“The Undocumented Americans” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Oh my goodness, this woman can write. I read where someone referred to this book as “a scream and a song”, and I totally agree. Karla reminds me of Roxanne Gay, in that she’s angry and raw and boldly honest, not only about her rage and how difficult it is for immigrants to move ahead, but also about her own shortcomings and demons.

Born in Ecuador in 1989, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was left there with her grandparents when she was eighteen months old, while her parents went to America to earn a living. Four years later, she moved to America and lived with her family in the borough of Queens, New York. Education was of primary importance to her family, and Karla was smart and shone in school. There is no doubt that Karla was hurt and deeply affected by the years she was separated from her parents and by the discrimination she encountered in America.

As a graduate of Harvard, Karla became incensed by the stereotypical portrayals she saw of immigrants and resolved to show them as individuals. She traveled the U.S., speaking to and learning about a variety of undocumented immigrants, making sure she threw away the notes she took by pencil and changing the names of everyone she interviewed. She wrote their stories, and, along the way in THE UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS, she tells us her story and invites us to get to know the complex person she is.

She lists the diagnoses she’s been given by mental health professionals, including “borderline personality disorder”, and it’s clear that she struggles. But her storytelling took me beyond her diagnoses, into the psyche of a sometimes tormented, but brave and determined airer of the truth.

She tells truth about the heartbreaking effects of 9/11 on undocumented workers, truth about the impossibility of getting health insurance and medicine, about the damage done to her father as a delivery “boy”, about having and not having “papers” in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t system. About a system so warped and broken that it sometimes breaks a once strong, optimistic immigrant. “They all have nightmares,” Karla writes. “Bad ones.”

Though THE UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS often focuses on terrible things, it’s a wonderful book. Passages and descriptions and encounters are laced with a dark humor and a WTF? attitude that kept me reading and shaking my head, both at the atrocities the author reveals and the amazing writing she uses to reveal it. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s voice is captivating. Do read this book.

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