Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it. ( )

I really disliked this book. The only section that I found really interesting was about the undocumented workers who were the "second responders" at the 9/11 site. The author made a point of saying that she wanted to write about those undocumented Americans who have been used, abused, demonized, harassed and forgotten, but then she kept insinuating herself into THEIR narrative. At one point, she writes that she is no journalist. No sh!t. Either write more about the people she said she was going to focus on or write her own memoir. Including all of her interactions with them put her center stage instead of them. ( )

A mix of memoir and interview, Karla centers undocumented Americans and their stories in fictionalized versions (for protection), alongside that of her own family. ( )

whew. this is amazing. her writing, her reporting, her connections, her honesty. this is incredible. this is so raw and full of hard stories, but also so full of love and even some humor. everything about this is brilliant.

i wanted to mark just about everything but in the end just:

"I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer."

"I think about the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of undocumented life on young people. As a result of all the stressors of migrant life, he found his subjects suffered chronic headaches, toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, and eating issues. Which is funny to find in research because I'm twenty-nine and I have this ulcer my doctors can't seem to soothe or diagnose the cause of. It feels like I have an open wound right beneath my breasts in the center of my abdomen and I can feel it spasm and bleed and it never goes away. Sometimes I have to go to Urgent Care, and I drink concoctions and take pills and drink teas and I just keep bleeding, and it hurts the most when, after a long day of reading about people forming human chains to block ICE officers from arresting a man and his child, I sit down to write about my parents.

Now, imagine that thirty, forty, fifty years in. Of course Octavio is sick. We're all fucking sick. It's a public health crisis and it's hard to know how to talk about it without feeding into the right-wing propaganda machine that already paints immigrants as charges to the healthcare system and carriers of disease. The trick to doing it is asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old as the country's justifications for slavery - that is, reassuring Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering marvels, built to do hard work, built to last longer and handle more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul, which is that we are 'impervious to pain,' as scholar Robin Bernstein has put it. We can only tell them we're sick if we remind them that sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines."

"Ivy’s baby has regained her vision, but nobody knows what the long-term effects of the water poisoning will be in her little body. The wait is torturous for Ivy. It is torturous for her mom. It is torturous for the community. It is not torturous for the government. They want us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same, our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead with the Lord until the end to give them an answer." ( )

3.5 stars. ( )