“I’m doing good; I’m feeling tan,” Karla Cornejo Villavicenio tells me from her home in New Haven, Connecticut. She’s donned a red sundress with a matching lip for the occasion of our Zoom interview, scheduled for after she’s spent some time away from the Northeast. “Some exposure to sunshine has changed me from Voldemort,” she jokes, adding, “Oh, but you know what, I think the governor of Connecticut has told people from Connecticut to stop talking shit about Connecticut.” The author of The Undocumented Americans has logged on to discuss her latest book, Catalina, but Villavicencio feels it’s important first to clarify her thoughts on her adoptive home state. “It’s because of this new program called ‘Make It Here’ to incentivize people to come,” she says. “I don’t want to upset the governor. Connecticut has received me warmly.”
Catalina itself is a result of this love-hate tension between Villavicencio and the places that raised her. The Ecuadorian-American author first stepped onto the literary scene in 2020 with the rejected Yale thesis that became her first book, a National Book Award finalist known as The Undocumented Americans, which not only detailed Villavicencio’s own life as an undocumented person in America, but also followed the lives of other undocumented Americans like her. Her observational precision paired with her jocular voice made for storytelling that left the reader gently exposed. Reading her debut, audiences quickly learned that Villavicencio doesn’t capitulate. She doesn’t yield to the ease and convenience of ignorance. In Undocumented Americans, she was open about her bias, about how she wasn’t entering spaces as a journalist but as a peer trying to tell a shared story. But in all the ways that her debut established her as a literary force, so it also left her feeling depleted.
“I felt, after Undocumented Americans, that I needed to find creativity in a place of solitude,” she says. “I think one of the things people responded to in The Undocumented Americans was how clearly available I was making myself to be undone by the people I was meeting.” Here, she paraphrases Judith Butler’s words: “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” Villavicencio continues, “When I said, ‘I’m not going to be just a journalist; I’m going to be a part of the story,’ I was allowing myself to be undone.”
Villavicencio laments that it’s hard to create through pain. It was during this process of post-Americans healing that the idea for Catalina came to her. “Catalina checks all the boxes for a first novel: it’s a coming of age novel; it’s a campus novel; [it’s] vaguely autobiographical,” she says. “I wanted to show what I could do with it. It was a challenge.” She likens that challenge to The Great British Bake-Off: “You’re at Bake-off and the category is sponges. I really wanted to show what I could do with the sponge. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but I wanted the hot man at Bake-Off [Paul Hollywood, for those unaware] to shake my hand…What do I do with the spotlight that I have now? I thought [Catalina] was a good time to see how much I could get away with. ”
Catalina Ituralde—the eponymous protagonist of Villavicencio’s resulting novel, and an undocumented woman who was raised by her grandparents after leaving Ecuador—is the sponge that would merit a handshake. Celestially spared several times in her life, be it from her perilous entry into this realm or her several close-call instances with would-be vehicular manslaughter, Catalina begins the book as a college student, just a year shy of graduation from Harvard. Her grandparents poured everything they had into her: art, science, culture, money—making every opportunity available they could, with the expectation that she would go on to reach a dream, hers or otherwise. As Catalina nears the completion of school and the group project of “rearing Catalina” seems near its end, it’s unclear what’s next for the three of them: what Catalina owes her grandparents, or if she owes them anything at all.
“I think Catalina feels a tug of obligation toward her grandparents that she assumes is a given,” Villavicencio says. “She assumes that her and all of the other kids like her are indebted to their parents.” One of those “other kids,” Catalina’s friend Delphine, sports a Cartier bracelet that her father saved up to purchase. “It’s a symbol where she [lives],” Villavicencio says. “He wants her to not feel alienated.” She continues, “We’re all aware of [this] debt, whether we talk about it or not. The children are, the parents, the grandparents, first-generation immigrants and then their children and then their children. The idea of debt and gratitude has different iterations, but in a lot of immigrant families it’s the rule. There is a great sacrifice that your caregivers are making for you. It’s unclear what the repayment is supposed to be. That’s one of the things that’s so haunting: It’s a cosmic repayment. You’re never sure when you’re done repaying. Or if you’re done repaying.” In Catalina, Villavicencio likens the dynamic to climbing up and standing on her grandparents’ backs—and they let her know it.
The author’s desire to put pieces of herself in Catalina started as an experiment with prose. She wanted to write in first-person, in a “voice that is so honey-sweet that I’m able to sneak in some bitter herbs—some medicine. Lure them in with the honey.” She isn’t so concerned with whether readers like the book, only that they remember it. “I want you to read things you can’t unread. I wanted to write sentences that I knew [you] would be unable to forget.”
As Catalina is loosely autobiographical—Villavicencio also attended Harvard, was an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, and is also a writer—the character mirrors Villavicencio most ardently in her commitment to be a part of the story, as opposed to an object of people’s imagination, fascination, or fixation. Social graces rooted in oppression do not go uncorrected in Catalina’s presence, comfort level of bystanders be damned. Villavicencio created this dynamic in hopes it’d grant readers permission to speak boldly: to be OK choosing truth over peace.
“I wrote Catalina to be this little goblin progeny of myself that I could send into the world as a little personal assistant for any young readers who need the confidence and need the pizzazz,” Villavicencio says. “Catalina has a very keen eye; she’s always observing the social rules around her. She doesn’t always get them right, and I think that helps her. She has the courage…We all need to support someone like that: [who can] say the things that we don’t want to say, that we can’t say. We need the person who’s just a little bit socially inappropriate.” The author jokes, “Subscribe to our Patreon.”
Villavicencio takes the responsibility of writing full-time seriously. She recognizes the privilege of getting to tell stories at all, let alone for a living. “It is extremely difficult to make art when you’re afraid all the time and when your basic needs aren’t being met,” she says. “Growing up without money and in an undocumented family, I felt like the weight of the world was on me. I never had a clear way out. The least likely [path] was being a full-time writer. That’s not something you can plan for. It feels like a blessing. It feels like a curse. It feels like God is allowing me to do something special.”
In Catalina, the concept of being spared from some great, terrible, pre-ordained fate is visited time and time again. A combination of guilt and deep purpose drive Catalina to navigate the world with the conviction she does. “A lot of people that come from backgrounds where they feel like they made it and other people didn’t, we associate that with survivor’s guilt,” Villavicencio says. “Being able to make a living as a writer and writing about immigrants…I really want to do something with that opportunity that has an impact and makes ripples. One of the most exciting things about this book is that its destructive potential is not mitigated at all by how fun and accessible it is. I think of this book as a book of social mischief.”
Cree Myles is a Webby-nominated book influencer, writer, and 1/2 of the podcast Girl v. Book. When she isn’t reading, she enjoys comfort watching Gilmore Girls with her husband or dancing with her three children. She thinks about Toni Morrison a lot.