Desaparecido. The word has been often on my tongue over the past four years. Most haunting is the sweet young man blowing kisses at his little girl in the window of the apartments next door. I wondered what would become of this family if he did not return. I only know that I have not seen him since that day.
What happened to the cleaners who came and went from my office? Did the building change services, were they cleaning another floor? What of the parents at that same apartment building next door, who congregated to put their children on the bus each morning? Were they forced out by gentrification?
Or, did they simply disappear?
To be undocumented is not only to be without legal papers. It is to be untold.
The physical and legal abuses of undocumented people in this country are often our focus, but in 'The Undocumented Americans', Karla Cornejo Villavicencio tells another story. It is her own story, but it is told in the stories of others, those who do not exist, not on paper, not in our conscience.
From the unknown restaurant workers, cleaners and delivery people who are uncounted in the 9/11 death toll, to the Latinx community in Flint, where undocumented people were unable to get water distributions; from the clean-up after Katrina, to the ICE office in Miami, Cornejo Villavicencio weighs the mental toll of a life lived in certain uncertainty: one can never know whether this might be the day that tears a family apart.
Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes.
Under such a life, one does not become attached. Not to things, not to places, not to people. Trust must be hoarded.
The myth of the 'anchor baby' is infuriating: under the Obama administration, a child born in the US might have been reason to grant deferral, but under Trump, the required check-ins have become another way to arrest and deport. DACA status, too, is imperilled: those who put their faith in the executive order and revealed their identities are now a convenient list for ICE deportations. It is impossible not to see the parallel to those who joined political parties and groups in the Weimar Republic, providing the Nazis with lists of communists and gay men.
The U.S. government’s crimes against immigrants are beyond the pale and the whole world knows.
We need not fear hyperbole. I attended a meeting of Jewish people gathered in solidarity against the separation of families at the border. Most notable was the son of a Holocaust survivor, who told us that before his father passed away, he made the comparison. Likewise, the Mujeres en Solidaridad who stand in silence across from the ICE check-in in Miramar, FL are women from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, mothers of the disappeared. They know.
Cornejo Villavicencio asks about nightmares, wants to know about the fears the subconscious gives up when we are most vulnerable. Esme, one of the Mujeres en Soldaridad, is a witness to the people waiting for their check-ins. She is witness to those who do not return.
She dreams of concentration camps.