Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Creates an Imaginary Sidekick for Immigrant Teens

As part of Documented’s new “Our City” interview series, we are speaking to prominent and influential New Yorkers who have deep connections to New York’s immigrant communities, some of whom are immigrants themselves. We ask them about how they made New York City their own, where they feel most connected to in the city, current projects, and more.

BETWEEN 11 P.M. AND 4 A.M., when the world was quiet and dark, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio would write her novel “Catalina.” It was only in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep and everything was still, that she could truly immerse herself in her work. 

And when inspiration vanished, she’d go to the West Farms Mall in Connecticut, where she lives with her partner, Talya Zemach-Bersin, and their dog, Frankie. 

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Her stops at the mall were always the same: Sephora, Victoria’s Secret, and finally, PF Chang’s. At the restaurant, she would ask for a table all the way at the back and order soup and a light margarita. With her headphones on, she would become invigorated by her surroundings, and she brainstormed and drafted what would eventually become her first fiction novel, “Catalina.” 

I read “Catalina” in two days, and in a year filled with disheartening and politically charged reporting on immigration, the book provided a refreshing escape. The author’s wit and wryness was a welcome counterweight to the immigration-focused books or articles often filled with the social-political burden of migration itself, legal jargon and complex analysis.

Her sharp humor and dry irony in “Catalina” are also evident in her 2020 book “The Undocumented Americans.”  The first sentence draws you in with a chuckle: “If you ask my mother where she’s from, she’s 100% going to say she’s from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say she’s from Ecuador.” The new book, which is about a genius child who survives a near-death experience in Ecuador and moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, is packed with humor that sometimes makes you feel guilty for laughing.

In our interview, Cornejo admitted dry humor was second nature. “How I grew up talking to my brother and making sense of this crazy world that we are in was with dark humor.” Growing up in Queens, New York, her mom would often chide her and her brother every now and then when they joked, saying, ‘Don’t say that.’ “We were always saying some really dark things but it helped us,” Cornejo Villavicencio, 35, told me. “It helped us get through. It really did.”

The writer, who began writing professionally as a teenager, was born in Ecuador in the 1980s. At age four in Ecuador, her teachers began to comment on how gifted she was. Later, her parents brought her into the U.S. as an undocumented child, a story she details in her first book, “The Undocumented Americans,” which was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction in 2020. Already, her 2024 book, “Catalina,” has been longlisted for this year’s National Book Award for fiction.

In what ways has the reception of your latest book, “Catalina,” been different from your experience of the reception of  “The Undocumented Americans?”

I got to go on a book tour over the summer, and I am still doing events in support of “Catalina” around the country. That’s a big difference. For the first book, there was no budget for marketing. I tell the story a lot, but initially, the imprint I was with rejected it and wanted to shelve the book. So I was shocked that people read it at all. Much more shocked that people seem to like it. 

For the second book I felt there was more pressure on me because now there was a marketing budget. Also, it was very existentially confusing to me because at first I was like, ‘I’m writing, even though nobody wants me to write.’ And now that there was an expectation that I write, I was like, ‘Well, now I don’t want to write.’ So I had to fight through that. 

This time around, I am meeting my readers and that’s been really meaningful to me. When I wrote the first book, I was really afraid that I was going to be read by white ladies in the suburbs and their book clubs, who are going to be like, ‘Look at this inspiring immigrant. You’re so inspiring.’ All love to them —some of my best friends are white women in the suburbs. But I see that my readers are a very diverse bunch. There’s a lot of young people, kids of immigrants, immigrants themselves, queer kids, and neurodivergent people.

I see that my audience is not what my fear was but rather what I couldn’t even imagine my dream would be. There are some people who read my books who aren’t even big readers but who still like the experience — we all had when we were kids — of getting a book and then reading it all in a day. I think now I’m gonna become a monster because I met all of these readers, and now I’m definitely not going to write again [laughs].

The cover of “Catalina” is just an embellished single eye in the middle, did you have a rationale behind it?  

I have sensory sensitivities, and for me, if something is a little too busy, cluttered, or loud, I kind of shy away from it. So I wanted a cover that was sort of simpler. Then the Random House design team came back with a few covers. This one was definitely going to be it from the beginning, it had a lot of symbolism I thought didn’t hit you over the head.

The eye: Catalina sees everything. I wanted it to serve as a kind of threat to outsiders or people who might not relate or see themselves in Catalina that there are young girls looking and absorbing and remembering everything, keeping names and a list. So the eye was very important.

Then it was a surprise when I saw that the Random House design team actually put gold foil on the cover. The gold is the reason the Spaniards [laughs] invaded the Inca Empire in 1532. So, there’s that gold, and then there’s also the fact that I tend to wear a lot of gold necklaces. In the book, Catalina’s grandfather gives her his own gold chain. That’s something that happens in my culture. So there’s a lot of symbolism that I like, but it also is just pretty and simple to look at.

The culture of giving your offspring gold jewelry is something that happens in Nigerian culture as well. I’m Nigerian, and my mom gave me this gold chain set when I turned 10. 

I find that so beautiful. The oldest object I have that belongs to me is the name necklace, it says Karla in gold. As soon as I came to America, my parents were like, here.

That’s endearing. Catalina is dedicated to Ted and Marco. May I ask who they are?

They’re Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Yeah, yeah, that’s them.  

Why?

You’ve put me in a position. ‘Cause I have to explain.

Oh, Oh, it just clicked. The two senators in Texas and Florida. 

So, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are both Latino senators, and they have been senators since I was a young girl. They’ve always voted and aligned themselves against whatever you might define as Latin people, people of color, immigrants, the working class, poor people, women, girls.

They just have consistently been treacherous little bitches who have voted against the community’s interests and I’m very animated when I think about them because I think they’re horrible and cowardly. I thought it would be a thoughtful thing to dedicate the book to them and let them know how I feel. 

Genius, honestly, I would never have thought. 

There was a part in the book where you described something like: ‘A Dreamer has other experiences outside of the notorious debacle of the U.S. immigration system.’ And the book vividly illustrates that. Given Catalina’s experience is similar to what you experienced in real life, if you were to put a number behind what percentage of the book was born out of reality or fiction, what number would that be?

Geez, okay, I don’t know that I can do a number, but let’s say 17% is autobiographically based. Now, here’s the thing. “Catalina” is my first novel, and it’s a coming of age novel. It’s sort of widely known that that’s the kind of book where a young writer mines from their life and their youth, and I did do that. But I did also want to create a character that many people could relate to, even if they haven’t had the very exceptional experiences that I’ve had. And when I say exceptional, I don’t mean Harvard, I don’t mean the Ivy League.

“I wanted to create a character that reflected some of the very strange and complicated life that a migrant can have, but also prove that at the end of the day, she also is just a girl who’s more than her story and also less than her story.”

I mean, you know, Catalina is an orphan; Catalina is self made; and Catalina has survived a lot. I’ve survived a lot, I’ve seen a lot. That is where the exceptionalism for me that I feel about myself comes from. It comes from the fact that I’m a migrant, and I feel very empowered by that. 

I wanted to create a character that reflected some of the very strange and complicated life that a migrant can have, but also prove that at the end of the day, she also is just a girl who’s more than her story and also less than her story. She’s just devoid of the mythology. She is just a young girl who doesn’t need to be taken care of.

Catalina’s grandfather is a fascinating character. Two scenarios come to mind. Before the start of her freshman year, he taught her how to take the New York City subway to high school. As you wrote, during training, he “…made her wear a puffer coat to add a realistic yet stressful element, because he said, when you are running late, and you are rerouted, and the trains are crowded, you’ll be sweating out of rage.”

There was that, and there was also a part of the book where Catalina was shocked her grandfather actually spoke English just fine when one day, they went to the fish market in Chinatown together. 

In writing, an author gets inspired by experiences here and there, so I wonder if these are scenarios you had seen play out in some way in real life before deciding to fictionalize them in the book?

Those things exactly haven’t happened to me but similar things have. I grew up around a lot of immigrants, Latino men, and immigrant men of many nationalities. I grew up with a very strong kind of macho father and I believe that my upbringing socialized me around a certain type of strong, tough guy, and I feel very safe around those kinds of men. I feel safe around the powerful, authoritarian [laughs], I would feel great next to Eric Adams, you know.

And I wanted to explore that part of myself, which is the figure of the strong man, of the local elder who may or may not have been in a gang in their youth, the local deli owner who knows all the cops and firemen — these figures of strong men that are seen through the prism of this young girl. So in some ways, she’s trained by a man like that. He trains her the way that maybe he’s fantasizing about military school, and is training her the way he imagines a young cadet would be trained. And that was my experience.

I think it’s the experience of a lot of daughters of immigrants who are raised by tough men who both really enforce strict gender norms and rules and then also celebrate the girls for breaking those rules and being ambitious and reminding them of themselves. So that’s where the grandfather and some of the other men come from. It’s a kind of masculinity that I got to see up close and that I’m both very critical of, but also can’t help but be a little affectionate towards.

Catalina works with a tough boss in the book: Jim Young, the editor at the magazine she does her summer internship at. Young asks if she was “self-educated” because of how she pronounced the word lapel. He says “sometimes you can tell if someone is self-educated because they have read all the books but haven’t heard the author’s names pronounced.”

Reading that had me questioning what Young called “little rules that govern people’s thinking and behavior. […] a code of the New York intellectual class.” Indeed, many author’s names, like yours and mine, are in languages other than a reader’s own language. What does this say of the society we live in?

I think I still do that. I did the audiobook for my own book, and there are so many words I and the director I was working with had to look up because neither of us knew how to pronounce them. Something I did in the book was I sprinkled in French words because reading serious literature, they’re always sprinkling French, Greek and Latin. And I’m always like who cares what this means in Greek? So I decided to do that earnestly with Spanish; put it in Spanish and not translate it.

If you knew, then maybe you would get an extra meaning out of it. And if you didn’t know, well, close enough; I don’t understand Latin. 

I wanted to create that experience of some people being included and some people were excluded because that happens in literature. I wanted to create that little bit of experience for the intellectual class who may come to the book and be like ‘I read serious literature,’ and then be like, ‘I don’t know what these reggaeton references mean.’ That was very motivating to me, to create a book that was literary fiction, but that also played with class a little bit.

Catalina raised a good point about people who don’t vote in elections. 

She tried to convince her friend Delphine to vote, and said: “I made it my mission to get Delphine to register. I sent her links. I sent her reminders. She did not register to vote, and she did not vote. It felt personal. […] I felt in my heart that people who were politically neutral were cowards.” 

Reading that, I felt that comment was more you than Catalina in a way. While this book is a work of fiction, was it also an opportunity for you to use wryness and wit to express truth?

That’s the purpose of all writing: to try to express truth through words. I don’t feel like I’m hiding behind Catalina. What I do think I’m doing with Catalina is creating sort of a little demon that different people can just put on their shoulder. I want my readers who relate to Catalina, for whatever reason, to see this little fire of vulnerability, courage, bravado, confidence and to just let that inspire them. Let Catalina be their imaginary friend. Let her be the little demon that follows them around. 

I wanted to create a facsimile of myself in a kind of mythological sense. Myself but greater. Myself, but turn it into a pop star, into a saint, a sidekick. It’s a version of myself that I guess I wanted to be a companion to young girls who have felt pushed aside and abused and disenfranchised. When I am at my most confident, delusional self, I want to just capture that for myself too. I read it back to myself, I’m like damn. I need that sometimes and that’s why I wrote it too, because I needed that. 

Writing a character like this who is an immigrant, who is so sure of her own dignity and right to exist in this world was really healing because the climate in an election year, around a presidential election is so deeply xenophobic and dehumanizing that where do I go for this dignity? Where do I go to get encouragement? There’s not a lot of places.

Even when I look for art that’s created by immigrants or Latinos, a lot of it can be pretty heavy. So I wanted to create something that was kind of invigorating and encouraging too.

Let’s talk about the hopelessness and unfulfilled promise of the DREAM Act [a proposed law to protect certain immigrants who came to the U.S. as children but are vulnerable to deportation]. “I couldn’t bear to look at the other dreamers for too long,” Catalina says in your book.

“I felt so much love for them, and it made me sad to see them try to keep hope. What scared me was overhearing the word when, as in ‘When the DREAM Act passes, I’ll finally be able to… .’ When. They were stupid for believing. I had stopped believing so long ago. It didn’t even make me feel moody and contrarian. It was just what it was.” 

It’s difficult for me to ask about the DREAM Act because everything you’ve written and said about it in your two books and elsewhere is so clear. I wonder if it feels that way for you, given how many times you’ve written and spoken about it?

I’m a citizen now, and so many of the people I care about are still waiting for this piece of legislation, and they are not children anymore. They are adults with careers and families, who contribute to their communities, who are an undeniable part of American society. I want them to know that I haven’t forgotten and that it’s a fight that must feel so hopeless, and that does feel so hopeless.

The way that Dreamers were invited to the State of the Union, and then one, two election cycles, saw themselves not even come up, and be in a horrific climate where people are excited about mass deportations. The conversation — when I was a girl — went from talking about comprehensive immigration reform that was bipartisan when you had Republican figures like John McCain who seemed genuinely interested in a humane path forward.

Then, we’ve seen the hope for comprehensive immigration reform completely vanish, and it’s a part of the Democratic platform now, but it would be an understatement to say that neither party is particularly immigrant friendly. So, in some ways it feels like the story of the DREAM Act is in the past, and in some ways it feels like it’s an unfulfilled promise to my community and a lot of people that I care about.

So it’s something that I’ll probably keep bringing up in my work until it passes, or until I die. [Laughs] Whichever comes first.

[Laughs] That’s real. My next question is about the book’s use of dark humor.  There’s a line in which Catalina says: “I was scared that learning laws about customs or the transportation of dry food stuff, or even googling how you transport anything internationally would implicate me in the human trafficking ring I always suspected I had a connection to.”

It’s a funny line, but I found the portrayal of this irrational fear about dealing with the U.S. immigration system to be both thoughtful and realistic. What inspired you to weave this kind of humor into Catalina’s perspective, especially when it touches on something as complex as immigration?

I’m glad you liked that line. I wondered if people would understand what I meant. Immigration is such a huge topic, and there are so many ways to write about it. Usually the ways I see immigration come up in the news is as a crisis, as a problem to solve, and as something that association with immigrants or with immigration is a liability for politicians and for public intellectuals even.

But I think being an immigrant, more than anything else, has filled my life with a sense of belonging and purpose because I have seen human beings fight for what they know their rights are, even if no government or nobody else is there to back them up and say, you do have these rights. I’ve seen people I know, and love, and also that have hurt me, and that I don’t know, I’ve seen them fight for their dignity every single day. 

“It’s that fight for dignity that I think immigrants have. That is what propels them to move and make the choice to migrate.”

I’ve seen them watch this country take their youth, their lives, their labor, their brilliance, and just spit them out. It’s that fight for dignity that I think immigrants have. That is what propels them to move and make the choice to migrate. In order to be an immigrant, you kind of have to be the kind of person that says I’m gonna migrate. I feel a lot of affection for that kind of person. They’re my kind of people. They have the spirit, a spirit that I admire.

So I’m happy to be able to write from a point of humor and irreverence and mischief, because I think the immigrant experience does include that, and there are so many ways that we preserve our own dignity in our experience.

Towards the end of the book, I found myself hoping Catalina’s grandfather would overcome his immigration issues and be able to stay in the U.S. Without revealing too much, why did you choose this direction for his story, and what message do you hope readers take away from it?

What I did want to make sure in the book is that I didn’t solve Catalina’s problems in the end. Because her getting a green card isn’t poetic justice for the journey that she’s been through. It is, again, like many people, a journey that has no end, has no resolution. But what I wanted to make clear to the reader is that Catalina was going to be okay. All of these huge things were happening to her but she had herself. She’s a little bit threatening at the end in being like, ‘And I’m not going to therapy for 10 years.’

But really what she’s saying is ‘Here I come, world. Even if you throw this at me, I’ve got myself.’ So I wanted to definitely leave readers with that.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Do you know who should be in the next Our City? Email earlyarrival@documentedny.com.

Fisayo Okare

Fisayo writes Documented’s "Early Arrival" newsletter and "Our City" column. She is an MSc. graduate of Columbia Journalism School, New York, and earned her BSc. degree in Mass Comm. from Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos.

@fisvyo