Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Being undocumented is not for the weak of heart. My grandparents lived hunched over, arms linked; climbing up in this world meant standing on their backs, and they let me know it. “All of this is for you,” my grandfather would say as my grandmother massaged Tiger Balm into his hands. “As long as you get an education, everything will have been worth it.”

There’s something about the faces of everyone in my family and in mine. I think you can see in our eyes the kind of sadness, which is in two places at once—mourning the past, grieving the future. Sad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way. Looking sad like it’s your job.

I know that’s how men write women, but how men write women is how I learned to speak English.

You can kill things by asking about them, but not by thinking about them.

My grandfather and Harvard anthropologists tag-teamed my education on the Americas and the truth is they agreed on the basic story. First came the Spaniards, and with them the Church, then came petroleum, then came cocaine, then came NAFTA, and now we were all fucked.

“Something tells me that if I seriously pursued you, I’d be a trope in your life. And fuck if I’m going to be a trope in someone else’s story.”

Emasculation at the hands of the state is a very cunning thing for the state to do because men will never see it coming from the state. They’ll blame the subjects in their own kingdoms, the women and children to whom they are lords. The only people to whom they are lords.

The problem with being an object of beauty, a beautiful object, is that you exist only when you’re looked at and thus to remain alive you must be constantly looked at, the way some sharks need to be in motion to breathe.

I’d heard stories of migrants being driven across the border without money or papers or phones, dropped off defenseless in cartel-run areas. Let’s say this happens to you. What would you do? Describe your plan below. I’m dying to know.

I never thought this day would come. I was graduating soon. Four years had once seemed eternal and here we were, at curtain call.

The rest of the world is plundered and bombed so rich white people can eat Caesar salad with each other and be inane.

My beloved daughter— I’m an old man and I’ve been here too long. It’s time for me to return home. Take care of your grandmother. Abuelo.

I could not remember a time when I did not want to die. But now I no longer felt like dying. The worst had happened, and here we were.

I had seen so many of these street memorials. Each time, I tried to memorize the faces of the girls, teenage runaways and sex workers and trans women, women who had definitely not died of natural causes. There were so many of them. I knew too much to keep on walking. I didn’t know who this girl was, but it didn’t matter. The point is, someone put their hands on her.

In loving memory of Vanessa Guillén (1999–2020)