She Documents
America’s Ills

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Is Spinning A History Of The Present

Text: Maya Binyam
Illustrations: Crystal Zapata

Editor’s Note & Content Warning: This interview discusses suicidal ideation in the context of ongoing mental healthcare and treatment.

For anyone who experiences manifold oppressions, insanity will always be a precondition of consciousness. “Black women often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and, most importantly, feminism,” wrote the members of the Combahee River Collective. “Don’t let them muck around with your realities,” urged Audre Lorde. “You may not make very much inroad, but at least you’ve got to stop feeling quite so crazy.”

In her debut book, The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio spins a history of the present from the position of insanity. Traveling throughout the country, between Staten Island, Miami, Flint, and back again, Cornejo Villavicencio assembles a motley crew of interlocutors to whom she is preternaturally devoted. They share nothing except their legal status, which means they recognize in each other all that they have to lose. She gets drunk with her subjects, is annoyed by then, slips them envelopes stuffed with cash. Sometimes they remind her of her family only to reappear as strangers, and other times they become her surrogate parents. In New Haven, she meets a man living in defiance of deportation orders within a local church. She brings him food, tutors his children, and negotiates with his attorneys to expedite his case, and when her wisdom teeth are removed and her gums throb with pain, she shares his sanctuary. She finds refuge on his couch, where he spoon feeds her his wife’s home cooked food.

Cornejo Villavicencio likes to remind her readers that she’s “a little bit crazy.” (As a child, she writes, she once celebrated good grades by drinking so much mouthwash that she passed out.) But The Undocumented Americans isn’t a memoir, and Cornejo Villavicencio isn’t a symbol of anything but herself, even as the public tries to turn her into an emblem: of sickness, of criminality, or even of hard work.

“The publishing industry and Hollywood have collaborated to create expectations for Latinx literature,” Cornejo Villavicencio told me. “It’s brainwashing.” Even so, in October, it was announced that The Undocumented Americans was a finalist for the National Book Awards, marking the first time that a book by an undocumented person was in the running to clinch the prize, and has been recognized as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, NPR, and Time. Cornejo Villavicencio's writing is a little bratty, and very openhanded, like a punk manifesto for an iconoclast with a blueprint. “It’s not gonna be on Obama’s end-of-year list,” she wrote when she sent me the book. But months passed like years, and in the end, there it was.

Maya Binyam

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

How are you?

Fine. I’ve been in New Haven. There’s a family of crows in my neighborhood, and they come and visit me right when there’s about to be news. Before my dad left my mom, the crows visited. The crows visited before we had a crisis with the teenage girls I take care of. They’re the most fun birds, because they’re as smart as a five-year-old child. They’ll recognize your face if you’re kind, they’ll never forget your face if you’re mean, and they will always seek revenge. If you feed them they’ll bring you presents. They brought me dead baby birds and little organs.

That’s very goth.

I didn’t fuck with that. I let the rain wash that away.

In The Undocumented Americans, you write that in order to tell “the full story” about undocumented immigrants in America, “you have to be a little bit crazy.” Most people who claim to speak on behalf of undocumented people in an official capacity present themselves as perfect little images of sanity: brandishing suits and policy figures, they speak with “expertise.” What gets lost in their account?

I’m open about my own mental illness, and when I say I’m crazy, I don’t just mean that I’m mentally ill, but also that living in this country lends itself to a kind of magical thinking. Immigration laws have always had exceptions for policing “aliens” according to mental hygiene laws, in order to create the idea of the perfect American, who was also the perfect factory worker. As undocumented immigrants, it would be harmful to not think about how we’re contributing to that discourse of American-making. Undocumented people constantly have to prove that we’re very hardworking, and it’s very corporatized.

Taking my author photo for the book was really uncomfortable. I was not doing well at the time: I was in between hair colors, I didn’t feel like myself, and I was doing a lot of disassociating. After the review in the New York Times, there was a lot of criticism of the photo, both from white people and Latinos, who were really angry about my nails, because they were “trashy.” They were baby blue, they were stiletto style, and they had gold studs on them, which I thought were really cute. And I was wearing a faux fur coat. People on the internet were like, “This girl is undocumented––she goes to Harvard, she goes to Yale, she gets a review in the Times, and her nails are still ghetto?” There was this anger from both conservative white people who hate undocumented immigrants, and Latinos who felt that I was misrepresenting them.

It seems like people were reacting to a perceived discrepancy between those credentials and how they were encountering you in the photo.

In publishing, credentials are how you get people to care about immigrant writers. When I pitched my book to people, I would be like, “Just read the first few pages so you know I’m not full of shit.” I’d tell them, “I don’t mention Harvard at all in the book. I don’t mention Yale at all in the book.” I was like, this is a work of literature. And it was hard to get people to see that. The Latinx community, Black readers, and other immigrant groups have responded one way, and white readers have largely responded another.

What do you think that difference is?

When I do events, we talk a lot about intergenerational trauma, and the brutal weight of the love that exists between immigrants and children of immigrants. So much of that love is based on obligation and guilt, and it’s hard to know by the time you’re an adult whether you love your parents or whether you’re just sorry for them and owe them a lot.

I’ve received a lot of anger from white people asserting that I’m not grateful. I wrote a piece for This American Life, in which I sound manic and crazy. When we were editing the piece, Ira Glass told me one of the paragraphs sounded bratty. It was! So I said, “What voice do you want me to write it in?” And he said, “I can’t dictate what voice you use––you’re a writer.” And I said, “Well, then, it’s going to sound bratty.” When the piece came out, white people said I tortured my parents, that I was cruel to them, shit like that. But part of my brattiness is a persona that I put on because I know I’m an undocumented writer––a lot of that bluster is political and performative. I don’t like people who punch down. I don’t like people who are unkind to others. But I think it’s okay to be funny, and I think it’s okay to be bitchy.

Throughout your book, the men you interact with—men who work as day laborers and delivery people, who are sheltered in sanctuary spaces and don’t have access to clean water—take on, at least in your telling of things, the position of a father. But you also become a kind of father figure, sometimes to those same people. The parent/child relationship seems to be a centripetal force in your life. I’m curious to know why that is.

I’m really traumatized by it. In a lot of our communities, men work hard and are met with racist abuse outside the home, and when they come into the home, we see them as martyrs. We excuse a lot of the abuse they then enact on their wives and children. Not to say that we’re complicit in that abuse, but the legend of these men gets passed on from generation to generation. That’s something I learned while writing the book, and I have been complicit in that. I have these severe images of my dad being physically wounded after coming home from work, or coming back having experienced a hate crime, and my response was to say, “I’m going to make sure this never happens again to him or any man who looks like him.” When I was in college and in my early 20s, if I saw a Latino man or a Bangladeshi man, or any immigrant man being assaulted in any way, I would put my body in front of him and I would start a fight. I thought of my father, and I thought it was my responsibility.

As I grew older, I realized the emotional damage my father had caused to me and my brother. He realized we saw him as a hero, and he abused that a little bit. I began to wonder if this was more widespread. And so I started interviewing people, and it was. It especially happened to men after middle age, when they had less to lose. And a lot of times their wives became disposable––wives who had given up their careers and their youths for them to come to this country, and now had to fend for themselves. Their children had to pick up the pieces.

"I don’t like people who punch down. I don’t like people who are unkind to others. But I think it’s okay to be funny, and I think it’s okay to be bitchy."

You’ve written elsewhere that you “don’t identify” as a “dreamer,” in part because dreamer rhetoric positions undocumented children against their parents, and demands that they undergo a process of disavowal in order to gain absolution in the form of citizenship.

At first, being a born contrarian and hater of all things corny or saccharin, I was like: “I’m not a dreamer. I don’t have dreams.” I’m a supporter of the DREAM act, I qualified for the DREAM act, and I would have identified myself in numerous ways that would have described that positionality regarding the DREAM act. But “dreamer” is a term that was intentionally created to encourage white Americans to feel sorry for us, and I was not about to fuck with that.

When dreamer rhetoric turned into cap and gown sit-ins, I really admired that activism, because in a very short time, it brought the DREAMer movement to the forefront. But it was corny, and it was based on the fact that we were students, when not all DREAMers are students. A lot of DREAMers drop out of school, join the military, are working at restaurants, are day laborers, or are working construction with their dads. The sit-ins white washed the idea of what a DREAMer looks like, and asserted that we’re all academically accomplished, and that we were all graduating. But we’re Latinos, and the statistics for Latinos who make graduation are low. The movement carved out an exception, and claimed that by being exceptional, you should be granted a pathway toward citizenship.

I was really grateful when I got DACA, because I was able to be paid for my writing, and to fly on a plane to conduct my research. I was a little less afraid of being deported, even though they still deport citizens. But I felt extremely guilty, because what does graduating from college mean? Is it supposed to suggest work ethic, integrity, virtue? The things that made me a person who was able to graduate high school at the top of her class, and graduate from Harvard, are predominantly luck. I had a home that often felt emotionally unpredictable, but I had food on the table, and I lived in a safe neighborhood. I did not encounter physical abuse at home. I was born with abilities that this mainstream, capitalist country considers to be something that they can make money from, and I don’t have those abilities in Spanish, which is my mother language. I also love taking standardized tests, which is a genetic mutation that should be taken out of people, and should definitely not be rewarded with citizenship.

I was thinking about how almost every time you’ve emailed me, you’ve mentioned something that you’re doing to treat yourself—taking a bleach bath, cutting your bangs, taking your mom to Sephora. I never thought about how the phrase “treating yourself” has a diagnostic undertone, but is meant to signify a little luxury.

I’ve always been open about my suicidality with my doctors. Some of them are scared, but I’ve found a psychiatrist who isn’t scared of me. I tell all of them: “I don’t want to be alive.” I know I have to be, partly because there is a greater good: my parents depend on me, my brother depends on me. The weight would fall on him if I weren’t here. My partner and my dog would be sad if I died. And I think, now, that my community needs me.

I’ve made a commitment to keep living. And so I have to invest in myself daily––not to keep the thoughts at bay anymore, because I’ve gotten a ton of Ketamine treatment therapy, which has really helped with that––but just to try to find joy every day. Not to be happy, because I know that’s not possible for me, but just to find something to look forward to.

I make sure that there’s good coffee in the house so that I look forward to waking up. I dye my hair regularly so that I have someone new to look at in the mirror. There are some days where I just need to not respond to anything, to just listen to podcasts about cults and lie in bed with ice packs on my head. Sometimes I listen to the music I liked in high school, because that’s the last time I remember being happy.

That’s what’s especially fucked up about the reactions to the author photo. You can call acrylic nails or a faux fur jacket ghetto, but they’re also the things that make life okay.

Before the pandemic, when I had my nails done, I would go out, and I’d see a woman who had her acrylic nails done, and I’d admire them, and she’d admire mine, and we’d grab each other’s hands to look at our nails. That casual touch felt so intimate. I’m someone who is an acquired taste, but these other women were so trusting. To say I love this, or I need a refill, or next time I’m going to try a different shape, or I cheated on my nail tech felt like a genuine moment of giddy recognition for a shared vanity. It was mostly women of color in this mostly white, Yale-dominated world. No matter where they worked, or how depressed I was, we always kept our nails looking great because it made us feel fierce. I miss that.

Maya Binyam is a writer living in New York. She's a senior editor of Triple Canopy and an editor of The New Inquiry.