'A Hunger for Survival': Karla Cornejo Villavicencio On Her New Book The Undocumented Americans
In Depth
Image: One World/Random House; Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Despite a seeming increase in fictionalized versions of undocumented Americans, the true and endlessly varied stories of contemporary undocumented Americans are still largely untold. Marginalized and criminalized by a country enamored to the point of smugness with its own “open arms” mythos, entire communities across the country are often portrayed as monodimensional and even pitiful, to the detriment of everyone who gives even the slightest shit. Diligent immigration reporters enact a pure public good by exposing the gaping chasm in this mythos on a state level, but less frequent are intimate looks at who these individuals are, what they do to survive, and the heroically mundane feats many of them perform just to get through the day in America.
The Undocumented Americans, the first book by the brilliantly talented writer and essayist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, seeks to remedy this a little bit through a series of intimate essays that serve as snapshots of undocumented people across the country she’s interviewed over the past several years. This book captured my entire heart; its grace and humanity alternately thrilled me and made me want to lie down on the ground in abject fury. Cornejo Villavicencio reported individual stories of people across the country with a rare level of access, in part because of her own status and in part, I suspect, due to the sheer force and generosity of her personality, which is powerfully evident in her writing. (As an example, read Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2018 essay “A Theory of Animals,” which I consider one of the best pieces Jezebel has ever published.) She does not (and cannot) write about her subjects with the arm’s length studiousness so prevalent in reporting about undocumented Americans. Instead, she interweaves her travels to Flint, to Miami, to Cleveland, with stories about her own family—she immigrated to Queens from Ecuador at five and was undocumented until recently—writing in the first person with deep reporting, investment, and emotion.
Cornejo Villavicencio decided to write The Undocumented Americans the night Trump was elected, after years of declining requests from her agent to do so (“A memoir?” she writes; “I was twenty-one. I wasn’t fucking Barbra Streisand”). Traveling around the country in the aftermath, she embedded herself with day laborers on Staten Island (“New York’s richest, whitest, most suburban borough”), the undocumented heroes who helped clean up Ground Zero after 9/11, a family of young boys in Ohio coping with the deportation of their father, immigrants in Flint who were the last to know the water was poison. It’s complicated because the circumstances are often dire—winter is coming, the boys whose father was deported have no car; the baby is sick from lead; the elder woman has cancer—but Cornejo Villavicencio’s voice is familiar, friendly, and quite often funny, with a particular agility at showing her subjects’ nuances and absolute will. It’s a story of survival; the people in this book are, generally, fucked by their circumstances, but they get through it however they can, flaws and all.
Jezebel spoke with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on the phone about her purpose in writing The Undocumented Americans, the immorality of the state, tending to one’s mental health, and the drag queen Trixie Mattel. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
JEZEBEL: In reading this book, I thought about the feats of will that a lot of undocumented Americans go through just to exist in this country. You said in your book that you wanted to make something better than most of the books you’d read about migrants, “something that rang true to me and the people I knew and loved.” Was that was your main purpose in writing this?
KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO: I wanted to humanize the individual subjects of the book, but I also wanted to create a portrait of the undocumented immigrant, and I think I do that in the book. I describe that there is something that makes us, us. There are a few things that I’ve discovered through being undocumented and having undocumented family and loved ones and now interviewing many undocumented people. And part of that is just hunger for survival. This hunger leads to certain things that I think are really inspiring, like the ability to work in small communities, in small groups, to be able to ensure each other’s survival, like understanding that your individual survival depends on the community’s ability to survive. I know that other marginalized groups do this, too, but we have colectas—it’s like an analog GoFundMe. If somebody is suffering because they don’t have the ability to access medical care or whatever, people will go around business to business, restaurant to restaurant, nightclub to nightclub, and just ask for cash, and people will donate, because people will understand this could happen to me. It’s not happening to me right now, but there is nothing in this world that protects me from this not happening to me. I think that’s something that people are realizing now in this pandemic where we’re all vulnerable and all our safety depends on our neighbors doing right by us. But this is something we’ve understood for a long time.
I think undocumented people have an understanding of higher morality in terms of the way that Dr. King spoke about it not being predicated by law, and I think that’s something that the right has a difficult time understanding. But we do believe we’re a little bit above the law in the sense that the reasons that we came here—to protect our families, to seek education for our daughters, to run away from our sons being recruited into gangs—those are, morally, of a higher importance than obeying the laws of any state. And following that is our hearts’ belief that it is a human being’s right to be able to move, that the right to move is a higher law than any state law. Even though know most of these people have not taken philosophy classes or human rights classes, there’s an implicit understanding. A lot of these people are believers. A lot of these people are very religious people. And there’s an implicit understanding that there’s a higher law.
That’s something you write about, Dr. King’s concept of morality—I would love to know more about what you think about the construct of law, because I think you did a really good job of showing, through the individuals you portrayed, how arbitrary it is—the basic absurdity of any human life being “illegal.”
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