The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Every single day laborer I meet loves, trusts, and speaks adoringly of Pedro. He is an institution in immigrant Staten Island, something of a godfather figure despite his youth and the fact that he is openly gay, and this in the all-male Latinx day laborer community. I ask him how he maneuvers that. “I ask them if they’ve ever been discriminated against, and they all say yes,” Pedro says. “So I tell them the LGBTQ community is discriminated against just like they are, and it is their job as people who have been hurt by prejudice to not hurt anyone else. And they all get it.”

Pedro was inspired to organize the storm volunteer brigades after hearing stories from Latinx New Yorkers who went to government-run restoration centers and were turned away by guards who told them, “You don’t belong here,” or, “You’re not from here. I know you’re lying.” Occupy Sandy, a group made up of former

Pedro tells me he heard a woman call into a local radio show to complain about the government’s lack of response, saying the only people who had their shit together were the day laborers. “We helped two hundred and forty families,” he says. “And that was the government’s job.”

He didn’t think of himself as a protagonist in the story of Sandy—he still doesn’t—but he tells me his clearest memory of the hurricane aftermath is meeting two elderly Asian women so frail they could not carry anything and had nowhere to sleep. He gave them inflatable beds. It is one of the most prized memories of his life.

stumbled upon the story of Ubaldo Cruz Martinez. Ubaldo was an alcoholic and many of the day laborers I talked to knew him or knew of him but didn’t really want to talk about him. They were so careful about their reputations and he was a homeless alcoholic who drowned in a basement during Hurricane Sandy because he was probably drunk. Did they feel sorry for him? Yes. Were they embarrassed by him? Probably.

Before the hour of this death, on October 31, Ubaldo leaned against a cement building for balance and he saw a small crescent of fur on the gravel, the rain already beating down. He walked to it, and discovered a small skinny squirrel, making a copper wiry sound, a wound on its abdomen. A stray, a stray like him. It was beginning to rain at a blunt slant, a lancing rain. He picked up the squirrel and walked into the basement where he was squatting. He made himself a Nescafé to sober up. The squirrel was cold to the touch so he put her in a shoe box and padded the box with his socks that he warmed in the oven. He had some condensed milk in the cupboard that he warmed in the microwave. He didn’t have a dropper, so he fed it to her through a straw, sucking up the milk with his mouth, then putting his finger on the top of the straw, putting the straw into the squirrel’s mouth, between her bunny teeth, to release the milk drop by drop. He knew he was not leaving this basement tonight. He couldn’t get himself anywhere. No one would want him. They’d given up on him long ago. He had kids in Mexico. They’d be orphans. His heart raced. His hands became moist. Stroking the squirrel kept him calm as the basement filled with water. He put on his Ochoa jersey and a thin gold chain, and he decided to wait for what would come. He stroked the squirrel until the water got up to his shoulders and he treaded water. He held onto the shoe box above his head. No creature should have to die alone. —

Did this happen?

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?

After one week, he got his first paycheck from the subcontractor: sixty dollars a day for working a twelve-hour shift; some days were longer than twelve hours. When he tried cashing the check, it bounced.

My diagnoses are borderline personality disorder, major depression, anxiety, and OCD. (I love diagnoses. Gives you the ability to read about yourself.) Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.

I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there’s a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others—like those who are in internment camps right now—and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us? —

went to Miami in 2017, shortly after the House of Representatives voted 217 to 213 to replace the Affordable Care Act with a new piece of legislation that listed cesarean sections, rape, and depression as preexisting conditions. Experts estimated it would strip healthcare from twenty-three million Americans over the next decade. Miami could hardly afford the blow. Miami-Dade has the state’s largest

One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and taxpayers. I cannot overstate how little interest I have in changing the minds of people who might believe this—I’d honestly rather swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe. But I’m curious about the bogeyman so I thought to explore it. What I discovered was a story

“When I began leading workshops about abusive relationships, I was like oh my god.” She’s never told her husband about her experiences with sexual assault because she’s afraid of what he’ll say. “You know men,” she tells me. “He’ll ask me what I was wearing or something. I don’t trust him not to say that. So there’s no catharsis in the home.”

He took the photos when he was sitting in the waiting room of the job agency waiting for his name to be called. The first picture is of a man maybe in his late seventies, wearing a green button-down, khaki pants, and aviator sunglasses. His lips are downcast. My dad said he was applying to be a dishwasher. The second picture is of a man maybe in his late forties who is wearing a black baseball cap, a gray sweater, and maroon pants. My dad said he’d had a stroke—his right arm was paralyzed and he had a limp in his right leg. He was also applying to be a dishwasher. Apparently, he was a fucking fantastic dishwasher, how, I don’t know. When he sent the pictures, my dad also texted me:

It’s hard to see men like that not get jobs. We’re invisible because of the circumstances that force us to be here at the agency…old age…illness…the fucking papers. Do you understand. A million thoughts rush to my head. It’s too much to think about.

feel constantly disgusting, dirty, hungover, toxic unless I’m hemorrhaging money in this very specific way that I find cleansing.

what happens is, let’s say I go out to dinner. If I’m having an anxious day, I will send my parents take-out dinner. If I see a brown person in the kitchen at the restaurant, I will think that every kitchen in America probably has a Mexican in it and it will make me feel proud but sad—RIP Anthony Bourdain, a homie who got it—and then if my server is brown, if they are either in my opinion too young or too old or seem too tired for the job, I will leave a crazy tip—for what I am, which is a freelancer. Now. I do not have the kind of money to be leaving people crazy tips. But I remember every person who ever left my dad a really good tip when we lived off his tips, I remember every one, you don’t understand, I have been thinking of those nice Puerto Rican executive assistants for the past fifteen years, it was always the Latina executive assistants, very rarely the white people in power, and I remember how he felt for the rest of the evening when he came home. It was like having my dad back from the dead. He would dance to no music and he’d make jokes, and he’d come out of his shower looking like a teenager. I know what a good tip feels like for a poor family. Every good tip feels like Simon helping Jesus carry the cross.

I ask how he feels on a daily basis as an older man without family here and Octavio says that he feels depressed and anxious. “What kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people.

the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of undocumented life on young people. As a result of all the stressors of migrant life, he found his subjects suffered chronic headaches, toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, and eating issues.

Now, imagine that thirty, forty, fifty years in. Of course Octavio is sick. We’re all fucking sick. It is a public health crisis and it’s hard to know how to talk about it without feeding into the right-wing propaganda machine that already paints immigrants as charges to the healthcare system and carriers of disease. The trick to doing it is asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old as the country’s justifications for slavery—that is, reassuring Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering marvels, built to do harder work, built to last longer and handle more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul, which is that we are “impervious to pain,” as scholar Robin Bernstein has put it. We can only tell them we’re sick if we remind them that sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines.

“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?”

Every mixed-status family in the United States knows the drill. An undocumented parent can be sponsored by their American-citizen child when the child turns twenty-one. (This does not work for siblings or other

father started to show signs of depression. His years had consisted of going to work, coming home to sleep, going to work, coming home to sleep, and back again, with nothing in his life to give it meaning or pleasure. He got older. He became overcome by stress and anxiety. He stopped talking.