But Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel requires no comparative exhortation. It is a singular, owned, undaunted achievement.
“Catalina” recounts a year in the life of a self-aware, undocumented Harvard senior who’s been coming of age since she was 5. Wry and perspicuous, the protagonist of the book’s title suffers no illusions as she approaches the end of her collegiate career. She is not reminiscent of Scout Finch. She isn’t Holden Caulfield, nor Esperanza Cordero. The question is not to whom one compares Catalina, but who will follow her.
Catalina is a miracle baby, having survived a horrible car crash that killed her parents in Ecuador. At 5, she was sent to live with her undocumented grandparents. She describes her childhood and subsequent path to the Ivy League with wry detachment, reporting a system that sets her up for sainthood instead of success, even at Harvard. “Throughout my childhood I ruminated intensely on why I was brought to America. Nobody explained it to me … Perhaps my Grandparents sent for me. Perhaps they were getting old and realized that if they raised me, I might take care of them …That seems like a cynical calculation but I understood the role cynical calculations play in survival.”
She is in seventh grade when she hears about the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or the Dream Act, and, by 20, knows the score. With no clear path to citizenship, the question is what Catalina will do next.
“Four years at Harvard had been presented to me like a trip to Disney World to a terminally ill child and the end was coming,” she thinks. “I could not be legally employed after graduation.” She resolves the problem by only taking unpaid internships. “So long as I was enrolled in school and lived with my grandparents,” Catalina explains, “I could do as many unpaid internships in media as I wanted. They could be like Pokemon cards.”
Early on, we meet Catalina’s grandfather. He is her muse, guardian of her walk to school, maker of homeland memories. “Everything I know about Latin America comes from my Grandfather … If a place in the world could be accused of being too much,” she says, “of not taking off one item of clothing or accessories before leaving the house, of in general being the opposite of Coco Chanel, that is the Andes, which simultaneously houses rainforests, desert, mountains, beaches and snow, cartels, and people who love Jesus so much that they put themselves through crucifixion.”
“Catalina” is Villavicencio’s second book. Her first, “The Undocumented Americans,” was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction. Her literary career thus far journals with candor her own experiences (her story has many parallels to Catalina’s) intertwined with deep reporting about other undocumented people and a different kind of crucifixion.
I can relate to Villavicencio’s fictionalization of Harvard, to a point. I’m a Harvard graduate, from a working-class Mexican family and American by way of the Sonora borderlands. My class entered Harvard’s gate amorphous and walked out star material: connected, employable, electable. My dad used to tell my brothers and me that we’re Americans of Mexican descent, accent on American.
When Catalina walks through Harvard Yard, the accent is on her resilience. My advantage when I was a student there was my American citizenship. Catalina is not worried about her status. In fact, for someone without a future to speak of, she’s resolute about her deserved place in the universe: Yeah, I’m undocumented. Y que?
No, Catalina’s worry is about transcendence. Her goal is not to elucidate art. It’s becoming art, to be art, to own the process, as she was taught. “My Grandfather taught me how to pick a lock with two bobby pins; he taught me the extradition laws of major Latin American countries, and France, Germany and Switzerland.” Her grandfather taught her about Marxism and how to make Nescafé taste good. These things, he told her, were “simply what you had to know as a cultured person.” Catalina learned “to rely on my own scruples to make things happen. I would have to become a writer myself.” When she’s recruited by a high-profile Hollywood filmmaker and Harvard alum to star in a documentary about her own life, the joining of idealism and objectification becomes her chimera.
Catalina’s journey plows a road of longing — for a place in a world that does not want her back or, at best, is confused by her mere existence. There is no room for yearning in this world, only observation and next steps. The triumph for Villavicencio is her illumination of Catalina’s aspiration. In this, she has composed a great lyrical novel that transcends origin. It is neither American nor Latin American nor Pan American. The spotlight on Catalina’s searching heart is of Villavicencio’s own making. It is her original bel canto, in her superlative voice.
Marcela Davison Avilés is a multimedia producer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Catalina
By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
