The Undocumented Immigrants Sparknotes

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans is a work of nonfiction that shins light on the lives and experiences of undocumented immigrants in the United States. While living a pretty rough life as a child being undocumented and having to live in the shadows, Cornejo Villavicencio shies away from preaching about her hardships and focuses more on the immigrant population in specific regions. Throughout her arguments and insightful experiences, Villavicencio adds to the bigger pictured situated around the idea of migration, challenging commonly held assumptions and stereotypes about these individuals known as immigrants. The overarching ideas of her book is to provide a firsthand understanding of what it means to be undocumented

Immigrants have been looked at as a nuisance and a hindrance to the overall success of populations. Cornejo Villavicencio expresses the feelings of being an immigrant when she writes “There’s a pain to being an undocumented person in American that is constant and dull, like a headache.” This pain that she is referring to, stems from the origins of immigrants always feeling stressed and strained into an identity different from who they really are. Not speaking in their native tongue, living in the shadows, and shying away from higher levels of education, “being undocumented means living in a state of constant fear, always on the brink of discovery and deportation.” Cornejo Villavicencio really brings the attention onto the obvious mistreatment forced on the lives of immigrants, opposing what the majority of politicians and governments

She allows the reader to see the firsthand experiences and immerse themselves into their stories. She talks about 9/11 and the importance that immigrants played in rebuilding the city after the plane crashes and she refers to them as “second responders.” The undocumented Americans, risking their lives working to find remains of people and clean up the tons of debris left behind. Working for little pay, with little to no safety gear in the harshest conditions, Cornejo Villavicencio tries to flip the script on how we view the word immigrant. When she connects the words “undocumented immigrants” to the words “second responders”, she forces the readers to have a new respect for these individuals. She shares her experiences with an individual named Enrique, who exposes the systematic slavery immigrants are forced to take part in to avoid detection. Cornejo Villavicencio shares her accounts with Enrique, “The Americans who own the contracting companies are all white. They hire Hispanic people to work as subcontractors and they’re the ones who deal directly with laborers. When the American contractors come to the work sites, the subcontractors treat them like gods,” he says. “They make us stop talking if we were talking, and we have to turn off the music if we were listening to music. We even stop working out of respect for