Hello, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is a special episode of the excerpt.

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but what does it mean to be undocumented?

Every one of their stories is different and the broad strokes coverage of migration you often hear can't possibly touch on everyone's reality.

Alex Dyke and Ontario Garcia decided to focus on the story of just one undocumented person, Aleks herself. A new book, The Cost of

Being Undocumented, One Woman's Reckoning with America's Inhumane Math is on bookshelves now. And I'm

joined by the authors, Alec's Dyke, and Ontario Garcia to discuss. Thank you both for being here.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. So, I want to just start with this. How did you two meet and what led to this idea for a book?

I've spent most of my time, my career as an educational researcher, spent in classrooms

thinking about educational inequalities and thinking about historically marginalized young

people and teachers and communities and families.

And during all of that, I was privileged with my wife to have a pair of twins.

We hired Aleks as our nanny.

The pandemic happened, and our world kind of shut down to just the five of us in a very

small household for a long time.

And after Aleks was no longer working with us as my children got older, we really started

to explore this question of the kinds of inequalities of what I experienced during this disruption of the pandemic was built on the privilege of being able to employ elites and to use her labor.

And that really led to us having some hard conversations together about what that work looked like.

And so I invited her to do participatory research alongside me.

There are some difficult conversations between the two of us of how to negotiate what that

research process would look like.

But that is the impetus is the ways invisible labor helps maneuver even well-intentioned individuals

to be able to thrive in this country.

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