Chapter 4
Alternative Medicine and Spiritual Healing in Miami
In Miami, where healthcare access for undocumented immigrants is severely limited, alternative medicine and spiritual practices become lifelines. Villavicencio interviews practitioners offering specific herbal remedies: papaya leaf to "keep your insides young," cerasee to clean drugs from the system, sapo tea for diabetes, and vervain for low iron. She meets Henri, an older man who claims vodou remedies can cure serious conditions including AIDS and cancer.
During a vodou ceremony, the author has a strange experience after being given a blue alcoholic drink. Though she remains functional enough to conduct interviews and complete her evening routine, her parents later tell her her speech was slurred. The next day she feels odd, "kind of floating."
A year passes, during which Villavicencio chronicles national events including Hurricanes Irma and Maria, ICE stopping public transportation to check citizenship papers, the #MeToo movement, and white nationalist violence in Charlottesville. Meanwhile, her own health deteriorates as she gains seventy pounds without medical explanation-a common phenomenon among undocumented immigrants who lack consistent healthcare.
The author reconnects with Esme, who has become "a surrogate for motherly warmth." Esme has co-founded an activist group called Mujeres en Solidaridad that teaches domestic workers about rights and gender-based violence. Their subgroup "You Are Not Alone" supports immigrants at USCIS offices, where people are treated "like livestock" and often "disappeared" into detention centers. Esme shares her own history of surviving abuse during Uruguay's dictatorship, and confides that her immigration advocacy work is meaningful because it gives isolated immigrant women "a reason to exist."
We meet Salome, a 48-year-old Argentine immigrant who became her family's sole provider after her husband Harrison died of brain cancer in 2012. Every hospital rejected him due to his undocumented status. They resorted to a naturalist's treatments, documented in a notebook with entries like "Miracle oatmeal" and "I am doing everything I can to stay alive." Harrison's cancer spread to his throat and lungs before he died at 46. Salome stayed in America for her four children, one with DACA, and recently obtained a green card through her citizen son, giving her newfound confidence.
Later, Villavicencio joins Salome, Esme, and Isadora (a former international affairs lawyer now working as a housekeeper) for a night out at a Fort Lauderdale tiki bar. Over mojitos, they discuss the dangers housekeepers face-sexual assault, wage theft, deportation threats, and health hazards from cleaning chemicals. When asked about nightmares, they all experience them nightly, with Esme dreaming of concentration camps and hiding people who must remain silent.
The chapter reveals how undocumented immigrants create parallel systems of care-medical, spiritual, and communal-when excluded from official institutions. These networks of support become essential not just for physical survival but for maintaining dignity and hope in the face of constant precarity.
Chapter 5
Poisoned Water, Poisoned Lives in Flint
Villavicencio visited Flint in 2017, a year after its water crisis made headlines and two months after officials were charged with involuntary manslaughter for misleading the public about water safety. Once a thriving industrial city where General Motors employed half the population, Flint had lost half its residents by 2014 after GM closed nearly all factories. The remaining population-smaller, poorer, and predominantly Black and brown-faced crumbling public services, rampant arson, privatized garbage collection, and astronomical water bills for still-contaminated water.
Flint's undocumented residents suffered unique hardships during the water crisis. Warning flyers were published only in English, and when canvassers went door-to-door, many immigrants wouldn't answer out of fear they were immigration authorities. When Obama declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard, uniforms further deterred undocumented residents from opening their doors. Some only learned about the poisoned water from relatives in Mexico who saw reports on Univision.
At St. Aloysius, the only church offering Spanish services, undocumented members gather to meet Villavicencio after mass. They recall how the auditorium once overflowed with donated water cases when the crisis made headlines, but now stands empty. Lilliana, battling cancer, describes how they first suspected problems when rust-colored water tasted terrible, but officials dismissed complaints. Meanwhile, GM stopped using Flint water at a remaining plant to prevent parts corrosion, warning only their employees' families.
The health impacts are devastating. Lilliana explains that blood tests don't reveal the full danger, as lead penetrates bones and causes long-term effects. Research shows childhood lead exposure can cause high blood pressure, kidney damage, and intellectual disabilities affecting speech, memory, fine-motor skills, and behavioral control. With children of color disproportionately exposed, Villavicencio wonders about the future of Flint's children when the state has poisoned their bodies and brains.
Daily life has become harder-families use multiple cases of bottled water daily, with children crying over quick lukewarm showers since hot water opens pores that absorb lead. Trust remains a major issue-residents doubt official claims about water safety and question identical lead test results across entire families.
We meet Theodoro, a quiet man who appears much older than his fifty-six years, with deep wrinkles like tree bark. After various jobs in factories and restaurants, Theodoro found happiness at a chocolate factory where he spent ten years. "My years at the chocolate factory were the most beautiful time of my life," he tells Villavicencio, describing with reverence the chocolate machines that "cascaded down like a curtain but also up like a geyser." When new owners took over in 2012, requiring legal documentation, they let him go with a certificate praising his work. Now living alone with his two rescued pit bulls, Gracie and Bella, he shares his limited clean water rations with them, explaining simply: "They can't really speak, but if they could speak, they'd have a lot to say."
Villavicencio returns to Flint nearly a year later, after Governor Rick Snyder announces the state will stop providing free water despite only replacing 6,200 of the 12,000 affected pipes. She reflects bitterly that "the government wanted the people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died," seeing Flint as a microcosm of how undocumented immigrants are treated nationwide: "being killed softly, silently, and with impunity."
Chapter 6
Families Torn Apart in Cleveland
Despite generally not enjoying children's company, Villavicencio was moved by a video of three young American boys saying goodbye to their father being deported from Cleveland. Reminded of her brother, she contacted their lawyer offering to mentor them and wrote them a letter about honoring their parents' sacrifices through education.
She travels to Willard, Ohio-a rural farming town with 6,000 residents (94% white) where migrant workers face hostility from locals-to meet the boys. She discovers four children: Andres (14), Omar (11), Elias (10), and Greta (6), who are struggling with unsupervised time while their mother works extra hours. Their father Javier lived in the US for sixteen years before being deported in 2017, despite having checked in with immigration authorities every six months since his 2011 deportation order.
When Javier was deported, he left suddenly without packing, believing someone would intervene. The family found his belongings everywhere: unwashed clothes, damp toothbrush, a razor soon to rust. Though they speak daily, Javier has changed-becoming short-tempered from separation. Andres assumed the "man of the house" role, walking miles to the grocery store and caring for siblings instead of joining wrestling. Without their driver, they're stranded in rural Ohio. Patricia works long hours, takes English classes, and comes home exhausted.
Since the deportation, each child copes differently: Omar remains stoic but misses his father intensely, Elias dreams "the world is going to crack open," and Greta stopped eating. Patricia refuses to move the family to Mexico despite Javier's wishes, saying, "This is their country."
While helping Javier's family, Villavicencio meets Leonel Chavez, a 45-year-old Ecuadorian who's claimed sanctuary in a Methodist church near Yale. After twenty years in America, building a construction career and raising a family including American-born daughter Diana, Leonel faces deportation following a 2007 wrong turn into Canada.
Living confined in the church has darkened Leonel's spirit. His room is a windowless former pastor's office with a twin bed, broken clock perpetually showing 12:22, and shelves of snacks. He stays up until visitors leave, and finds meaning in the story of photographer Kevin Carter who documented suffering but couldn't intervene-paralleling his own trapped situation.
Leonel introduces Villavicencio to Francisco Valderrama, another Ecuadorian who has taken sanctuary in a nearby church. Only forty-two people nationwide live in churches defying deportation orders. Francisco's family struggles with his absence. Five-year-old Johnny, obsessed with dinosaurs, asks Villavicencio why dinosaurs died-the only tragedy his young mind fully comprehends. When Francisco's stay request is denied again, faith leaders hold an all-night vigil. His daughter Brianna stares at the family photos arranged with candles, whispering, "They made it look like Dad died," before sobbing.
Johnny develops a coping mechanism, referring to "Francisco" (the man in the church) and "Daddy" (his father) as separate people. He saves snacks from school lunches to bring to his father. His sister Franny experiences dissociative moments too, sometimes speaking of past routines as if they're still happening.
Villavicencio and her partner become surrogate parents to Francisco's children-becoming emergency contacts, helping with homework, celebrating holidays together, and taking them on outings. Though she doesn't want children of her own, she develops a deep bond with these kids, wanting to teach them everything she knows about survival and social mobility while providing emotional support through their family's crisis.
Chapter 7
The Final Frontier: Aging Without Papers
Villavicencio opens with a nostalgic memory of her family sleeping on their New York apartment rooftop on hot summer nights when she was young, her parents still in their thirties and in love, and she made them promise never to grow old.
Now her father faces a prostate cancer scare but refuses a biopsy because "he wants to die." This moment represents everything she has been preparing for since arriving in America 24 years ago-caring for aging, uninsured immigrant parents in "a fucking racist country."
She explains the "twisted inversion" many immigrant children face: parents eventually become like children, and the American dream transforms into ensuring they "age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them." Undocumented seniors have no safety nets-no Social Security benefits despite many paying into the system, no health insurance, no retirement plans, and minimal savings.
Octavio, paper-thin and aging, shares that discrimination often comes from younger immigrants who question older workers' abilities. Despite his skill and reliability, he suffers from depression, anxiety, and loneliness: "What kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people." Villavicencio connects this to research showing undocumented immigrants suffer chronic health problems-she herself has an undiagnosable ulcer that bleeds when she writes about her parents.
She meets Mercedes Soto, a 56-year-old housekeeper who fears aging in America: "Have you seen Mercedes? She lives under the bridge now!" Mercedes and her husband Jacinto plan to "retire" to Mexico soon, as his aging body struggles with gardening work. At a Christmas party, another woman, Altagracia, shares her strategy for aging-having two children: "One of them ought to turn out well."
Outside a worker center, Villavicencio witnesses day laborers conducting an impromptu intervention for an alcoholic friend, revealing how migrants often end up "sick, sad, and alone." She reflects on her brother, born in America and thus a citizen, who carries a different responsibility than she did as the undocumented child: "He just had to turn twenty-one."
For Villavicencio and millions of other children of undocumented immigrants, the American Dream has become inverted-not about their own success, but about ensuring their parents can age with dignity in a country that has never fully accepted them. This final frontier of undocumented life-aging without papers-reveals the ultimate cruelty of America's immigration system, where decades of labor and tax contributions yield no security in old age.
Chapter 8
A Different Kind of American Story
"The Undocumented Americans" presents a radical departure from conventional immigrant narratives. Instead of focusing on exceptional DREAMers or inspirational success stories, Villavicencio illuminates the lives of ordinary undocumented Americans - day laborers waiting on street corners before dawn, housekeepers maintaining luxury homes they'll never inhabit, delivery workers traversing city streets in all weather, and construction workers building homes they cannot legally rent. These individuals form the backbone of America's economy yet remain invisible in its cultural imagination, their stories often overshadowed by more palatable narratives of immigrant achievement.
Through intimate portraits across five American cities, she reveals how undocumented immigrants respond to systemic exclusion by creating sophisticated parallel systems of survival. In Miami, underground networks of healers and unlicensed doctors provide essential healthcare to those afraid to visit hospitals. In Staten Island, undocumented volunteers formed crucial first responder teams after Hurricane Sandy, helping rebuild communities when official channels proved inaccessible. New Haven's aging day laborers have developed informal pension systems and care networks for workers growing old without access to Social Security or Medicare. In communities fractured by deportation, improvised support groups help children maintain connections with detained or deported parents through letters, phone calls, and shared rituals.
Villavicencio's approach deliberately breaks from traditional journalistic conventions. She rejects the pretense of objectivity, writing instead from a place of shared trauma and collective memory as an undocumented person herself. Names are changed to protect subjects, interviews are translated with careful attention to emotional resonance rather than literal meaning, and certain scenes are artfully reconstructed to preserve privacy while capturing essential truths. The result is a hybrid text that defies easy categorization - weaving together elements of memoir, investigative journalism, and poetic meditation on belonging and identity in America.
By centering the experiences of undocumented Americans beyond reductive narratives of victimhood or exceptional achievement, Villavicencio creates space for the full humanity of people who are typically reduced to their labor or legal status. Her subjects emerge as complex individuals with rich inner lives - they fall in love, nurture secret ambitions, harbor regrets, tell jokes, struggle with depression, celebrate quinceaneras, and navigate complicated family dynamics. They make mistakes, show courage, experience doubt, and dream of futures that may never come.
In the end, "The Undocumented Americans" transcends conventional discourse about immigration policy to probe deeper questions about American identity itself - who truly belongs in this nation of immigrants, whose stories deserve to be told, and what moral obligations we hold toward those whose labor sustains our communities while being denied full membership within them. Through unflinching portraits of lives lived in society's shadows, Villavicencio challenges readers to move beyond political abstractions and confront the human cost of an immigration system that simultaneously depends on and criminalizes millions of people. Her work reveals how the "undocumented experience" is, in many ways, quintessentially American - defined by both remarkable resilience and profound contradiction.
