Just a heads up y'all, there's some language in this episode that listeners may find offensive.

So, you know, it's gonna be some custom.

You've been warned.

I'm Jean Demby.

I'm Shireen Marisol Maragi, and this is Code Switch.

From NPR.

This episode features the words and writing of Carla Conejo Villavi-Sensio.

I had always thought of myself as an artist,

but I knew that the offers to represent me literally weren't coming from a place of admiring me as a writer,

but from a place of seeing me as an immigrant who had a sad story to tell, and that pissed me off.

Literary agents started reaching out to Carla after she wrote this essay for the Daily Beast.

It was about being an undocumented, Harvard student.

And this was back in 2010, about two years before DACA was first announced.

They wanted me to call my undocumented status, my dirty little secret, and I remember pushing back

and being like, like, that sounds like a vibrator. Like, I'm not going to do that.

The title ended up being, I'm an illegal immigrant at Harvard.

And after that, essay ran, she started getting offers to write a memoir.

And I was 21. I did not have a memoir in me, and I knew what they wanted,

which was they wanted like a devastating border crossing story.

And they wanted me to write about like how I was born in a literal ditch, and I made it to Harvard.

And I was disgusted by that.

10 years after that essay in the Daily Beast came out, Carla did publish a memoir of sorts.

...