The Undocumented Americans

It was obvious after reading the introduction that this book was not only going to be important, but that it would be good writing. Karla is an incredible writer. Not a journalist, but someone who cares, someone who has the skill to condense that enormous amount of love into words. Every chapter of this book resonated in some way. The last two pages of "Ground Zero" devastated me.

"Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived."

This book is a work of journalism by, about, and for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Not the exceptional immigrants getting into eight Ivy League universities, not the Latinx activists leading massive protests, and not the students on DACA marching on Capitol Hill. This book is about the undocumented immigrants who don't make the headlines: the food delivery workers in Manhattan who died on 9/11 carrying croissants and lattes, the day laborers hired to clean up Ground Zero for $60 a day and without warning of the health consequences, the families living in Flint, MI who are afraid to open their doors to canvassers educating the community about their drinking water. They are imperfect refugees seeking a life free of show more violence, corruption, and persecution, but aren't finding much here because we fail them, ignore them. show less

Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it.

whew. this is amazing. her writing, her reporting, her connections, her honesty. this is incredible. this is so raw and full of hard stories, but also so full of love and even some humor. everything about this is brilliant.

i wanted to mark just about everything but in the end just:

"I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer."

"I think about the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of undocumented life on young people. As a result of all the stressors of migrant life, he found his subjects suffered chronic headaches, toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, and eating issues. Which is funny to find in research show more because I'm twenty-nine and I have this ulcer my doctors can't seem to soothe or diagnose the cause of. It feels like I have an open wound right beneath my breasts in the center of my abdomen and I can feel it spasm and bleed and it never goes away. Sometimes I have to go to Urgent Care, and I drink concoctions and take pills and drink teas and I just keep bleeding, and it hurts the most when, after a long day of reading about people forming human chains to block ICE officers from arresting a man and his child, I sit down to write about my parents.

Now, imagine that thirty, forty, fifty years in. Of course Octavio is sick. We're all fucking sick. It's a public health crisis and it's hard to know how to talk about it without feeding into the right-wing propaganda machine that already paints immigrants as charges to the healthcare system and carriers of disease. The trick to doing it is asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old as the country's justifications for slavery - that is, reassuring Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering marvels, built to do hard work, built to last longer and handle more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul, which is that we are 'impervious to pain,' as scholar Robin Bernstein has put it. We can only tell them we're sick if we remind them that sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines."

"Ivy’s baby has regained her vision, but nobody knows what the long-term effects of the water poisoning will be in her little body. The wait is torturous for Ivy. It is torturous for her mom. It is torturous for the community. It is not torturous for the government. They want us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same, our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead with the Lord until the end to give them an answer." show less

I really enjoyed learning from this book and seeing the immigrant community through Cornejo Villavicencio’s eyes. Non-fiction books come in all shapes and sizes but I think the very best ones are written from the perspective of someone who has lived the experiences they are writing about and are able to share those experiences in an honest, unfiltered way. Cornejo Villavicencio excels at this and her reading of the work adds a level of emotion very few readers could add. It’s excellently written. I learned a lot.

In The Undocumented Americans, Cornejo Villavicencio tells different stories of different experiences. She tells the story of her own strength and guilt, her parents – each of whom have different experiences – and those show more of the individuals she has met and fought for. Cornejo Villavicencio makes you want to fight for them too. As we all should. As an audiobook, The Undocumented Americans is only five hours long – a short book. Every moment is meaningful. Words are carefully chosen and they are impactful. It’s the best way to write a sociopolitical non-fiction book. I’m impressed by Cornejo Villavicencio’s technique! I’d read more of her work.

In regards to the subject matter, I think there is a perfect balance of personal experience and outside stories. Whenever Cornejo Villavicencio discusses the work experience of an immigrant, she effortlessly ties that back to her father’s experience, her mother’s dysphoria, or her own guilt. Most impactful of these stories, for me, was learning about immigrants seeking sanctuary from deportation orders in a church or other place of worship. These are the tales you hear of heroes and fugitives of the law – not criminals but crusaders, those breaking laws for the good of all. These stories, this parallel, was so beautiful and heartbreaking. The deep loneliness of the men in sanctuary is devastating. Cornejo Villavicencio tells these stories directly and honestly. I appreciated it so much.

The Undocumented Americans taught me the level of sacrifice immigrants endure to create opportunities for future generations. Cornejo Villavicencio’s father returned to Ecuador once his children were stable, because he was tired of fighting for a living wage. Her mother is still trying to figure out who she is. Cornejo Villavicencio Carrie’s the heart and hurts of so many whose family experience parallels her own. This book is a must-read to grow our understanding of the immigrant experience in the United States and the additional hardships our systems place of refugees and those seeking a better future. show less

Achingly poignant vignettes from the author's work and family life. This is the best window into the world of the undocumented Americans that I have looked through. The nearly invisible workers who take the worst jobs and live in constant fear of being caught and deported populate Villavicencio's world. I felt forlorn at the lives lost, the families separated, and the degree to which people take advantage of and/or mistreat these fellow human beings. Isabel Wilkerson's book, "Caste" comes to mind. I think the undocumented have been relegated to the equivalent of India's untouchables. Once again, this is a book which documents the undocumented and the shameful behavior of Americans. An important book!

Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it.