Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on “Catalina,” the Tale of an Undocumented Student at Harvard
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey, Lulu here. Whether we are romping through science, music, politics, technology, or feelings, we seek to leave you seeing the world anew. Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know, wherever you get podcasts. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone.

Catalina Iturralde is the protagonist of the new novel Catalina. In the summer before her senior year of college, she's working as an intern at America's third most prestigious literary magazine. That's how she describes it anyway. It's a magazine full of, quote, famously difficult men who wrote tens of thousands of words about being sad and horny. I think we know the type. Come the fall, she'll be back at Harvard to plot her future.

If all of this suggests a life of rare and kind of annoying privilege, Catalina's situation is actually a lot more complicated. She's an undocumented immigrant to the U.S., raised in Queens by her grandparents. And what her future looks like after graduation is very uncertain. In the summer of 2010, the year Instagram launched, there was a cricket invasion in Queens.

Something to do with global warming, and if you believed my grandfather, yet another sign that America was lagging behind Cuba in scientific advances. He was not a communist. He just had a bit of a thing for Fidel. Dozens of crickets were under the floors and in the walls of our apartment. The landlord sent an exterminator, but it had little effect on their fornication.

The sound was intolerably loud. My grandfather said that back in Ecuador, summer nights in Esmeraldas were so loud, it sounded like, well, what it was, a beach and a jungle. I had not been to Esmeraldas where he spent every summer as a child. Like him, I was undocumented, so I could not go to Esmeraldas, probably ever. I would probably never see the Amazon, and thus I would never really know a summer night. He would always have that over me.

He knew in his flesh what I could only read about, and I read a lot. Catalina is the second book by Carla Cornejo Villavicencio. She first gained attention with an essay titled I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard, published anonymously by the Daily Beast. Then her first book, The Undocumented Americans, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her novel, Catalina, comes out this month, and she spoke with our host, David Remnick.

Now, the main character in the book, Catalina, is undocumented and completing her senior year at Harvard. Why did you decide to make a novel out of this rather than a memoir? Well, I think that I have never really been interested in writing a memoir because I still think I'm too young. And I still think that what I will be remembered for hasn't happened yet. I imagine something new.

Like, arson. You know, who knows? But I hope it's not The Undocumented Americans. It's a great book, I am sure. But...

I'm just, you know, I'm still 34. I can do so many things. You know, what's interesting is that I did think for a first novel, this is classic. Coming of age story, campus novel, vaguely autobiographical, maybe seriously autobiographical. And then I really wanted to lean into that because usually with my nonfiction, it is in the first person. And in nonfiction, I can't really withhold. I cannot stray from the facts.

I wanted to write a novel also because it felt – I passionately felt that I wanted to write something that would impress Philip Roth and also like terrify him a little bit before he passed. The book is set in 2010 and Obama is trying to pass the DREAM Act. Right.

Our character, our hero, our heroine, is watching this play out in Washington while studying for finals. Immigration status is hanging above her head as she's working, as she's studying. And eventually it becomes too much for her. She breaks down. Is this an experience that you lived through?

I would say that I would describe my entire four years as a breakdown journey with peaks and valleys. It was something that definitely happened when I was in college. The DREAM Act was being debated. There were versions of the DREAM Act that seemed likelier to pass. All of that was happening in the newsroom.

I mean, honestly, by that point, I really tried to drown out the propaganda. I mean, I feel like to be an immigrant at any point in time,

But particularly during an election year or when somebody is trying to make a name out of themselves in the political arena, you become very used to the rhetoric being very charged and dehumanizing. And so I disconnect. I think probably other people do as well. You know, I— Do you disconnect this time around with Trump looking like—

I mean, there's no guarantee for him, but who looks poised to win in November, quite possibly? I don't get anything out of plugging in my nervous system into a war I'm not there to die in, so to speak. I think that I don't like thinking about politics in a recreational way. It doesn't soothe any part of me. It doesn't fill me with information. It doesn't do anything other than...

I mean, it's sort of immigration news. It doesn't do anything other than absolutely terrify me. Also, a lot of the news that accompanies any news of immigration are just pictures of people huddling on the ground or looking scared. I think every essay that I've ever published has probably been accompanied by a photo of a migrant child with big eyes looking at the camera, sad. And so...

I tried to submerge my brain into a different kind of brine, you know? You did a really interesting thing when you were a senior at Harvard. You wrote an anonymous essay called I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard and published it at the Daily Beast without your name. Why did you publish it anonymously and tell me about the urge to do it? I think urge is a good word. I felt like

The Titanic was sinking, and I've always had this image myself. The Titanic was sinking, and there's somebody on the Titanic playing violin. So what's the year, and what was the Titanic involved here? This was 2011, and the Titanic was—the Dream Act was not going to pass.

And I was graduating from Harvard without any employment prospects, possibilities, even remotely. Which meant what for your life? I mean, probably, you know, the way I imagined it was like me working as a seamstress in a factory, like in the triangle shirt coat factory. I pictured like me working with my dad at a restaurant, but being really bad at it because I'm uncoordinated and uneducated.

And I was thinking about all of the manual labor that I am not equipped to do. And like a lot of people, and particularly people in those circumstances, you feel responsible for your parents economically and otherwise, culturally. You're raising each other in some way. Yes. What responsibility do you feel towards them? The truth? Yeah. Yeah.

is that I don't feel any responsibility towards them. Why is that? Because the narrator in my head knows that that is a script, and I refuse to follow it. So I understand that the script is I'm supposed to feel indebted to my parents and supposed to be haunted by their sacrifice and supposed to look at their hands and feel shame and guilt about my own life.

And that is why I don't feel that. I catch a cliche and then I can't allow myself to feel it. And you crush it. Yeah. I'm speaking with the novelist Carla Cornejo Villavicencio more in a moment. Now, you eventually wrote The Undocumented Americans, which came out in 2020. It's part memoir, part—

and includes other stories about undocumented. Talk about deciding to expand that book out to be more than just your story, which seemed to be part of the inventiveness of it and the richness of it to me. Yes, I think that I really wanted to feel myself connected to other people. It was a moment of just genuine need for...

other immigrants in this country who were surviving and who were living full, rich, complicated lives. Because again, there was this narrative in the culture that I needed to counteract for myself primarily. And so I think that is one of the reasons why I also gave of myself when I was traveling across all of these cities talking to undocumented immigrants is because they also were seeing me and they were also seeing an immigrant who was

working hard, not only in the traditional sense, but also working really hard to be happy and to make art. And that meant a lot to me. I think it also took a lot out of me. I think one of the reasons why people really responded to the book was because

I allowed myself to be vulnerable and I allowed myself to be affected by the people that I was interviewing in a way that I understand isn't healthy for a journalist to do the majority of the time. You think? I think so. I think that you probably have to have a certain level of emotional disconnect, you know,

If you're going to not burn out and if you're going to keep doing this work consistently, I don't think you can necessarily afford to feel everything. It's really true. I mean, the journalists I've met along the way who have felt everything, there is that danger. I think so. I think a lot of when I think of journalists who've been doing really heavy reporting, it takes a toll. And it did take a toll on me when I allowed myself to

to be affected and to care about these immigrants, all of whom could have disappeared overnight. Tell me about a particular interview or particular relationship that you developed that really affected you. I think the Miami chapter, I meet a group of immigrant women from Argentina and Uruguay, and they were all in their 50s maybe. And

Most of them were really on this journey of self-discovery. Some of them were divorced. Some of them were widows. And they had taken activism as a way of doing work and, you know, doing great work, but also having a sense of community and a sense of purpose and community.

They wanted to, like, take me clubbing. They were showing me around Miami, and they're like, that's where Mark Anthony lives. And they were like, why aren't you living your life? Like, you're so young. I was, I don't know, maybe I was like 27 or something. And they were like, you should be out partying in a dress that short. I was just really moved by, they reminded me of my mom. My mom wants me to

have all the freedoms that she didn't have. And sometimes that freedom means going out to party. How did those interviews inform the writing of fiction?

When I was creating the grandmother character, I did try to honor all of the immigrant women who have made a mark on me or the Latina women who have made a mark on me throughout my life. And I wanted the character to be as full-blooded and as beautiful

complicated and funny and wicked and glamorous. That's how I think of when I think of the woman I met in Miami, and that's what I think of when I think of my mom. So I wanted to create a character that embodied that deep sense of dignity. I know you are in a constant war with cliché, but one of the big changes that's taken place since your last book came out is that you've got a green card. I'm a citizen now.

I say that because being undocumented was such a big part of your identity for so long. Describe what that change means to you in your life and psychologically and just in your day-to-day. I don't feel scared when I'm in the airport. The feeling of being deportable is difficult to convey. And it doesn't disappear overnight.

I think of my citizenship as something that can be revoked at any time. How long have you had it? A couple years. And you still feel that? I think I'll always feel it. I think that's something that doesn't change with actual change in the paperwork or in your status, but I was raised...

by undocumented people and I was an undocumented person, those were the circumstances under which my brain developed. There's this like Latin American paranoia that comes from my parents grew up under a dictatorship and I've heard all of these stories. In Ecuador. Yeah. And then there's also being undocumented here where the idea that I could disappear at any time, my parents could disappear at any time. I don't think that I'm necessarily capable of feeling that kind of permanence.

Carla, you said, I think long ago, that you don't want to be a poster child for the undocumented. You've now written two books that arguably are about that, or at least in part about that. What do you want to do next? Or do you feel that you have one subject and you want to dig that trench for a good long while?

No, I think that I wanted – I really – you know, when I did the press for the undocumented Americans, I saw that people were really interested in the fact that I had gone to Harvard. They really wanted to talk about that. So you wanted to scratch that itch for them. Yeah. I wanted to do that. I wanted to say, you know –

A little bit, like, be careful what you wish for. Like, this is what you wanted. And now I wanted people to read something that they couldn't unread. And so I'm not sure what the next...

book is going to be. But I think that I am very motivated and I continue to be motivated by a general sense of mischief and seeing what I can get away with. It's very strange and it's very rare. I do think that I'm like Miss American Dream, you know, all of these great institutions that I've

You know, I've walked through, et cetera. And it's like, well, now that I'm here, what do I want to do with myself? Carla, thank you. David, thank you for having me. David Remnick spoke with Carla Cornejo via Vicencio. Her new novel is called Catalina. David will be back next week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone. Thanks for listening.

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