Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on “Catalina,” the Tale of an Undocumented Student at Harvard

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The writer talks with David Remnick about writing the lives of the undocumented, in journalism and in fiction. Her previous work, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
0:11.2	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone.
0:14.0	Catalina I Teralde is the protagonist of the new novel, Catalina.
0:22.0	In the summer before her senior year of college, of the new novel, Catalina.
0:23.1	In the summer before her senior year of college, she's working as an intern at America's third most
0:28.1	prestigious literary magazine.
0:30.5	That's how she describes it anyway. It's a magazine full of, quote,
0:34.0	famously difficult men who wrote tens of thousands of words
0:37.0	about being sad and horny.
0:39.0	I think we know the type.
0:41.0	Come the fall, she'll be back at Harvard to plot her future.
0:45.5	If all of this suggests a life of rare and kind of annoying privilege, Catalina's situation
0:50.3	is actually a lot more complicated. She's an undocumented immigrant to the U.S.
0:55.0	raised in Queens by her grandparents.
0:57.0	And what her future looks like after graduation is very uncertain.
1:12.0	In the summer of 2010, the year Instagram launched, there was a cricket invasion in Queens, something to do with global warming, and if you believed my
1:14.9	grandfather, yet another sign that America was lagging behind Cuba in
1:19.1	scientific advances. He was not a communist, he just had a bit of a thing for Fidel. Dozens of crickets were under the floors and in the walls of our apartment.
1:29.0	The landlord sent an exterminator, but it had little effect on their fornication.
1:34.7	The sound was intolerably loud.
1:37.1	My grandfather said that back in Ecuador, summer nights in Esmeraldas were so loud,
1:42.0	it sounded like, well, what it was, a beach and a jungle.
	...

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