Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - The Undocumented Americans

On the night of the 2016 presidential election, I spent a long time deciding what to wear. Id be staying home to watch the returns with my partner, but the Comey letter had come out in mid-October and I was convinced Trump was going to win. Id always admired the women on the Titanic who reportedly drowned wearing their finest clothing and furs and jewels and the violinists who kept playing even as the ship sank. I wore a burgundy velvet dress with sheer lace back paneling, a ribbon in my hair, red lipstick, and a leopard-print faux fur coat over my shoulders. I poured myself a goblet of wine. I understood that night would be my end, but I would not be ushered to an internment camp in sweatpants. The returns hadnt finished coming in when my father, who is undocumented, called me to tell me it was the end times. I threw myself into bed without washing off my makeup, without brushing my teeth. I had a four a.m. wake-up call.

A few hours later, I took a bunch of trains to New Jersey to meet an oceanographer I was profiling for a New York magazine. We took a boat into the Hudson and sped by the feet of the Statue of Liberty. Fuck, I said. This will appear sentimental. Still, I asked him to take my picture in front of it, and I smiled at the camera, the strong winds blowing my hair in my face.

It seemed safe, somehow, to be there, at Lady Libertys feet. I got off the boat and, on my phone, emailed an agent Id been friendly with since I was a kid and told him I was ready to write the book. The book. And he said okay.

The book. When I was a senior at Harvard, I wrote an anonymous essay for TheDaily Beast about what they wanted to call my dirty little secretthat I was undocumented. It got me some attentionit was a different timeand agents wrote asking me if I wanted to write a memoir. A news program asked to film me while I fucking packed up my dorm, to show, I guess, that I was leaving Harvard without any plans, without even the promise of a career, which was the crux of my essay.

This was before DACA.

I was angry. A memoir? I was twenty-one. I wasnt fucking Barbra Streisand. I had been writing professionally since I was fifteen, but only about musicI wanted to be the guy in High Fidelityand I didnt want my first book to be a rueful tale about being a sickly Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didnt have a Social Security number, which is what the agents all wanted. The guy who eventually ended up becoming my agent respected that, did not find an interchangeable immigrant to publish a sad book, read everything I would write over the next seven years, and we kept in touch. I was the first person who wrote him on the morning of November 9, 2016.

That morning, I received a bunch of emails from people who were really freaked out about Trump winning and the emails essentially were offers to hide me in their second houses in Vermont or the woods somewhere, or stay in their basements. Shit, I told my partner. Theyre trying to Anne Frank me. By this point, I had been pursuing a PhD at Yale because I needed the health insurance and had read lots of books about migrants and I hated a good number of the texts. I couldnt see my family in them, because I saw my parents as more than laborers, as more than sufferers or dreamers. I thought I could write something better, something that rang true. And I thought that I was the best person to do it. I was just crazy enough. Because if youre going to write a book about undocumented immigrants in America, the story, the full story, you have to be a little bit crazy. And you certainly cant be enamored by America, not still. That disqualifies you.

This book is not a traditional nonfiction book. Names of persons have all been changed. Names of places have all been changed. Physical descriptions have all been changed. Or have they? I took notes by hand during interviews; after the legal review, I destroyed the notes. I chose not to use a recorder because I did not want to intimidate my subjects. Children of immigrants whose parents do not speak English learn how to interpret very young, and I honored that rite of passage and skill by translating the interviews on the spot. I approached translating the way a literary translator would approach translating a poem, not the way someone would approach translating a business letter. I hate the way journalists translate the words of Spanish speakers in their stories. They transliterate, and make us sound dumb, like we all have a first-grade vocabulary. I found my subjects to be warm, funny, dry, evasive, philosophical, weird, annoying, etc., and I tried to convey that tone in the translations.

When you are an undocumented immigrant with undocumented family, writing about undocumented immigrantsand I can only speak for myself and my ghostsit feels unethical to put on the drag of a journalist. It is also painful to focus on the art, but impossible to process the world as anything but art. The slightest gust of the wind bruisesTrumps voice, Stephen Millers face, the red hat, but also before that, the deli counter, the construction corner, the hotel room, the dishwashing station, the dollar store, the late-night English classes at the local community collegeand its a pain I am sure is felt by the eleven million undocumented, so I write as if it were. I attempt to write from a place of shared trauma, shared memories, shared pain. This is a snapshot in time, a high-energy imaging of trauma brain.

This book is a work of creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read. Maybe you wont like it. I didnt write it for you to