The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

I hate the way journalists translate the words of Spanish speakers in their stories. They transliterate, and make us sound dumb, like we all have a first-grade vocabulary. I found my subjects to be warm, funny, dry, evasive, philosophical, weird, annoying, etc., and I tried to convey that tone in the translations.

It’s not that I haven’t asked my parents why they came to the United States. It’s that the answer isn’t as morally satisfying as most people’s answers are—a decapitated family member, famine—and I never press them for more details because I don’t want to apply pressure on a bruise.

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

I ask Julián what he’d like readers to know about him, and he immediately says, “Tell them I crossed the desert four times to see my children.”

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.”

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.

Not me crying at work

The first responders were firemen and EMT workers. The second responders were undocumented immigrants.

Milton feels genuinely sad that these animals are gone and tells me he hates the American culture of hunting. “Hunting for pleasure is putting an end to creation. God creates for a reason,” he says. Does god allow death for a reason? I ask him. Milton does not know.

if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever.

The Catholic Church is, above all things, reliable across centuries.

I would frantically tell everyone that there was no such thing as the American Dream but then some all-star immigrants around me who had done things “the right way” preached a different story and Americans ate that up.

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. So 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? —

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.

meeeeeee

My mother took me aside and asked me who the first man on the moon was. Neil Armstrong, I told her. Now name the second man on the moon. I don’t know, I said. Nobody does, she said. If you’re not number one, you’re nothing.

ok mother go off

What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.

When I got him, it was the week of Trump’s inauguration and I was watching videos of black labs and German shepherds helping veterans with PTSD, jumping up at their faces when they were crying, shielding their bodies with their own, and I just cried into a pillow, wanting to be protected. I was super suicidal, and one night my partner was just like, you’ve never even been around a puppy. So we went into a pet shop just to play with a dog—look, we tried rescues, they denied us because we didn’t have a yard—to distract me for long enough to stop me from slitting my wrists, and they brought out Frank.

Ivy’s baby has regained her vision, but nobody knows what the long-term effects of the water poisoning will be in her little body. The wait is torturous for Ivy. It is torturous for her mom. It is torturous for the community. It is not torturous for the government.

I try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to solve shit for their parent because these people are all my parents, I am their child, if I wasn’t their child—and I was their child—I should be patented and mass-produced and distributed to undocumented immigrants at Walmarts. I am a professional immigrant’s daughter.

I’d drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that with what I was seeing in Flint.

There are no clowns in fields with machetes in America. There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta’s mom will be deported too. There are no clowns in fields with machetes, but there are ICE officers who pose as nice people trying to buy a piñata off the Internet, meet you in a parking lot, and detain you.

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?

And the other day on the bus, a white woman went on a racist rant against me while I was just standing there. All of the racism here makes me want to go back to my country when I die. I’m not wanted here, and I do not want to live in eternity in a place where I’m not wanted.”

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.