Karla Cornejo Villavicencio has written about immigration, music, beauty, and mental illness for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among others. She lives in New Haven with her partner and their dog.
“Punk and dazzling and remarkably human . . . like watching
firecrackers go off.”—Jia Tolentino
“Brilliant, vivid, tender, furious.”—Louise Erdrich
“A scream and a song . . . a complex, human look at the fabric of
this nation.”—Quiara Alegría Hudes
“In her captivating and evocative first book, The Undocumented
Americans, [Karla] Cornejo Villavicencio aims to tell ‘the full
story’ of what it means to be undocumented in America, in all of
its fraughtness and complexity, challenging the usual good and evil
categories through a series of memoir-infused reported essays. In
doing so, she reveals how her subjects, including her own family
members, struggle with vices like adultery and self-harm, even
while doing backbreaking, demeaning work to support their families.
. . . Cornejo Villavicencio reveals a fullness of character that
feels subversive, simply because of how rare it is.”—The New York
Times Book Review
“There’s nothing to do but sit down and read this book. Inside it,
I feel deep in being, immersed in a frankness and a swerving bright
and revelatory funkiness I have not encountered ever before
concerning the collective daily life of an undocumented family in
America. It is a radical human story and Karla Cornejo
Villavicencio is a great writer.”—Eileen Myles
“Karla Cornejo Villavicencio offers an un inching indictment of
our
current immigration system. This is the book we’ve been waiting
for.”—Roberto G. Gonzales, author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented
and Coming of Age in America
“Profoundly intimate . . . Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s highly
personal and deeply empathetic perspective serves as a powerful
rebuttal
to characterizations of undocumented immigrants as
criminals and welfare cheats.”—Publishers Weekly
“This valuable and authentic inquiry is powerfully
embellished with magical imaginings, as when she envisions a man
drowning during Hurricane Sandy’s last moments. Cornejo
Villavicencio’s unfiltered and vulnerable voice
incorporates both explosive profanity and elegiac incantations
of despair, as, for example, when she internalizes the hatred
toward brown people manifest in the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s
water supply. She gives of herself unstintingly as she
speaks with undocumented day laborers, older people working
long past retirement age, and a housekeeper who relies on the
botanica and voodoo for health care. Cornejo Villavicencio’s
challenging and moving testimonio belongs in all
collections.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Memorable . . . compelling . . . heartwrenching . . . a welcome
addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who
understands the issue like few others.”—Kirkus Reviews
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