The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

I fucking hate thinking of migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can’t fuck a bitch up.

Can we imagine that he was capable of kindness, even as he was drinking? That he was capable of courage, even as he was wounded? What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?

The people in Flint now are the people who did not leave, because they could not or did not want to.

My husband gets upset with me because I get up out of bed at dawn every morning to go watch the birds wake up. I like rising with the birds. I like to hear them sing.” I ask Lilliana if she owns pet birds. There is a long pause. “I don’t own birds. I set them free. “You see, my husband got me some small birds as a present but I don’t like them in cages so I went outside one day and I released them. I had two blue birds and one green bird. I wanted my birds to be wild so I never even named them. They kept returning to my yard. I used to talk to them about how their day was going. I asked them when they were hungry. They were very attentive.”

What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.

If god is fair, he will allow her to grow up into a woman with the resources to spoil a stupid toy breed like a Cavapoo that she’ll carry around in a purse. Patricia tells me Greta stopped eating after her father left, and lost a lot of weight. When I visit, she barely touches her food.

Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children who become orphans in foster care. One study found that family income dropped around 70 percent after a deportation. Another study found that American-citizen children born to immigrant parents who were detained or deported suffered greater rates of PTSD than their peers.

“I’m getting depressed more and more, I feel a desire to run out and leave this all behind. I ask the Lord that He not abandon me. On days I know I’m going to be alone, I don’t want to wake up or even eat.”

Saint Paul taught that any stranger who asked for help could be an angel undercover,

There was an ancient Greek belief that someone turning away a supplicant ran the risk of turning away Zeus himself.

I personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity, especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the United States, as is the case with most third world countries from which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?

I don’t want kids of my own. I do not want to be a mother. I have always known this. I have never played with baby dolls. I have never wanted to hold a newborn. I don’t want to have to sacrifice anything for a child, I already have too many people to take care of, and I don’t want my child to have hazy memories of me in a silk robe with a whiskey ginger ale at 11:00 A.M. acting queerly around bath time, around water—was I…trying to drown them? Oh, honey.

When I meet kids who suffer, I want to teach them everything I know about the world, which isn’t a lot, and basically amounts to: Go to Harvard. Make hella money. Read contracts before you sign them. Bring two tiny bottles of Kahlúa and a tiny bottle of mouthwash when you have to go with your parents to their biopsy results. I follow my own advice while trying to hold off on the suicidal ideation while trying to be as socially fucking mobile as socially fucking possible and then these kids fucking find me, and what do I do, but invite them into my heart and tell them, babes, go to school, climb the ranks, kill the salutatorian, make it look like an accident, and in your valedictory address, remind your school that cops are pigs, and ICE are Nazis, and you are John at the foot of the cross, Jesus’s most loved apostle, maybe his lover, and you’re in the holy word, escape to my home for some chamomile tea and RuPaul, there will always be room for you, I love you and forever will.

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.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, around 10 percent of undocumented people are over fifty-five years old. This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.

“I hope they have children who can take care of them,” I respond. 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.

But now I realize that the literal truths about myself that are immediately manifest to others—I am clumsy, distracted, have no attention to detail, am messy, fall often, hurt myself easily—made me clearly useless in the kitchen and they just didn’t want me around to interfere.