The Undocumented Americans Quotes

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“For many years when I have heard nice people try to be respectful about describing undocumented people, I’ve heard them call us “undocumented workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about being just an undocumented person standing with your hands clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“For one thing, most available jobs for undocumented immigrants are jobs Americans will not do, which takes healthy young migrants and makes them age terribly. At a certain point, manual labor is no longer possible. Aging undocumented people have no safety net. Even though half of undocumented people pay into Social Security, none are eligible for the benefits. They are unable to purchase health insurance. They probably don’t own their own homes. They don’t have 401(k)s or retirement plans of any kind. Meager savings, if any. Elderly people in general are susceptible to unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of them, and the undocumented community draws even more vultures. 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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“What kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people. I feel destabilizing anxiety and pain. Doctors say I don’t have anything, but I know I’m sick.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I've done in my life was trying to save the Flint youth while I was visiting there.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The jet-fuel smell thick in the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to 011 and that's enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It's a fake ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“For the past ten days, I've had a migraine that follows me like a shadow. One hundred and forty-two hours of incessant pain, an eight on the ten-point scale. My doctor has suggested codeine, which I refused, because once I took too much Percocet after a tooth extraction and threw up for twenty-four hours straight. I have a CT scan, an MRI, I go to the neurologist—the readings are all inconclusive. I'm told it's a migraine with an unknown cause. Have you tried yoga? they say.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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. They want us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same, our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead with the Lord until the end to give them an answer.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities. (There had reportedly been a raid at a grocery store the week before the news broke.) When President Obama declared a state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint, making undocumented people even less likely to open the door, since this time the canvassers were in uniform. Some undocumented Flint residents learned of the lead in their water only when family members from Mexico called them on the phone to ask about it. They had seen reports of the poisoned water on Univision.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I’d honestly rather swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a xenophobe.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“In our community, there is an ingrained idea that if you are sick, it’s a weakness, a symptom of our internalized bootstraps mythology.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first responders,” one labor organizer told me.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers—red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike. EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“As a rule, I try to not tell strangers my nightmares unless I’m being paid by the word.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“All Latin Americans know about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them. Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe... I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry, or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration authorities.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“My job was simple, to tell this story: The government wanted the people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died, which is the same thing, and set in motion a plan for them to be killed slowly through negligence at the highest levels. 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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Sometimes to prove my ability to let go, I’ll write something long and delete it, or go on my phone and delate all the photos i have of memories. I’ve never loved any material object.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans