‘The Undocumented Americans’ Is the Immigration Punk Manifesto We Need Today

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s provocative and compassionate memoir is not for the white gaze

The morning after Donald Trump was elected, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio decided it was finally time to write the book. Back in 2010, when she published an anonymous essay about her life as a young undocumented immigrant at 21, agents threw themselves at her, imploring her to write a memoir. But Cornejo Villavicencio, now a 30-year-old PhD student at Yale University, didn’t want her first book “to be a rueful tale about being a sickly Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didn’t have a Social Security number.” In other words, she didn’t want to write for the white gaze.

With Trump’s America in full force, Cornejo Villavicencio could have written a palatable portrait of her life as an undocumented kid for that same audience. Instead, she wrote a punk manifesto for other young immigrants and immigrants’ kids. She tells me that she wants them “to feel a sigh of relief knowing that there are lots of us out there.” The Undocumented Americans, out March 24, is the mirror she wishes she had in her youth. Changing the hearts and minds of those who are not immigrants would be a welcome by-product, but it’s not her goal.