In 2020, four years after Donald Trump promised Americans he would “build a wall” and make Mexico pay for it, the first formerly undocumented immigrant writer was nominated for the National Book Award. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, whose anonymous essay for the Daily Beast that chronicled her experience as an DACA recipient and student at Harvard went viral in 2010, has penned a fascinating debut, The Undocumented Americans, which profiles immigrants across the country who know all to well the price of the American Dream. In her 2010 essay, Cornejo Villavicencio writes about the possibility of DACA being repealed, an event that would force her deportation, and while DACA was once again upheld in 2020 (not without significant resistance from the president and his colleagues), it is clear that the fear of ICE and immigration authorities, accompanied by the painful personal histories of undocumented immigrants living under the Trump presidency, will cause far-reaching damage beyond any of our comprehensions.
Cornejo Villavicencio began this book soon after the traumatic election night in 2016, when she and other immigrants and children of immigrants, knew that their lives were in immediate danger. In 2016, the topic of illegal immigration was at the forefront of the national conversation, as the ascendance of Donald Trump made clear. But Cornejo Villavicencio felt exhausted by media coverage surrounding immigration, by condescending stories written by out of touch journalists who were so unfamiliar with the community they were writing about. She writes that the book came from her desire to understand people outside of the media’s non-nuanced portrayals of them: “I wanted to tell the stories of people who work as day laborers. Housekeepers. Construction workers. Dog walkers. Delivery men. People who don’t inspire hashtags or t-shirts. But I wanted to learn about them as the weirdos we all are outside of our jobs.” She writes, “This book is for everybody who wants to step away from the buzzwords in immigration, the talking heads, the kids in graduation caps and gowns, and read about the people underground…Not heroes. Randoms. People. Characters.”
Cornejo Villavicencio, herself the daughter of immigrants from Ecuador, ingrains herself into immigrant communities in New York, Flint (Michigan), Miami, Cleveland, and New Haven (Connecticut). She speaks to day laborers in Staten Island, men who have been showing up to work freelance construction jobs around New York for decades, to women in Miami who have turned to alternative medicine due to their lack of healthcare, and to a family in Flint whose father was suddenly deported, leaving behind his wife and young children. She visits with a man who has taken up asylum in a church, confined to an attic room to avoid deportation. She weaves together her own family’s narrative with these stories: her hardworking father’s consistent mistreatment by employers, and her spirited mother’s desire to pave her own way in the world. While emotional distance is often valued in nonfiction reportage, it is Cornejo Villavicencio’s closeness to her subjects, her moving dedication to improving their lives, that makes this book so strong. It is a rare honest portrayal that strikes the perfect balance between nuanced reporting and deep intimacy.
In one chapter, titled Ground Zero, Cornejo Villavicencio writes about the immigrant day laborers who were bused to the Twin Towers on 9/11, who dug for bodies through all-encompassing dust and rubble. These people were not given proper protective equipment, many were cheated out of wages by their employers, and thus almost all of them suffer from lung diseases, cancer, or PTSD decades later. But of course, none of them are listed among the dead from that day, they have been all but forgotten by history, and excluded from aid programs that they qualify for. In an interview with CNN, Cornejo Villavicencio makes the connection between these laborers, these immigrants whose deaths were not recorded and thus not properly mourned, with the undocumented victims of COVID-19. She says, “In the spring in New York, the number of deaths of Latinos — many of them immigrants who were dying in ways that were completely undignified, like their bodies stuffed into frozen trucks on the street — and, you know, there were no obituaries, the majority of the country was not caring and choosing to ignore Covid because they knew the people who were dying were Black and brown. I saw the list that The New York Times printed of the people who died. And it reminded me of 9/11 and the incomplete list of the people who died on 9/11.”
The Undocumented Americans is a stunning book, with an emotional weight unlike many others. Reading it during the twilight days of the Trump presidency, I do feel some hope that the lives of the characters featured in this book will be improved under the next administration, but as history has taught us, we cannot prematurely celebrate. This book is a total rejection of damaging stereotypes, a dismantling of the liberal vision of these DREAMers and strivers, perfect immigrants that represent an ideal version of humanity. Cornejo Villavicencio has written a beautiful and provocative piece that gives a human face to issues of justice, identity politics, and borders, one that trades tired clichés for devastating realities.