The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

It may have been hotter than a boiling caldron in Tennessee but this week also marks the official start of fall and we are HERE. FOR. IT … and all the witchyness we can get!  I have my special glass selected for Virtual Book Club on Friday, October 21, 2022 at 7:30pm Central where those who sign up here will discuss Alice Hoffman’s The Rules of Magic and we hope to see you there.  Just a hint on this one, if you haven’t read Practical Magic and can’t fit it in before book club but want to, watch the movie, but do come back to the book later, because it’s a fun hang and a bit different from the book, as per usual.

I feel like I need to start with a note that as I was reading through today’s title, the news was full of the story of two planes full of people who are migrant workers and were sent to Martha’s Vineyard from Florida.  The timing felt very interesting.  I feel like I also need to state that Ashley and I did not read this book concurrently, but back to back instead, because there was only one copy we had access to via our libraries.  With those prefaces, darling readers, I want to share with you about The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.  This title got on my TBR because of the word should.  Actually, I don’t know how it got there, but that’s why it stayed.  As someone who works in the nonprofit sector, I have a passion for helping people who are under resourced, or have a lower status, as was suggested to me today via TED, and while we can definitely have a conversation about the minutiae of the modern caste system in the US (or you can check our review of Isabel Wilkerson’s book outlining it), I think we can all agree most people who immigrate to the US and overstay their visas are among the most under resourced, lower status people in our country.  Many are escaping horrid living conditions and have done so at great personal risk during their journey to our country, merely desiring the “American Dream” so very many of our ancestors came here in search of.  The irony does not escape me.  

The Undocumented Americans is the stories of those people, undocumented immigrants looking for a better life, and it’s told via essays, definitely with some snark, and possibly some embellishments.  Cornejo Villavicencio has a journalistic style that is irreverent and the reading experience was so stellar that I was delighted to read that this title is a National Book Award finalist and will be looking for some of her short form pieces and any other books she chooses to share with us.  

I feel like some readers will shy away from The Undocumented Americans because they think they book will be heavy and it is, but it’s also funny, and enlightening, and even uplifting because of the people telling their stories and how Cornejo Villavicencio capture them and adds her own flare.  It’s important because this book is about our neighbors, both locally and globally.  Sometimes it is our neighbors we can’t communicate with, or don’t see because of our own blinders and privilege, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there because they are, and their stories matter.  If we don’t have proximity in our daily lives with people who don’t look like us or have backgrounds and lived experiences like us, a great step is to read about people who are different from us, and this title is a great choice as part of the journey towards actual proximity with the people who live in your city or town.  

Because of the amazing writing and storytelling, as well as the powerful tales of adversity and persistence, as well as passion and real life struggle, I’m giving The Undocumented Americans an enthusiastic five star review.  While I’m not likely to reread this fantastic, short book, it’s stayed with me and I think it will continue to do so.  If I’m right, it’s got favorite of the year potential.

What’s a powerful book that was also an amazing reading experience you’ve really valued and enjoyed?~ Nikki

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the undocumented immigrant daughter of undocumented, native Ecuadorian parents, all three of whom self-identify as New Yorkers. Cornejo Villavicencio is not a DREAMer and admits that “they are commendable young people…but they occupy outsize attention in our politics.” Repeatedly in The Undocumented Americans she thanks personal benefactors, patrons of her writing, who facilitated her ability to receive a private, Catholic primary education, attend Harvard for undergrad, and be working on her PhD at Yale. She has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Elle,  Vogue, and others. She currently lives in New Haven with her partner and dog.

It has been a couple of weeks since I read The Undocumented Americans and yet all the stories have stuck with me, too. From the the tales of undocumented immigrants in Manhattan in the aftermath of the Twin Towers destruction on September 11, 2001 – where they were the ‘second responders,’ the pregnant mother in Flint, Michigan, who didn’t know about the water ban, to the home and herbal medicines that many immigrants depend upon instead of the medical-industrial complex, how the church shelters some immigrants with the concept of sanctuary – where immigration officers will not remove a person for deportation, and to Cornejo Villavicencio’s own parents’ stories and her relationship with them. She admits that after writing the book, she has destroyed the handwritten notes she took during the interviews and refused to use a voice recorder so that anonymity could protect the immigrants from unwanted consequences from ICE. I am especially touched by the story about how some of the immigrants do in fact return to their homelands to live out their old age, but that the ones who choose to stay are aging out of the physically demanding work that they have been doing for years. These people pay taxes but receive no benefits. Many are not only undocumented, but unbanked, and they certainly don’t have investment resources that they can fall back upon to support their retirement. 

These stories, these heart- and gut-wrenching stories…truly there are no words to how impactful they could, nay SHOULD be in the public consciousness. How can we as humans treat other humans in such inhumane ways? Even Cornejo Villavincencio admits that she has “drunk the social-mobility Kool-Aid” and thinks that if anyone wants to get educated and do better for themselves that they can, but she also admits in the same paragraph that she specifically had a lot of monetary help funding her entire American education. She worries about her parents and providing for them in their old-age. 

After a lot of contemplation about my star-rating, I’m also giving The Undocumented Americans a five-star review. As Nikki mentioned, Cornejo Villavicencio’s style is inherently conversational and yet it’s the conversations with good, trusted friends that hit us in the feels more often than surface level, fact based newspaper reads. I wish that it were a National Book Award WINNER and had all the fanfare as such, but Finalist is no small feat. I’d love to see this title as required reading in our high schools government and citizenship classes. It makes me want so much more for my country, and that’s what the most thought-provoking titles can do no matter the subject matter.

~Ashley

PLEASE SUPPORT US WHEN YOU SHOP BY FIRST CLICKING ON THE IMAGES BELOW: