Politics May 25, 2020

When Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was fifteen and growing up in New York, she called the restaurant where her father worked as a deliveryman and pretended to be a beat reporter at a city paper to get an abusive manager fired. In 2010, after she wrote an anonymous essay about being undocumented and a student at Harvard, she received her first offers to publish a memoir, which she rejected. But she is not, as she tells us in The Undocumented Americans, a journalist. “Journalists are not allowed to get involved” the way she gets involved, nor to “try to change the