graduate, Yale doctoral student and the author of this much-praised book, whose champions include Barack Obama and the New York Times. At one point she reflects on how her exceptionalism affects her relationship with the young people she interviews in Flint. They are not only victims of the polluted water crisis, but casualties of social imperatives that will never let them succeed. "The whitest thing I've done in my life," she writes, "was trying to save Flint youth while I was visiting there." As Villavicencio realises she cannot pull them individually out of the structures within which they live, she feels a sickening thud of despair: "I'd drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people¿ and I didn't understand these kids who didn't think the same way¿ they were alien to me. I didn't know how to talk to them. So I didn't." There were times, reading this book, when I felt ill at ease. It treads its own path, neither fact nor fiction - or, in Villavicencio's own words, "creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry". So while there is a lot of reportage, the author is equally happy to take flight from fact. One character, for instance, a homeless alcoholic who dies in a flooded basement in Hurricane Sandy, is gifted a mawkish death scene in which he is stroking and feeding a dying squirrel as he drowns. That kind of invention makes you wonder how her interviewees feel about being recreated on the page, and how freely their notes have been transposed into Villavicencio's melodies. But for the reader, these melodies sing. The most memorable and shocking parts of the book are those that deal with Villavicencio's own experiences and those of her parents. She was left by them in Ecuador until the age of five, before being brought to New York. She blames them; she loves them; she wants to protect them. It's a heartbreaking mix. In one scene, her father collapses on to her, sobbing, because the state governor has revoked driving licences for undocumented workers and he has lost his job as a taxi driver. "My father, the dictator, heaving full-throated sobs," she writes. As Villavicencio acknowledges, she is one of countless people struggling with such trauma. "I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others - like those who are in internment camps now - and I just imagine us as an army of mutants¿ Who will we become? Who will take care of us?" I have never read anything that so captures the pain of the migrant child of migrants. This book bears witness to the great violence of our times: the violence of borders, which has seeped into all our lives. It also reveals the empathy and courage we might need to move beyond these dark years.
Kirkus Review
The debut book from "one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard." In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn't invent or embellish. But as she notes, "this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes." Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered "illegal" in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author's candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories. A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this debut, Cornejo Villavicencio writes of forgotten family traumas, through and around profiles of undocumented persons. She enters communities in Miami, Flint, Staten Island, and more, and examines structural challenges that people without papers experience, including access to health care. These well-rendered journalistic vignettes evoke her sources more like characters or friends. The account is straightforward about what it is like to exist as an immigrant in today's political climate. Cornejo Villavicencio does not mince words, repeatedly calling policies and actions racist, violent, and exploitative. She also touches on the subject of child separation at the Southern border and what such early crises do to human minds. For Cornejo Villavicencio and many in her community, traditional relationships and caretaking arrangements are altered by necessity. She writes, "At some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them." VERDICT Readers come to see that there is no time for hedging: the personal traumas discussed in the book are compounded by their commonality. A must-read indictment on what it means to be undocumented and what it means to be American.--Sierra Dickey, Ctr. for New Americans, Northampton, MA
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Staten Island August 1, 2019 If you ask my mother where she's from, she's 100 percent going to say she's from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say that she's from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the international stage--magical realism basically skipped over it, as did the military dictatorship craze of the 1970s and 1980s, plus there are no world-famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London (the president) and Christina Aguilera's father, who was a domestic abuser. If you ask my father where he is from, he will definitely say Ecuador because he is sentimental about the country for reasons he's working out in therapy. But if you push them, I mean really push them, they're both going to say they're from New York. If you ask them if they feel American because you're a little narc who wants to prove your blood runs red, white, and blue, they're going to say No, we feel like New Yorkers. We really do, too. My family has lived in Brooklyn and Queens a combined ninety-seven years. My dad drove a cab back when East New York was still gang country, and he had to fold his body into a little origami swan and hide under his steering wheel during cross fires in the middle of the day while he ate a jumbo slice of pizza. Times have changed but my parents haven't. My dad sees struggling bodegas and he says they're fronts. For what? Money laundering. For whom? The mob. My mother wants my brother and me to wear pastels all year round to avoid being seen as taking sides in the little tiff between the Bloods and the Crips. My parents are New Yorkers to the core. Despite how close we are, we've talked very little about their first days in New York or about their decision to choose New York, or even the United States, as a destination. It's not that I haven't asked my parents why they came to the United States. It's that the answer isn't as morally satisfying as most people's answers are--a decapitated family member, famine--and I never press them for more details because I don't want to apply pressure on a bruise. The story as far as I know it goes something like this: My parents had just gotten married in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, and their small autobody business was not doing well. Then my dad got into a car crash where he broke his jaw, and they had to borrow money from my father's family, who are bad, greedy people. The idea of coming to America to work for a year to make just enough money to pay off the debt came up and it seemed like a good idea. My father's family asked to keep me, eighteen months old at the time, as collateral. And that's what my parents did. That's about as much as I know. You may be wondering why my parents agreed to leave me as an economic assurance, but the truth is I have not had this conversation with them. I've never thought about it enough to ask. The whole truth is that if I was a young mother--if I was me as a young mother, unparented, ambitious, at my sexual prime--I think I would be thrilled to leave my child for "exactly a year," as they said it would be, which is what the plan was. I never had to forgive my mom. My dad? My dadmydadmydad was my earliest memory. He was dressed in a powder-blue sweater. He was walking into a big airplane. I looked out from a window and my dad was walking away and, in my hand, I carried a Ziploc bag full of coins. I don't know. It's been almost thirty years. It doesn't matter anymore. My parents didn't come back after a year. They didn't stay in America because they were making so much money that they became greedy. They were barely making ends meet. Years passed. When I was four years old, going to school in Ecuador, teachers began to comment on how gifted I was. My parents knew Ecuador was not the place for a gifted girl--the gender politics were too f***ed up--and they wanted me to have all the educational opportunities they hadn't had. So that's when they brought me to New York to enroll me in Catholic school, but no matter how hard they both worked to make tuition, they fell short. Then one day--I think I was in the fourth grade--the school bursar called me into his office and explained that there was an elderly billionairess who lived in upstate New York who had heard about me and was impressed. He told her my family was poor and might have to pull me from the school. (Okay, so in this scenario the tragedy would have been that I'd have to go to the local public school, which was not a great school, but just so we're on the same page, I support public schools and I would have been fine.) So she came up with a proposition. She'd pay for most of my tuition if I kept up my grades and wrote her letters. That was the first time in my life I'd have a benefactor, but it would not be my last. When I was at Harvard, a very successful Wall Street man who knew me from an educational NGO we both belonged to--he as a supporter, me as a supported--learned I was undocumented and could not legally hold a work-study job, so every semester he wrote me a modest check. In the notes section he cheekily wrote "beer money"--the joke being that I wouldn't really drink until I was twenty-one--but every semester I used it for books, winter coats for those f***ing Boston winters, money I couldn't ask my parents for because they didn't have any to give. I wrote him regular emails about my life at Harvard and my budding success as a published writer. He was always appropriate and boundaried. I had read obsessively about artists since I was a kid and considered myself an artist since I was a kid so I didn't feel weird about older, wealthy white people giving me money in exchange for grades or writing. It was patronage. They were Gertrude Stein and I was a young Hemingway. I was Van Gogh, crazy and broken. I truly did not have any racial anxieties about this, thank god. That kind of thing could really f*** a kid up. I'm a New York City kid, but although the first five years of my time in America were spent in Brooklyn, if we're going to be real, I'm from Queens. Queens is the most diverse borough in the city. This might sound like a romanticized ghetto painting, but when I walk through my neighborhood, a Polish child with a toy gun will shoot at my head and say the same undecipherable word over and over; a Puerto Rican kid will rap along to a song on his phone and turn it up as loud as necessary to make out the lyrics, even rapping along to some N-words; some Egyptian teenagers will refuse to move out of my way as I'm simply trying to cross the street; and some Mexican guys will invite me to join a pyramid scheme. But none of us will try to take any rights away from each other. We don't have potlucks, but we live in peace. We go to the same street fairs. The other boroughs are less diverse, but I found that the same thing is basically true. Except for one borough that I was always curious about--Staten Island, New York's richest, whitest, most suburban borough. It is almost 80 percent white. By way of comparison, Brooklyn and Queens are just less than half white, the Bronx is 45 percent white, and even Manhattan is only 65 percent white. Staten Island is geographically isolated--you can't take the subway there from the city--and, I don't know, man, there isn't a lot of shared goodwill between islanders and city residents. It's not like we're unaware. They've literally tried to secede from New York City and form their own city or join New Jersey. In June 1989, the New York State legislature gave Staten Island residents the right to decide on secession, and in November 1993, 65 percent of voters voted yes. Governor Mario Cuomo insisted that the referendum be approved by the state legislature, where it was defeated, but the desire continued to bubble just beneath the surface for years, so even after the world was rocked by Brexit, you had local island politicians posting on social media about how inspiring an event it was. Staten Island is the city's most conservative borough, pretty reliably Republican, the only borough in New York City to go for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. It's also the borough where Eric Garner was killed in a choke hold at the hands of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo. A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo for murder. I learned about all of this later. But the first time Staten Island really entered my consciousness was when there were news reports about hate crimes against Latinx people when I was a kid. This was the only context in which Staten Island was mentioned on Spanish nightly news--Mexican immigrants as victims of hate crimes at the hands of young black men, a cruel reminder of the rift between our communities. Excerpted from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xiii |
Chapter 1 Staten Island | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 Ground Zero | p. 31 |
Chapter 3 Miami | p. 57 |
Chapter 4 Flint | p. 95 |
Chapter 5 Cleveland | p. 118 |
Chapter 6 New Haven | p. 147 |
Acknowledgments | p. 173 |
Notes | p. 177 |