Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, creator of the Nationwide Ebook Award finalist The Undocumented Individuals, has so much in frequent with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented scholar, and her broad ambitions might simply be imagined because the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the current prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and lots of others, readers would possibly marvel, how a lot of Catalina is Villavicencio?
This uncertainty, it seems, is deliberate: “I at all times need the reader to not essentially ensure what my intentions are as a author,” Villavicencio says. She discovered a mannequin in J.D. Salinger’s quick tales in regards to the Glass household. “Salinger undoubtedly does this. . . . You begin to assume Salinger is likely to be one of many brothers, he is likely to be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I preferred the sport of not understanding what Salinger was attempting to do . . . however I at all times knew that I used to be wrapped round his finger.”
Like these Salinger tales, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the ebook as being in the identical custom as different novels with younger protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a number of school college students, dreads the strategy of commencement and might’t work out what to do with the remainder of her life. By capturing the tumult of younger maturity, Villavicencio hopes to impress readers to make one thing out of their mess. Her aim in writing is “empowering those that must be empowered, embarrassing those that must be embarrassed.” Within the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was taking part in stay in New York Metropolis, it was stated that anybody who noticed them was impressed to begin their very own band. Villavicencio needs her writing to have that very same impact, for readers to “assume they should go make one thing. . . . [To think] I really feel so alive, I’ve to go do one thing now.”
Musicians who make their songs really feel private have been a giant affect on Catalina, particularly Lorde’s album Melodrama, the place, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio needed this ebook to “sound and really feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes throughout in Catalina’s potent mixture of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to consider her work in relation to Taylor Swift as nicely, whose followers pore over her lyric sheets on the lookout for clues to her private life.
“What your loved ones, Telemundo and García Márquez educate us are all completely different. These are defective classes. . . . The American racial binary can’t think about us.”
There’s an attract to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio needed studying Catalina to be like consuming popcorn or potato chips, to offer readers that feeling of “you’ll be able to’t simply eat one,” she says. “You may uncover one thing new in each sentence, however it may well additionally simply be actually enjoyable.” When Villavicencio was sharing the ebook with household and buddies, the response of one among her associate’s relations, an older white girl with out the identical academic background as Catalina, was encouragingly optimistic. She instructed Villavicencio that she “actually associated to Catalina” and felt “included with the sensible children . . . in a manner that she felt she’d been excluded earlier than.” This sort of boundary breaking, the place what might need been alienating is as an alternative pleasant, is the muse of Catalina, because the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity but manages to remain completely her difficult self. “There’s one thing that feels very, very liberating about coming into cultural establishments feeling prefer it’s all there so that you can use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t should tackle the values to have the ability to use it.”
There’s one other form of empowering boundary breaking at work right here as nicely, by way of Catalina’s place as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s mother and father handed away in a automobile crash, she was despatched to stay along with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. earlier than she was born. Raised by them in New York Metropolis, and unable to depart the nation due to her lack of documentation, Catalina is totally a New Yorker. Nonetheless, she experiences the town and the remainder of the world round her by way of a special language, one indecipherable by Anglos.
This transcendent language is symbolized within the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording machine produced from knotted strings—a “tactile” type of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters on the campus museum the place she works. Western students have by no means been capable of decipher the language of the khipu, so it stays a thriller what precisely they have been used to report. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are sometimes illegible to 1 one other each linguistically and culturally. However Villavicencio places the image to an extra goal: On one other degree, the khipu illustrates the gap between oneself and “the elements of our ancestry we are able to’t faucet into.”
“Who do you maintain the door open for going into the shop? The theoretical is snug. Lived expertise is more durable.”
Villavicencio speaks with a cautious knowledge about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” stating that “it may well imply something! . . . What your loved ones, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez educate us are all completely different. These are defective classes.” In right this moment’s political panorama, the place all the pieces hinges on identification, “there’s a picture for advertising,” she says, nevertheless it doesn’t account for the difficult methods historical past has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t think about us. It’s important to use these phrases defensively and it places an excessive amount of stress on them. [Identity] has to embody all the pieces.” She says that it’s important to “go right down to earth, head to head, [think about] who do you maintain the door open for going into the shop? The theoretical is snug. Lived expertise is more durable. Idea will get us out of doing the actual work.” She is definitely doing the actual work in Catalina, and readers will really feel its affect.