Her journey to this book started when she wrote an essay for the Daily Beast when she was an undocumented undergrad at Harvard. It received praise that turned into book offers for a memoir that she refused to write because she did not fit into the box of what white Americans wanted Dreamers to be. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, she felt the impetus to tell the stories of peoples' lives in America, not about the journey of coming to America. For Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, if the focus is coming to America, all of the other beautiful, dynamic, and complicated stories become impervious to the perception of the undocumented American's American experience. Her "elevator pitch" of this book was that she had read many books on immigrants' experiences in the United States and she hated them all because she could not see her parents in the stories that often focused on their "othering" in America rather than the ways that they created lives in the United States. She believes that most books on immigration often emphasize the exceptionalism of immigrants (especially, Dreamers) which provides some irony because as a graduate of Harvard and Yale, she is an exceptional Dreamer. Throughout the book, she discusses her own mental illness, ways that the people subvert our notions of immigrants (without doing it obviously), and analyzes America in a way that is so nuanced and piercing. She is sharp and cynical, but with a big open heart and empathy that translates to the page so well that it is contagious to the reader.
She opens the book with a bit about her family's background and her parents' history in New York. She recounts 9/11 and the "second response workers" who were the day laborers, hired quickly, and paid in cash to come to sift through the rubble and clean Ground Zero. She remembers, "I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so Septemeber 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia" (40). 9/11 changes her father's life because his driver's license is revoked and he is unable to be a taxi cab driver. She becomes a delivery "boy" (she attempts to educate her father about the inherent racism of calling non-white, grown men "boys") and lives off of tips. She tells stories about her dad coming alive by large tips and the way that she now tips largely to pay it forward.
She also addresses the mental health issues that she has faced and the issues that she knows other immigrant children face because of the actions of the US government and its role in creating stressful environments for children. She writes, "The US government's crimes against immigrants are beyond the pale and the whole world knows. At protests, I've been to outside of courthouses and ICE offices, I've seen white people carry signs plastered with images of the drowned bodies of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his toddler, Angie Valeria, on the banks of the Rio Grande. But when I was growing up, and throughout the Obama administration, these same crimes were happening, if on a different scale, and I'm not sure the same people cared. I felt crazy for thinking we were under attack, watching my neighbors disappear and then going to school and watching the nightly news and watching award shows and seeing no mention. I felt crazy watching the white supremacist state slowly kill my father and break my family apart. I would frantically tell everyone that there was no such thing as the American Dream but then some all-star immigrants around me who had done things, 'the right way' preached a different story and Americans ate that up. It all made me feel crazy. I also am crazy. Pero why? My diagnoses are borderline personality disorder, major depression, anxiety, and OCD. Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.
So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstance than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We've all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?" (60-61).
She cautions readers at the toxicity of the "gratitude" platitude that is often preached by immigrant parents and also mindfulness techniques. The notion to "be grateful" for someone else's sacrifices and to silence their own pain is a tactic of the comparative suffering game that is often rallied between parents and children over who has lived a more difficult life. Villavicencio argues that this can metastasize and ultimately cause children to silence their pain in order to please their parents: silencing their sexual preferences and gender identities for the sake of traditions, silencing their own beliefs that are separate from any religious organizations, and silencing their frustrations with a country that was supposed to bring them bounty instead of pain.
She also includes plenty of redemptive moments of joy amidst the heavy existence. She calls into a restaurant that had hired a Puerto Rican, American citizen manager who was racist and rude to her father, and she inquirers about this incident as she creates a facade that she is a reporter for a local newspaper. When the owner requests that she not write the story, she digs in a bit more with "I dunno, man. It's a pretty good story" and it ultimately gets the racist manager fired (to which she does not regret or feel bad about). She also has a feminist mother who never taught her anything domestic so that she could never be turned into a housewife; whenever she attempted to cut a vegetable or clean something, her mother would tell her to go read a book instead.
She pushes against the stereotypes of immigrants as people who like to work or people who are connected to land which makes them better workers for the job. She dislikes the notion that migrants are symbolized by a butterfly because "butterflies can't fuck a bitch up" (12). I can't help but smile at her defiance of others' projections of what she should be and what she should embrace.
She weaves her own experiences and her family's experiences into the stories that she tells of the other people and families that she meets in the other cities that she visits. As a story-telling and writing tactic, she pushes against the notion that story-tellers should be unbiased; they should be invested in telling the stories of the people they write about in a way that represents their struggles, pain, and joy. She even announces, "I am not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed to get involved the way I have gotten involved" (14). She writes this towards the end of her chapter on Flint and its infamous water crisis. She abbreviated the story: "The government wanted the people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died, which is the same thing, and set in motion a plan for them to be killed slowly through negligence at the highest levels. What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions of this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity" (115). Those sentences just hit a bit differently during this pandemic.
The review in The New York Times.
An episode of the podcast "CodeSwitch" from NPR.
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