18.1 Introduction: Vulnerable States
A key development in Cristina Henríquez’s 2014 novel The Book of Unknown Americans comes when an immigrant father who has traveled to the United States with his family from Mexico on a work visa is laid off and they lose their legal status. Determined for their daughter to attend a special needs school to get support for a traumatic brain injury, the family finds their situation becoming desperate. The family’s loss of status exacerbates the hardship of losing the father’s income by putting their hopes for their daughter’s welfare at risk. Because the father’s visa restricts the mother from working, their citizenship status reinforces a reliance on the male as chief wage earner. By narrating the repercussions of this shift in documentation, Henríquez makes visible the human – and gendered – cost of immigration policies and the instability of documentation, a precarity that has taken on heightened resonance under the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants. Henríquez’s act of telling this undocumented family’s story, as well as the stories of other immigrant characters of varying levels of status, mirrors the “Undocumented and Unafraid” movement’s rejection of silence as a political mode.1
This chapter takes up the gendered inflections and devastating effects of shifting states of documentation as depicted in contemporary novels by US women writers, including Henríquez, Ruth Ozeki, Lisa Ko, and Bich Minh Nguyen. These texts, emerging alongside a political project to render immigrant and undocumented life visible, insist on drawing attention to the ways that precarious states of citizenship impact women of color through economic instability, broken relationships, labor exploitation, and gender- and race-based harassment. Restrictive immigration policies, these novels emphasize, harm women in ways that are inextricable from gender, race, and citizenship status.
This chapter thus extends scholarship on the ways that literary texts have shown the harmful effects of immigration policies through the intersections of exploitation, racism, and gender stereotyping. Claudia Sadowski-Smith has argued that narratives about border crossers show “border deaths and disappearances as human rights violations and highlight[s] their traumatic effects on those left behind.”2 Viet Thanh Nguyen has emphasized how Chinese American male writers have rejected emasculating stereotypes about Asian males and sought “racial remasculinization through the performance of violence by the male body.”3 Lisa Lowe has analyzed how first-person narratives and literary texts have refused “the atomization of the conditions that issue from patriarchal subordination, racialized immigration, segregation, and labor exploitation … . [by] illuminating the intersecting axes of exploitation.”4 My analysis builds on this intersectional work by exploring how recent texts have emphasized the devastating effects on women’s lives of shifting states of documentation.
18.2 Undocumented, Unafraid: Resisting Invisibility
The shift toward telling stories of undocumented life is relatively recent, although it has roots in the late nineteenth-century work of Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). Undocumented immigrants have long been forced to live in the shadows, reducing them to the permanent silence of a disadvantaged underclass. They are present in the United States, but unable to advocate for themselves because of the threat of deportation. Pointing both to the advocacy work that personal stories can effect and the unique challenges of undocumented immigrants in telling their stories, Marta Caminero-Santangelo explains that “To speak and be heard, in ways that will not immediately invite the most serious of repercussions (e.g., detention and deportation), is a challenge that unauthorized immigrants face in ways that other populations with a direct stake in US legislative battles do not.”5 In Mae Ngai’s history of immigration restriction, she points to the double bind of the immigrant’s presence in the United States without rights to inclusion in the social or political sphere: “Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.”6 In other words, this is a group with a stake in national politics, but no voice or acknowledged right to engage in that conversation.
The double bind that Ngai describes has led to a mass silencing of immigrant stories. As Luis Alberton Urrea writes in the introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, undocumented stories have been largely ignored: “Undocumented immigrants have no way to tell you what they have experienced, or why, or who they are, or what they think. They are, by the very nature of their experience, invisible.”7 The silence of the undocumented has created an opening for rhetoric that paints unauthorized immigrants of color as criminals and as a threat. As Joanna Pérez notes, “Anti-immigrant rhetoric, sentiment, and policy are rooted in hegemonic narratives that depict undocumented immigrants as ‘illegal aliens,’ ‘criminals,’ and a ‘threat’ to the US.”8 Although not all undocumented immigrants are Latinx, anti-immigrant rhetoric is often directed at the Latinx community as part of what Leo Chavez describes as the “Latino Threat narrative.” As Chavez explains, “The Latino Threat narrative posits that Latinos [… .] are part of an invading force from south of the border that is bent on […] destroying the American way of life.”9 Anti-immigrant rhetoric relies on generalizations about immigrants that deny their individual experience and humanity. Beginning with activism surrounding the DREAM Act in 2010, immigration activists have resisted this narrative of criminality and threat by rejecting the invisibility of the undocumented and telling their stories.
A series of protests in 2010 signaled the political decision to tell stories under the “Undocumented and Unafraid” banner: in January, Felipe Matos, Carlos Roa, Juan Rodriguez, and Gaby Pacheco embarked on the Trail of Dreams, a 1,500-mile walk from Miami, Florida, to Washington, DC, in support of the DREAM Act; on March 10, a series of rallies were held across the United States as part of a national “coming out” day where undocumented activists told their stories; and in May, five activists staged a sit-in at Senator John McCain’s offices. These acts drew attention to individuals and their undocumented status as a means to gather support for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for those already in the country without authorization. By telling their stories, these activists hoped to change people’s minds about immigration. As Pacheco explained, “[T]he Trail of Dreams was my way of challenging the distorted depiction of immigrants in this country. We set out to dispel the myths by talking to the average American” (qtd. in Pérez, 33).
As René Galindo points out, these acts of protest are unique “since they [the undocumented] are excluded from the polity and are in the unique position of facing deportation.”10 Inspired by the Undocumented and Unafraid movement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas came out as undocumented in a 2011 New York Times Magazine story in which he describes his decision to stop hiding his undocumented status because “I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.”11 At a 2013 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on comprehensive immigration reform, Vargas explained that “I come to you as one of our country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, many of us Americans at heart, but without the right papers to show for it. Too often, we are treated as abstractions, faceless and nameless, subjects of debate rather than individuals with families, hopes, fears, and dreams” (39). To Vargas, telling undocumented stories is a rejection of abstractions and a demand for recognition. In this way, these stories are similar to testimonios, a genre Kimberly Nance describes as having three main characteristics: “a first-person narrative of injustice, an insistence that the subject’s experience is representative of a larger class, and an intent to work toward a more just future.”12 While Joanna B. Pérez and Walter J. Nicholls have critiqued the rhetoric around DREAMers as boosting the idea of a model minority, the expansion of the Undocumented and Unafraid movement to include all stories has rejected that narrative and made claims for the humanity of undocumented immigrants.13
18.3 Resisting Invisibility in Literature
The power of telling undocumented stories is not limited to personal narratives and political activism, as the last decade of American women’s literature has shown. A spate of novels by US women writers have also resisted silence and included undocumented characters as major parts of their storylines, using narrative to humanize their characters and elicit empathy for their stories. Speaking to the anti-immigrant discourse that has emerged from the Trump administration, Henríquez affirms the power of literature, and in particular storytelling, to push back:
It’s bad enough to have one person stand up and vilify or rebuke an entire group of people, but then to have a huge portion of the electorate buy into it? To have so many people now believe that the word “immigrant” is equivalent to “criminal”? To have so many people accept the spurious idea that immigrants are out to get them? That’s depressing as hell. But it should also convince us of the power of storytelling. If the people in power are willing to spin that narrative then those of us who believe differently should tell another.14
Henríquez sees literature playing a role in shifting the narrative by telling a story that humanizes immigrants and rejects the caricatures, such as Trump’s dismissal of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, despite research demonstrating that native-born Americans commit crimes at a far higher rate than immigrants.15 Fictional texts about undocumented immigrants can reframe the narrative by resisting abstractions and distortions.
Sadowski-Smith and Lowe have theorized the emotional and cultural work that literary texts can achieve in reframing narratives around immigration. Sadowski-Smith distinguishes between the rhetorical power of “cultural representations” (such as novels) and first-person narratives. Personal accounts, Sadowski-Smith argues, “are told in order to elicit identification from the audience by engaging their sense of ethics and justice with causes distant or alien from their own experiences” (335). On the other hand, creative works, such as Ana Castillo’s novel The Guardians, use literary and cinematic techniques to “elicit outrage and incredulity” (337) from the reader. Similarly, Lisa Lowe delineates first-person forms as “evidentiary” versus literary forms that are aesthetic (33). Novels, Lowe asserts, “allegorize” how the personal is affected by global, legal, economic, and geographic factors (43). The allegorical act that Lowe describes is key to the rhetorical power of novels of precarious citizenship: by creating characters who embody the repercussions of restrictive immigration policies, the novelists discussed in this chapter seek to gain empathy for undocumented people in the real world.
This act of storytelling as allegory is the project of Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans, whose title invokes the power of narrative to bring those who have been hidden out of the shadows and render them as knowable individuals. As the character Micho Alvarez says, “We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them.”16 These “unknown Americans” have been overlooked deliberately both because narratives about them have made people afraid of them, but also out of fear that people might realize that they aren’t so “other” after all. Micha suggests that the possibility of seeing similarities is, in some ways, the real threat because it’s easier to dismiss them if they are seen as different. The Book of Unknown Americans tells those stories and creates a network of individuals whose stories cannot be denied by caricatures or generalizations.
Henríquez’s move to tell stories and change readers’ minds is part of a recent immigration-centered movement, largely led by women writers, which builds on this longstanding belief that books will help readers to identify with those who are different from them. The idea that books will build empathy is reflected in the Reading without Walls (RWW) program, aimed at children and teenagers and promoted by author Gene Luen Yang, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The RWW program challenges youths to read books “about characters who look or live differently than you, topics you haven’t discovered, or formats that you haven’t tried” (RWW).17 The program is explicit in its goals: reading diverse books, the organizers argue, “promotes diversity and opens readers’ eyes to new ideas and experiences” (RWW). Although not all recent fiction focusing on immigrants’ lives is by women (Viet Thanh Nguyen is an obvious exception) or ignores male experiences, in the last decade a significant number of women have written about gendered aspects of immigrants’ stories. Holly Genovese noted in Literary Hub that 2016 through 2018 witnessed “a verifiable wave in young adult literature featuring immigrants and first generation Americans.”18 She points to the number of works featuring deportations that put “a human face on undocumented status” (para. 15). Notably, all of the authors Genovese discusses are women, and she points out that much young adult literature focusing on immigration is “closely linked to the experience of living in America as immigrants, daughters of immigrants, and women of color … . One thing they all have in common is the focus on the specific experiences of teenage girls” (paras 6–7). The focus on teenage girls’ lives in YA fiction reflects a broader trend toward telling stories of undocumented women.
Although the telling of undocumented stories in gendered terms has gained more traction in the last decade, its beginnings can be found in the work of Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), whose stories Sadowski-Smith identifies as “the first-known fictional representations of the undocumented U.S. border crosser.”19 To trace a literary genealogy back to Eaton underscores undocumented stories as a longstanding mode for exposing the repercussions for women and families of repressive border policies. Eaton’s family, according to Mary Chapman, helped smuggle Chinese immigrants over the border from Canada during the exclusion era that began with the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Chapman’s research has illuminated Eaton’s family connections to the smuggling trade: Eaton’s father was known as a “kingpin” in the smuggling industry based in Montreal.20 Chapman points to three “smuggling stories” in Eaton’s oeuvre, all echoing accounts of her father’s smuggling operations: “The Smuggling of Tie Co” (1900), “Woo-Ma and I” (1906), and “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” (1912). These stories dramatize the “backdoor” route of illegal entry from Canada to the United States, a frequent topic in Eaton’s journalism (xxv, xxvii).
Eaton’s fictions of undocumented border crossers emphasize gender dynamics and draw on sentimental romance plots to invite sympathy for her characters’ condition. “The Smuggling of Tie Co,” for example, uses a sentimental romance plot to humanize the immigration story of a woman disguised as a man and in love with her smuggler. Martha Cutter, Huining Ouyang, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, and Min Song have explored the gendered and racial dynamics of border crossing and smuggling in this story. Their work suggests ways that the smuggling of Tie Co from Canada to the United States can be read as a coded act of crossing borders of gender, race, and sexuality. As Cutter argues, this story “suggests the radical possibility that is both homosexual and miscegenating.”21 The gender and racial dynamics are important because Chinese women were even more excluded than men in the late nineteenth-century US. Sadowski-Smith points out that “Eaton’s focus on the predicament of undocumented women immigrants points to persistent gender bias in the making of nineteenth-century immigration legislation that would be enacted at the border” (56). Eaton’s attention to the gendered effects of immigration policies has reemerged in contemporary women’s fiction.
18.4 The Cultural Work of Immigration Narratives: Developing Empathy, Changing Minds
Recent novels about the undocumented by US women writers also draw on sentimental plots, but with a heavier emphasis on family ties and on fully depicting the lives and circumstances of those who are in the country without authorization. Family relationships are key in these representations, especially the ways in which family relationships, and especially those between mothers and their children, are put under stress by the condition of being undocumented. Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (2017), for example, tells the story of Deming Guo, a young man whose mother, Polly, suddenly disappears when she is swept up in a deportation raid at the nail salon where she works. Deming, unaware of what has happened to his mother, thinks instead that she has abandoned him in search of other opportunities. While Polly did not leave him on purpose, her actions throughout the novel are motivated by a desire for more opportunities than are available to a mother in her situation, and Guo’s subsequent destructive behavior stems from a sense of abandonment.
Polly’s immigration story from Fuzhou, China, is deeply connected to her identity as a mother. In flashback sequences, Polly narrates her discovery as a young woman that she has become pregnant by a man she does not love. China’s laws dictate that she cannot get an abortion without the father’s permission and that she would face a steep fine for an unauthorized pregnancy. Unwilling to marry the father of her child, she ultimately decides that her best option is to go into debt to emigrate to the United States where she thinks she will be able to have the abortion and find more opportunities for work. When she gets to New York, however, she finds out that it is too late for an abortion because the roundabout route that she had to take to enter the United States illegally took much longer than anticipated. As a result, she has to find a way to balance grueling work in a sweatshop with motherhood. Rather than finding the opening up of opportunities that she had imagined in the United States, her options are limited both by her condition as a mother and as an undocumented worker. Labor exploitation, immigration policies, and her thwarted desire for opportunities beyond motherhood ultimately create pain for her and her son.
Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014) likewise meditates on the connection between documentation and family connections through the lens of a mixed-race daughter’s disappearance. The family’s inability to connect with one another, and the daughter’s estrangement from her family, is rooted in her Chinese American father’s sense of alienation from US culture, a sense that he has never “belonged here, even though he’d been born on American soil, even though he had never set foot anywhere else.”22 Unlike Polly, who struggles as a sweatshop worker, James Lee is a professor of American Studies with a graduate degree from Harvard who battles assumptions about what he is qualified to teach. His feeling that he doesn’t belong is crystallized in a flashback to the disastrous first lecture that he gave in a course on cowboys in American culture, where most of the students walked out after seeing that their teacher was not what they considered “American.” His story is embedded in a precarious connection between family and documentation: his father came to the United States during the exclusion era, when only children of people who already lived in the United States could immigrate from China. Using a false story and the name of his neighbor’s dead son, he entered the United States to join his “father.” As the narrator reflects, “It was the story of nearly every Chinese immigrant from the time of Chester A. Arthur to the end of the Second World War. While the Irish and the Germans and the Swedes crowded onto steamship decks, waving as the pale green torch of the Statue of Liberty came into view, the coolies had to find other means to reach the land where all men were created equal” (40, emphasis in original).
In connecting James’s search for identity in the United States to the history of Chinese exclusion, Ng demonstrates how the legal requirement to document family relationships fractured family ties and created psychologically damaging states of limbo: “In Chinatowns, the lives of all those paper sons were fragile and easily torn. Everyone’s name was false. Everyone hoped not to be found out and sent back” (41, emphasis in original). Ng depicts the fragility of individual lives and families created by policies of exclusion, a dynamic that Eaton underscored in “The Smuggling of Tie Co,” where the narrator explains that would-be Chinese immigrants “on payment of a couple of hundred dollars could procure a father, which father would swear the young Chinaman was born in America – thus proving him to be an American citizen with the right to breathe United States air.”23 In this story of unsuccessful border crossing and romance, Eaton underscores the family ties available for sale and, as Degenhardt points out, “the realities of Chinese exclusion that prevented Chinese men from producing legitimate families.”24 While the manufactured family ties in Eaton’s work led to an expansion of opportunity and “the right to breathe United States air,” for James Lee, his family’s history of fabricated family ties leads to a sense of disconnection from both a national and immediate family.
Even in families where connections remain close between parents and their children, immigration policies and the search for citizenship distort extended family relationships. Jean Kwok’s semiautobiographical Girl in Translation (2010) tells the story of a mother and daughter who arrive in the United States from Hong Kong under a relative’s sponsorship. They are reliant on Aunt Paula, who has married a US citizen and manages a sweatshop in New York City. The gender dynamics of the aunt’s escape from Hong Kong and subsequent ability to sponsor her relatives are made clear from the outset:
It was difficult for anyone to escape from Hong Kong before its scheduled return from British to Communist Chinese rule in 1997. There was almost no way out in those days unless you were a woman, beautiful or charming enough to marry one of the Chinese American men who returned to Hong Kong in search of a wife. This was what Aunt Paula had done. And now, she had been kind enough to allow us to share in her good fortune.25
Because of her beauty, Aunt Paula was able to escape to the United States and attain a position of prosperity and authority. Unfortunately, for the narrator and her mother, Aunt Paula uses her position to exploit her sister’s labor, despite claiming family loyalty. Aunt Paula had originally promised that the mother would help take care of her family, but after the mother became ill in Hong Kong with tuberculosis, Aunt Paula changes her mind and offers grueling work in her factory instead. As it turns out, the work is so demanding that the daughter is pulled in after school to help her mother keep up. While Monica Chiu has critiqued Girl in Translation for focusing on how a “poor disenfranchised character who is preternaturally brilliant as well as a hard worker achieves economic mobility,”26 rather than condemning the systems that create inequity, the novel invites empathy for the female characters who are left open to exploitation, even by their own family, by immigration policies.
18.4.1 Citizenship and Precarious States
Across these novels, documentation is shown to be a shifting state that can change through a wide range of unforeseen circumstances over which the characters have limited, and in some cases no, control. Whereas national discourses of “criminals” from Mexico surging across the border give an image of fixed states of legality that are transgressed in the act of border crossing, these novels show how often citizenship and documentation shift. In her analysis of the history of the nation’s construction of illegal immigration, Ngai emphasizes that “illegal alienage … is contingent and at times it is unstable. The line between legal and illegal status can be crossed in both directions” (6). Shifting states of documentation in these novels often parallel shifts in traditionally gendered roles and relationships within households. The resulting tensions over that precarity reveal how gender and citizenship are intertwined.
In telling the stories of the undocumented, recent novels have focused on how the precarity of documentation, in particular, impacts women and families. In Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), the protagonist Nao’s father is headhunted by a Silicon Valley company, so they move there from Japan when she’s three. The company goes bankrupt when the dot com bubble bursts, and they lose their visas and the family has to return to Japan, where Nao, who thinks of herself as an “ordinary California girl,”27 finds herself in crisis. Nao is alienated from Japanese culture because “as far as I’m concerned, my whole life started and ended in Sunnyvale, which makes me American” (43). Her dad falls into a state of depression when he cannot find a new job and is not emotionally available to support his daughter as she is victimized by bullies at her school. In a narrative structure that symbolizes the silencing of undocumented stories, Nao has no outlet for telling her story, and so she confides it to a diary that she sends across the ocean. Her story is only revealed to Ruth, a Japanese American woman who finds it washed up on the shore near her house. Ruth begins to read Nao’s account because she feels a connection to Nao and to her own Japanese heritage. As in the case of many DACA recipients, Nao’s disconnection is rooted in immigration policies that revoke status and ignore personal and cultural connections that may have been forged in the adopted country, sending a young woman like Nao back to a country that feels alien.
The impact of precarious documentation is detailed at even greater length in Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls (2009), which is set in the post-9/11 period when restrictions on immigration in the name of anti-terrorism were being tightened. I have argued elsewhere that the immigration narratives of Vietnamese refugees in Bich Minh Nguyen’s work, most notably Short Girls, must be understood within a political context, especially in the post-9/11 period.28 Short Girls depicts the protagonist Van’s father’s route to US citizenship against the backdrop of others who have failed. Although the characters in this novel who seek citizenship are male, the stories are told through the lens of the female protagonist, an immigration lawyer who is engaged in the emotional work of trying to help the expatriate Vietnamese community and fulfill what her community sees as her obligations as a daughter.
While Van’s father achieves citizenship, she feels a personal sense of failure when she is unable to help two men whose route to legal status fails as a result of minor crimes unacceptable to a system designed to expel immigrants who fail to show “good moral character,” as defined by the US code (title 8, sec. 1101). The first case precipitates a crisis in Van’s professional life and marriage as she fails to protect a man whose hopes to secure an H-1B temporary worker visa are dashed when he is pulled over and found to have a gun in his car. Van describes his vision of the American dream: “Vijay was going to settle in, work his way up the salary rung, eventually buy a house in one of the suburbs; his children would grow up completely American, shun Vijay’s customs for those of their white friends at school. It was going to be the typical immigrant story” (48). After being caught with a firearm, he loses his case to avoid deportation, and this vision evaporates. In the second case, Van’s father commands her to help Na Dau, a member of her community, hold onto his green card after being arrested for drunk driving. When Na is arrested for a second offense, he panics, thinking that he will be held indefinitely in a detention center. By running away and leaving the state, he puts himself out of reach of legal help and shifts from green card holder on the pathway to naturalization to permanently undocumented. Van predicts that he “would become one of those shadowy underground figures slipping in and out of restaurants, his every day weighed against the worry of being caught, pointed at, named illegal” (275). In contrast to a green card holder working toward the goal of citizenship, the undocumented “shadowy underground figures” of this vision can be named “illegal” by others at any moment and thus lose command of their identity and ability to remain in the United States. These failures are a tragedy both for the immigrants and for Van who agonizes over her inability to help. The crisis brought on for Van is presented in gendered terms: her husband punishes her emotionally for her inability to prevent deportation in the first case and in the second she is trying to fulfill the traditional role of dutiful daughter for her demanding father and her Vietnamese community.
18.5 Conclusion
There is one key difference between the recent literary works by US women writers that tell stories of the undocumented and the first-person stories being told by what Pérez refers to as “undocuactivists”: undocuactivists tell their stories at the risk of personal consequences, including deportation, whereas literary fiction has the advantage of being told through a layer of safety and distance. Literary fictions about the undocumented tread a middle ground between the undocuactivists’ work and the double-bind of silenced non-citizenship described by Caminero-Santangelo: they can fearlessly tell the stories of unauthorized immigration because they are hidden behind fictions. In this way, they can amplify and add emotional resonance to the first-person stories being told by activists, thus, in effect, working to support similar goals as the Undocumented and Unafraid movement by humanizing immigrants. At the same time, these novels’ rhetorical and emotional power comes from the truth claims that they make about the representational nature of their stories – in other words, from the allegorization that Lowe describes. These stories put flesh on the bones of immigration policies, showing the gendered human costs of precarious citizenship. The humanity that these works of fiction represent matters and has the potential to change readers’ minds because it is drawn from and a reflection of truth.
