Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: DREAMer memoirs have their purpose. But that’s not what I set out to write.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is not enjoying the new social norms imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but she doesn’t hate them, either. Wearing masks, she says, reminds her of all the years she spent growing out her bangs, wearing thick scarves, trying to hide her face. She’s used to working from home, and she likes seeing people cross the street when she’s out walking her dog, Frankie. “I’m probably the introvert from which all introverts were created,” she said on a recent Zoom call, as Frankie ran in and out of the frame. Then, as she so often does in her work and in conversation, she worked her way to a considerably sharper note: “But obviously I’m going through a lot of survivor’s guilt, because my family is from Queens and our hospital was Elmhurst Hospital and I’m not dead.”

Cornejo Villavicencio has been writing professionally since she was a teenager, reviewing jazz albums for a monthly magazine in New York City. Then, during her senior year at Harvard, she wrote an essay for The Daily Beast on what the site wanted to call her “dirty little secret”: Cornejo Villavicencio, who was born in Ecuador, was undocumented, and she had no idea what she was going to do after her graduation in May 2011. 

The essay put her in the spotlight at a time when there was an increasing awareness around the plight of undocumented youth; DACA, which shielded some undocumented kids from deportation and allowed them to secure work permits, wasn’t ordered by Obama until later that year. As she writes in the book—and as she reiterated in our conversation—Cornejo Villavicencio felt profoundly ambivalent about the sympathy being generated for hardworking kids who “hadn’t done anything wrong” while their parents and grandparents were being deported in record numbers.

Now, Cornejo has written The Undocumented Americans, a book channeling that ambivalence into a series of dispatches from what we might call undocumented America: a country within a country, one that overlaps and undergirds the other. In six tight chapters,