The Undocumented Americans

In The Undocumented Americans (2020), Karla Cornejo Villavicencio provides a snapshot of the lives of undocumented Latinx immigrants living and working in the US. While labor is central to their experiences and Villavicencio discusses it in detail, her account moves far beyond the frustrating pattern she has long observed in American popular culture to discuss immigrants only as laborers or as young and promising students. She instead provides an account that incorporates work, education, and many more topics in a much larger context. The Undocumented Americans was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and was named one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Summary

Throughout the text the reader meets individual immigrants through short anecdotes they provided in interviews to Villavicencio. The author is sometimes intimately involved in these people’s lives, and she addresses how this involvement separates her from journalists who typically do not intervene in the stories they cover in such major ways as she does (like contacting lawyers, sending money, visiting families).

The book is divided into a short Introduction and six chapters. The chapters each depict a locale in which immigrant stories reveal important patterns of immigrant life and American racism. The chapters are set in Staten Island in Manhattan; at Ground Zero following the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center; in Miami, Florida; in Flint, Michigan; in Cleveland, Ohio; and in New Haven, Connecticut. The last two chapters deal with the subject of deportation, and the immediate geography that grounds the chapters is a little less important than it was in the earlier ones.

Villavicencio declares in her opening that the book is for immigrants. It is about and intended to represent and make proud the regular person who immigrates to the US and faces the shared experiences of mistreatment, trauma, and continued existence in the face of such challenges. The author’s anger—and, by extension, the anger of a larger community of Latinx immigrants—drives the narrative as she recounts many instances of major immigrant contributions that go either unnoticed or outright denied in mainstream American news and society. She also details many injustices committed against immigrants in the United States that stem from policy and popular culture alike.

The author describes her approach as “creative nonfiction” (xvi). She followed journalism methodologies for the book’s research base, centrally including formal interviews with the people discussed in the book, but Villavicencio discusses the art of translation, which she undertakes as a poetic process that upholds the spirit and tone of an interviewee’s statements. Spanish words appear throughout the text, often untranslated.

This is not a story of immigration at the southern US border. It is a story of immigrants in their homes, with their children and parents and partners, full of interests and goals and resentments. The book is an exploration of the full humanity of a population that the American media usually presents through only a few problematic story lines.