The Undocumented Americans

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

  We were making dinner in the church basement one evening when Johnny suddenly asked his sister Brianna why their dad wasn’t allowed to go home. He had long outgrown the original explanation, which was that his dad worked at the church, a special job with no time off. Brianna said there was an evil man who wasn’t letting him leave. Johnny then turned to me and asked why the dinosaurs died. Johnny is obsessed with dinosaurs. He is as much an expert as a five-year-old can be. He knew why. But he wanted to hear me say it. So I told him that a meteor hit Earth and the dust blocked the sun and there was no food for the dinosaurs so the dinosaurs starved. “Yes,” Johnny said empathically. The extinction of the dinosaurs is the only tragedy Johnny knows. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima. He doesn’t know about the Holocaust. He doesn’t know about the Trail of Tears. He just knows his father can’t come home and he knows the dinosaurs died.

  * * *

  —

  When Francisco received news—not for the first time nor for the last—that his request for a stay was denied by local immigration authorities, faith leaders from around Connecticut set up an all-night prayer vigil outside the ICE offices in Hartford to plead with ICE to use its discretion to give Francisco a stay. They set up a table with pictures of Francisco with his children and tiny votive candles surrounding the frames. The pictures were from their life before—of the family at the park, fruit-picking, dressed for parties. Brianna stared at the pictures for a long time. “They made it look like Dad died,” she whispered. Then she threw herself into the arms of my partner and sobbed. “When will this end?” she asked as she heaved. She could barely get out the words. When we all piled into the car and headed back to New Haven, the girls asked us to play sad music. An enormous yellow full moon followed our car through Hartford and the girls stood up in the back seat to film it through the sunroof, the wind almost toppling their skinny frames, hoping it was a good omen, but it disappeared once we arrived in New Haven.

  “Keep Francisco home!” Johnny would chant at every protest we held in honor of Francisco. This whole thing has confused Johnny. “Francisco” has come to mean the man in the church, and that man is scared and in danger. As adults, we can all remember the moments when we realized our parents were not infallible, that they were mortal, that they were vulnerable people. But for Johnny, it is happening within a narrative that escapes his comprehension. So he disassociates. He has begun talking about a man named “Francisco” who is his father and about a man named “Daddy” who is also his father. When we go out for pizza, he wants us to bring back a slice of pizza for “Francisco.” Francisco is someone who can go hungry if food is not brought to him. (Johnny saves snacks from his school lunch to bring to his father.) On our way to the aquarium one morning, we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and Johnny asked for a doughnut with pink frosting and sprinkles. When I passed it to him, he packed up the doughnut in a paper bag real tight, rolled it up, and said, “I am saving this for Francisco.” My partner and I insisted he eat it, but he refused. His sisters turned very serious and sad, as if they had seen this behavior before.

  I lied and said Francisco gets stomachaches from eating sugar. Only then did he eat it and he ate the doughnut happily, hungrily.

  Franny slips into some dissociative moments too. Sometimes she’ll speak in the present tense about past events that haven’t been true for a year and a half. One evening, Francisco was discussing how he used to wake up very early to go to work at the factory where he worked for fifteen years and Franny said, “What do you mean, Daddy? You still wake up at five A.M. every morning to make it to work.” Francisco gently reminded her he didn’t. She’s having sleep problems. She feels exhausted but cannot reconcile sleep, often until four in the morning, her mind running with thoughts of her father.

  * * *

  —

  The girls were over for a sleepover one night when one of them asked if we planned on buying a house of our own someday, because they’d need their own rooms. We were like, sure someday I mean yeah that’s not realistic right now but like sure. We became their emergency contacts at school. I did their makeup for formals and class pictures. They asked my partner to pick them up from places sometimes, no questions asked, and she did. We had our own little Christmas, the four of us, with their first-ever stockings filled with practical presents they were sweet to be excited about, because it wasn’t the new Jordans they wanted. When we went to the movies, the four of us would cram into the photo booth, the girls’ bony butts sitting on us, and Franny cut out a frame and put it in the back of her phone case. In the winter, we ice-skated in Boston Commons at nightfall as it snowed and in the dead heat of summer we took them to Red Lobster, where I threw up in the parking lot after dinner as they comforted me. Once, the girls asked me why I don’t have a New York accent. “Do you know what internalized racism is?” I asked them. They didn’t. I told them. I felt loved. I loved them back. We weren’t parents but we were something.

  I don’t want kids of my own. I do not want to be a mother. I have always known this. I have never played with baby dolls. I have never wanted to hold a newborn. I don’t want to have to sacrifice anything for a child, I already have too many people to take care of, and I don’t want my child to have hazy memories of me in a silk robe with a whiskey ginger ale at 11:00 A.M. acting queerly around bath time, around water—was I…trying to drown them? Oh, honey. But my relationship to these kids was different. When we showed up for school functions, I was either assumed to be their young mother or introduced as their mom, by them, with Brianna and Franny grinning wickedly, and I felt like a double agent. But there I was, counting dollar bills to buy Franny’s school’s bumper sticker to put on our car next to a sticker of soccer-gay-sex-icon Tobin Heath, wasn’t I? Where’s the lie?!

  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.

  CHAPTER 6

  New Haven

  It was about an hour before midnight in New York in August and the heat had calmed down just enough to try sleeping. We didn’t have working air-conditioning units and our third-floor apartment, built on top of a former garment factory, had a roof with short walls adjacent to our windows, so—this was before the gentrifier snitches got us in trouble with the landlord—we would drag out our twin-size mattresses through the windows and lay them down on the floor of our roof. The night was still hot but there was a breeze. My mom and dad squeezed onto one mattress and my little brother and I onto the other and I wish I could say we looked up at the stars but there were no stars, per New York’s famous light pollution, but there was the moon, and there were the pop pop pops in the background that were either the sound of kids playing with fireworks or the sound of a cop shooting one of us in the back, the odd ice-cream truck playing “Turkey in the Straw” or “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” which none of us immigrant kids had ever heard before, a car blasting salsa, a woman screaming in drunken ecstasy or else in alarm. The night seemed eternal. My parents were still in their thirties and they were still in love, and I had just watched Beyoncé perform “Crazy in Love” for the first time on TV and I felt electrified. I made my parents promise me t
hey’d never get old. They did, they promised.

  My father is in the middle of a prostate cancer scare right now. There is not much to say about it other than he does not want to get a biopsy, against the doctors’ advice. The reason he does not want to get the biopsy is because he wants to die. It’s two more weeks until we go in to get the results of his next prostate exam and the doctors will probably once again recommend a biopsy and my father will definitely refuse and that will be the moment I have been preparing for my entire life. Everything that I have done or that has happened to me since I took that New York–bound flight twenty-four years ago has been preparing me for this moment—learning English, getting bangs, placing second in the Emancipation Proclamation oratory contest, gaining weight, losing weight, getting the sick puppy from the pet shop, all of that happened to prepare me to this point—my parents are sick, uninsured, and aging out of work in a fucking racist country.

  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. That’s what makes caring for our elderly different from Americans caring for their elderly. 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.

  My father is a salad maker now, feeding Manhattan’s executive class. I’ve never watched him make a salad but I’m sure he’s exquisite at it. (He did teach me about how to chop a salad in the most efficient way possible, which is to stand as if on a surfboard and take turns balancing your weight on either foot. The rhythm leads to faster chopping.) He has always been the best at his job, no matter the job. He worked as a taxi driver for his first twelve years in America, a time before MapQuest, let alone Uber, and he has the entire city memorized, every axis on the grid, all five boroughs and parts of Jersey. Since then, he has worked in restaurants. Now he is usually the oldest person in the kitchen. Out of respect, the younger guys all call him Don.

  Recently, he started a new job, recommended to him by an acquaintance who lured him with the assurance of better hours, better treatment, a better environment. My dad is very gullible. He spent three days at this new restaurant where, for spare change, they had him work all day, and then in the final hour of the day, he was given just that hour to clean an industrial kitchen, an industrial fryer, a refrigerator, a stove, an oven, and a sink, wash the dishes and the dishwasher, take out the trash, sweep and mop the floors, and clean the garbage chute. His body was wrecked at the end of each day. “I’m too old for this,” he said. So he quit. His old job wouldn’t take him back. Desperate, he began each morning by showing up at a Latinx job agency, which would send him out to “audition” at a different restaurant day after day, week after week, to no avail.

  My dad told me all of this over dinner one night at a hotel restaurant in Midtown Manhattan where I’d invited him to meet me after what I thought was the end of his shift, and it was, but it was the end of a trial shift at a different restaurant than the one I had in mind. This whole thing, all of it, the entire fucking thing, had been kept from me for over a month, per my father’s orders, because in my family it is believed I am sometimes fragile, stemming back from an incident when I was twenty-one and my father had to come to New Haven in the middle of the night to pick me up from the cold tile of my apartment’s bathroom floor, beer bottles and a razor around me, and take me back home to New York. My father had initially refused to enter the restaurant because he believed he wasn’t dressed nicely enough for it, but I convinced him my money was good there, and I introduced him to the server as my father in a bit of a flamboyant way, not enough to embarrass my dad, just to make a point that this was a motherfucking thing for me and I expected this to be a respected thing among the three of us, and I urged my dad to get the steak and ordered wine for us both and translated a conversation between the server and my father about a wine recommendation to go with his meal, which I usually think is so bourgeois, and I also joined him when he swirled the wine in his glass and smelled it, which I also usually think is the worst, and I quietly slipped myself a Klonopin while he was cutting his steak, confessing to all of this job trouble, in a pained, casual way, and then as he kept on talking, boy was there so much I didn’t know, I slipped myself a second Klonopin with our second glass of wine, and when he left, I went up to my room and put on the terry-cloth hotel robe and shut off the lights and passed out feeling nothing, certainly not feeling fragile. I felt like Indio Juan Diego seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe in her glory, the miracle he wanted and needed at once. I felt god had gifted me blackness and death and I said, Thank you Jehovah God. Thank you. Is this a blackout? I’m free of their tears. Is this freedom?

  Once his secret was in the open, my dad started texting me blurry cell phone pictures from the job agency. I told myself I needed a reminder of why I needed to be successful, so successful, statistical anomaly successful, so I have them saved on my phone to emotionally blackmail myself with. He took the photos when he was sitting in the waiting room of the job agency waiting for his name to be called. The first picture is of a man maybe in his late seventies, wearing a green button-down, khaki pants, and aviator sunglasses. His lips are downcast. My dad said he was applying to be a dishwasher. The second picture is of a man maybe in his late forties who is wearing a black baseball cap, a gray sweater, and maroon pants. My dad said he’d had a stroke—his right arm was paralyzed and he had a limp in his right leg. He was also applying to be a dishwasher. Apparently, he was a fucking fantastic dishwasher, how, I don’t know. When he sent the pictures, my dad also texted me:

  Further proof that we’re not a burden.

  Who says you’re a burden?

  It’s hard to see men like that not get jobs. We’re invisible because of the circumstances that force us to be here at the agency…old age…illness…the fucking papers. Do you understand. A million thoughts rush to my head. It’s too much to think about.

  “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.

  * * *

  —

  Octavio Márquez is a sixty-six-year-old Guatemalan day laborer with a faint white stubble. I saw him in a video online describing being robbed of his wages by an employer. At some point in the video he says Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants, which I cannot dispute. I email a message of concern to the immigrant worker center advocating for Octavio, and receive a reply inviting me to meet him at the blue boxcar in Brooklyn where the worker center is located. I visit one morning as the workers are making coffee and eggs. Before I go in, I stop by a Walgreens and pick out a nice card for Octavio. I stuff it with four hundred dollars. I don’t know how much money he was robbed of, but it’s what my dad earns in a week so I do it.