The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

It is also painful to focus on the art, but impossible to process the world as anything but art. The slightest gust of the wind bruises—Trump’s voice, Stephen Miller’s face, the red hat, but also before that, the deli counter, the construction corner, the hotel room, the dishwashing station, the dollar store, the late-night English classes at the local community college—and it’s a pain I am sure is felt by the eleven million undocumented, so I write as if it were. I attempt to write from a place of shared trauma, shared memories, shared pain. This is a snapshot in time, a high-energy imaging of trauma brain.

Whether the effect is real or placebo is not the pressing issue here, so much as the matter of choice and access.

this video awakens in me a lion’s heart of desire to protect.

I am a little afraid of her because when she hugs me and looks at me, I feel like telling her I hurt too much.

all of that happened to prepare me to this point—my parents are sick, uninsured, and aging out of work in a fucking racist country. The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them.

What I mean to say is: I hope they have a child like me. I hope everyone has a child like me. If I reach every child of immigrants at an early age, I can make sure every child becomes me. And if they don’t, I can be everyone’s child.

“Everyone who kills themselves through their work is doing this for their children,” he says. “If you don’t have kids, why would you kill yourself like this?” For my family the question is, once your kids are grown and doing okay, what happens when you keep killing yourself like this?

I asked almost everyone I interviewed for this book about regrets, but they didn’t tell me many. That’s not what they remember of their time here. That’s not what we’ll remember when we have to leave, by choice, force, or casket. The look in a mother’s eyes at her baby’s first word in English, my father’s heaving sobs when I handed him my diploma in Latin from the best fucking school in the world, Leonel’s first steps of freedom outside the church in the autumn cold after four months in hiding, the Mexican chefs behind every great restaurant in New York, the Upper East Side babies who love their Haitian nannies so much it makes their moms jealous, a day laborer’s first cold shower in America after wearing off the soles of his feet in the desert, the two young men who pushed Joaquín up the mountain when he wanted to die, Jesus Christ himself on the cross—Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

Finally, to my father—you’ll never know what it is like to carry your father’s heart in yours when it has been so torn to shreds for your sake. I will circle the world many times over telling everyone about its weight, its beauty, and what an honor it was to have known it.