Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented student, and her broad ambitions could easily be imagined as the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the recent prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and many others, readers might wonder, how much of Catalina is Villavicencio?
This uncertainty, it turns out, is deliberate: “I always want the reader to not necessarily be sure what my intentions are as a writer,” Villavicencio says. She found a model in J.D. Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family. “Salinger definitely does this. . . . You start to think Salinger might be one of the brothers, he might be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I liked the game of not knowing what Salinger was trying to do . . . but I always knew that I was wrapped around his finger.”
Like those Salinger stories, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the book as being in the same tradition as other novels with young protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a lot of college students, dreads the approach of graduation and can’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life. By capturing the tumult of young adulthood, Villavicencio hopes to provoke readers to make something out of their mess. Her goal in writing is “empowering those who need to be empowered, embarrassing those who need to be embarrassed.” In the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was playing live in New York City, it was said that anyone who saw them was inspired to start their own band. Villavicencio wants her writing to have that same effect, for readers to “think they have to go make something. . . . [To think] I feel so alive, I have to go do something now.”
Musicians who make their songs feel personal were a big influence on Catalina, especially Lorde’s album Melodrama, where, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio wanted this book to “sound and feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes across in Catalina’s potent mix of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to think of her work in relation to Taylor Swift as well, whose fans pore over her lyric sheets looking for clues to her personal life.
“What your family, Telemundo and García Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories. . . . The American racial binary can’t imagine us.”
There’s an allure to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio wanted reading Catalina to be like eating popcorn or potato chips, to give readers that feeling of “you can’t just eat one,” she says. “You can discover something new in every sentence, but it can also just be really fun.” When Villavicencio was sharing the book with family and friends, the reaction of one of her partner’s family members, an older white woman without the same educational background as Catalina, was encouragingly positive. She told Villavicencio that she “really related to Catalina” and felt “included with the smart kids . . . in a way that she felt she’d been excluded before.” This kind of boundary breaking, where what might have been alienating is instead enjoyable, is the foundation of Catalina, as the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity yet manages to stay entirely her complicated self. “There’s something that feels very, very freeing about entering cultural institutions feeling like it’s all there for you to use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t have to take on the values to be able to use it.”
There’s another kind of empowering boundary breaking at work here as well, through Catalina’s position as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s parents passed away in a car crash, she was sent to live with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. before she was born. Raised by them in New York City, and unable to leave the country because of her lack of documentation, Catalina is thoroughly a New Yorker. Still, she experiences the city and the rest of the world around her through a different language, one indecipherable by Anglos.
This transcendent language is symbolized in the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording device made from knotted strings—a “tactile” form of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters at the campus museum where she works. Western scholars have never been able to decipher the language of the khipu, so it remains a mystery what exactly they were used to record. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are often illegible to one another both linguistically and culturally. But Villavicencio puts the symbol to a further purpose: On another level, the khipu illustrates the distance between oneself and “the parts of our ancestry we can’t tap into.”
“Who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder.”
Villavicencio speaks with a wary wisdom about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” pointing out that “it can mean anything! . . . What your family, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories.” In today’s political landscape, where everything hinges on identity, “there is an image for marketing,” she says, but it doesn’t account for the complicated ways history has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t imagine us. You have to use these terms defensively and it puts too much pressure on them. [Identity] has to encompass everything.” She says that you have to “go down to earth, face to face, [think about] who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder. Theory gets us out of doing the real work.” She is certainly doing the real work in Catalina, and readers will feel its impact.