The way I define like being punk myself is that you understand that your accomplishments are not just your accomplishments.

You understand that you belong to a

community. You understand that the world is the system. You understand that the food on your table

came from somewhere and you can envision the last hands that touched the food before they, you know,

enter the package that you just opened.

And that it's kind of like you're haunted, like you're haunted by your relationship to all

of the people in this, in this world, and you act accordingly.

That's Carla Cornelho Villavicencio, author of the new book, The Undocumented Americans.

I could tell you about Carla, how she's a gifted writer or a Harvard grad, but she'd probably

hate all that.

That's part of why she wrote this book to tell her own story in her own words and a complicated

narrative about what it means to live in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant.

This book was a long time coming. Why write it now?

Well, it wasn't a long time coming because I didn't want to write it.

It was like I kind of felt like my parents came to this country to, for me to have a better life and not to dwell in the migrancy of my life. Like, I wouldn't have been

an immigration lawyer. You know, that's, that didn't feel like the proper repayment for my

parents' sacrifices. It wasn't far enough away from their migration. And I felt like a proper

repayment. And that's how I, that's how I thought of my life.

That's how I still think of my life for their migration was something so far enough from their

migration that it would make them not remember the trauma. And so writing about immigration was not it.

And so I just wrote about music for a long time.

And I wanted to be the guy in high fidelity.

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