...[a] captivating and evocative first book ...Villavicencio aims to tell 'the full story' of what it means to be undocumented in America, in all of its fraughtness and complexity, challenging the usual good and evil categories through a series of memoir-infused reported essays.

Cornejo Villavicencio is able to inhabit her subject in a way few who get to publish can. (She even turns her limitations into strengths: writing powerfully about the places she can’t go, the situations where she’s out of place, the people who won’t talk to her.).

Based on fieldwork from Ground Zero to Miami, solidly researched and footnoted, this chronicle is framed by [Villavicencio's] own family’s experience with immigration and the relationships that blossomed between her and her similarly undocumented subjects. This valuable and authentic inquiry is powerfully embellished with magical imaginings.

...a profoundly intimate portrayal of the undocumented immigrant experience in America.

In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story...and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S.