The Undocumented Americans

Profoundly intimate . . . [Karla Cornejo Villavicencio] 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, Michigan, 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, Connecticut. . . . 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. --Publishers Weekly Memorable . . . 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. . . . A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others. --Kirkus Reviews There's nothing to do but sit down and read this book. Inside it, I feel deep in being, immersed in a frankness and a swerving bright and revelatory funkiness I've not encountered ever before concerning the collective daily life of an undocumented family in America. It's a radical human story and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a great writer. --Eileen Myles This is the book we've been waiting for. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio offers an unflinching indictment of our current immigration system, one that separates families, inflicts trauma, and every day eats away at people's dignity. At the same time, she writes about migrants in a way they've never been written about before--in all their complexity, messiness, humanity, and beauty. Cornejo Villavicencio understands in her bones that writers cannot give people voices or faces. The Undocumented Americans succeeds precisely because she sees their faces and hears their voices. Deeply personal and so superbly told, this is a work we will be talking about for a long time to come. --Roberto G. Gonzales, author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America