Author Aims for Punk Rock Memoir With “The Undocumented Americans”

Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio joins us to discuss her new
memoir, “The Undocumented Americans.” Villavicencio arrived in
America when she was five and is one of the first undocumented
students to graduate from Harvard. After the election of President
Trump in 2016, she began writing about her own experience as well
as those of other undocumented immigrants in New York, Miami,
Cleveland, Michigan and Connecticut through a series of reported
essays. Now a doctoral student at Yale, Villavicencio’s work
insists on breaking conventional and sanitized narratives of
immigrants in her book, which she calls a punk rock memoir.