Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Debut Novel Explores the Undocumented College Experience

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is an Ecuadorian American writer who uses her work as a vehicle to spotlight undocumented immigrant experiences in the United States, as well as the mental and physical toll that fear of discovery can take on our bodies. She is most well-known for her nonfiction book The Undocumented Americans, which uses oral testimony and interviews to showcase the experiences of undocumented immigrants across the U.S., which she wrote while being undocumented herself. This week, she released her debut adult fiction novel, Catalina, which follows the wry and vulnerable titular character through one year of her life at Harvard. When Catalina Ituralde was first admitted to the Ive League school, she felt like she’d finally fulfilled her destiny as a miracle child who escaped death in Latin America, moved to Queens, New York, was raised by her undocumented grandparents, and became one of the chosen. But in her senior year, she realizes that after graduation, she will face a world that has no place for the undocumented. In the meantime, she infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures and finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an anthropologist eager to teach her about her home country. But day by day, the rest of her life grows closer in all its horror and uncertainty, forcing her to question if she can save her family, save herself, and what it even means to be saved.

“I write about undocumented people not just because I was once undocumented, but because I think it’s a cross-section of American life that belongs in American culture, is important to American culture, and deserves to be a part of this terrible mosaic that is America as much as everything else,” Cornejo Villavicencio tells HipLatina.

“With Catalina, I wanted to create a character that was a girl who had grown up in humble circumstances, who the world had dismissed the minute she was born. I wanted to write about her lovingly and honestly with the bluster and ridiculousness that men use when they write about each other. I wanted to write about her mind and inner life because she deserves that same kind of vein and creative focus. That’s what I wanted to put the spotlight on.”

Cornejo Villavicencio had already been writing for years long before she was published. From a young age, she attended Catholic school and had grown up in a religious environment. It was instilled in her that not only were angels and Satan always watching her, but also that God could read her thoughts and mind and punish her just by thinking the wrong thing. She grew accustomed to the idea of always having an audience of people monitoring everything she did and every move she made. Then, when she was ten years old, she started to keep journals. But because of her upbringing, she believed that they could read what she wrote and made a decision never to reveal what she really felt or was scared of. Instead, she wanted to play with this audience of religious supervisors, teasing them, playing with and pushing against the boundaries of what she was allowed to feel, think, or do. This exploration proved to be a formative moment in her life because for once, she had a sense of control, even if it was small.

“That was the first time that I remember being interested in the thoughts that were in my head, what thoughts I was putting down on paper, what that meant, and how that made me feel,” she says.

From there, she continued to foster her love of writing with the support of her parents. As she grew older, she started reading books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John), and J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye). All of these writers taught her about the power of a writer’s voice to propel a story, even more so than the plot. However, she also found inspiration in other forms of media like television. She would watch shows like 30 Rock and do writing exercises where she rewrote scenes to get to the same punchline.

However, it wasn’t until 2016 that Cornejo Villavicencio’s professional career as a writer really began. Former President Donald Trump had just been elected as President of the United States, which filled her with waves upon waves of emotion: fear, anger, indignation. While it’d been a shocking moment, she also felt like she’d been preparing for it her entire life when her parents had grown up under a dictatorship in Ecuador and she’d grown up hearing stories about authoritarian rule, repression, and intimidation. However, she also remembered the stories of bravery, youthfulness, recklessness, and belief in a sense of liberation and justice, which propelled her to make an important choice the very next day.

“When Trump was elected, I felt a renewed sense of purpose,” she explains. “I wanted to use that fear to propel me through this kind of reporting. I wanted to write about undocumented people because I was undocumented. And I felt that the kind of writing that I usually saw written about undocumented people was intentionally dehumanizing, humiliating, and patronizing. So I wanted to write something that would give me the strength through the Trump administration, the kind of thing where you write something that you would like to read. I wrote that book for myself.”

In regards to Catalina, she considers her fiction debut a continuation of that moment of frustration and anger, but also hope from 2016. As opposed to The Undocumented Americans which focused on a group made up of millions of people, she wanted to zero in on the experience of a single undocumented person, to create someone that we could know intimately or who we might already know in our neighborhood, church, or place of work. Certainly, when reading Catalina, we grow to know Catalina as well as a friend or relative, allowed access to her most inner and vulnerable thoughts. In the first few pages alone, we learn that her undocumented status only allows her to accept unpaid internships, that she’s fascinated by problematic Greek mythology, and that she longs for a great, sweeping romance like in popular American films. Over the course of the novel, she slowly unravels more of herself, her history, and her desires to the reader, from her miracle survival of a car wreck in Ecuador, to the lack of fear she has of throwing herself out of a moving vehicle, to the sudden horror she experiences when she realizes that her face is what sustained the most damage.

One of the most unique aspects of the novel, however, is that all this comes to light because of how tightly we are wound to her inner life. There are several scenes featuring dialogue between Catalina and her grandparents, internship supervisor, professors, and boyfriend. But the majority of the story takes place as a stream-of-conscious narrative inside Catalina’s head. We follow the trajectory of her thoughts like a winding river, switching from past to present and mimicking the way many of us go down long thinking spirals from time to time. At times, she interrupts scenes of dialogue with her own seemingly unrelated thoughts.

Like when she and her grandfather are speaking with a lawyer about a letter of separation that he recently received, and her mind starts wandering down a path of not wanting her grandfather to be buried in Ecuador, to her distaste for hoop earrings, to the strength of her immune system because she was born with a urinary tract infection (UTI) and a stomach infection as a baby, to her imagining being loved and adored by her family in Ecuador. While these sound like drastically different topics, Cornejo Villavicencio crafts the scene in such a way that the road she went down makes sense. This is true even when Catalina makes questionable decisions, like embarrassing a waiter in public while meeting her boyfriend’s parents, which makes the reading of the novel a fun and special experience.

“I’m 35 now and Catalina is 20, so a lot of the time, I knew that what Catalina would do, isn’t what I would do. It wasn’t the healthiest thing to do and may in fact may be the dumbest thing to do, but it is what she would do,” she said. “In general, that’s my approach to write about young people, for them to make decisions that are dumb but developmentally appropriate.”

At the same time, it was a long journey to get to the point where she felt comfortable writing in a different genre, since she’d made her original debut writing nonfiction. For months, she did a lot of research, reading books and watching videos about writing novels, and learning about the rules of novels before deciding which ones she wanted to break. She especially focused on books that were considered classic American novels including The Catcher in the Rye for inspiration on how to write a coming-of-age novel in the first person, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen for dialogue, and Sula by Toni Morrison for creating a memorable character.

When it came to the cover, Cornejo Villavicencio again wanted to center Catalina through the image of the eye, colored in gold to represent the gold of the Indigenous Inca, which plays an important role in the story. But even more so, she wanted the book to stand out from other covers in the industry, which have become extremely busy, loud, and bright. That felt disingenuous to her because she gets sensorily overwhelmed easily. Here, again, The Catcher in the Rye became a source of inspiration because of how the simple white cover had made her feel as a young person, how it had compelled her to pick up the book even before she’d been assigned to read it for school.

“It didn’t even have a summary at the back,” she said. “You could read it and it looked like this private thing because it didn’t say what it was about. It looked naughty, like reading a book covered by a newspaper in the subway. So I wanted something that felt minimal to encourage the reader to wonder about what was inside and then be surprised by what they found.”

Looking ahead, Cornejo Villavicencio will be embarking on her book tour throughout the East Coast including New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Florida. She will also be visiting some states on the West Coast like California, Washington, and Oregon. She’s excited for the world to get to know Catalina, to get insight into the head and inner life of one undocumented person in the U.S., and to learn what it’s really like for an undocumented person to make it through one single day of their lives. For her, it was so important to focus on a single story of an undocumented experience because of how much it’s erased in the media and by politicians who do everything they can to dehumanize and criminalize immigration through nameless, faceless statistics. She notes:

“If my essays are immigration-related, the picture that often comes with it is a photograph of a real child, whose name I’ll never know, this sad brown child with large, dark, sad eyes behind a fence. I understand why these images are used but I’ve never liked the use of them as props. This child is a real person. This child has real thoughts and probably has a favorite TV show and foods they like and foods that they don’t like. Then, I saw a PBS documentary called Exodus, which is about the migration crisis in Europe and follows this young ten-year-old girl who is a refugee from Syria seeking asylum. I just kept thinking about her while I was writing Catalina because I thought, ‘After this girl has lived through so much, survived so much, seen so much, there’s going to be a day when someone’s going to look at her and try to dismiss her or try to see right through her or try to treat her like an object or like a specimen or a spectacle.’ That made me angry. So much anger led to me wanting to use an addictive voice to lure readers into staying for as long as I wanted them to stay in this room, listening to this girl and her thoughts.”