 All right, let's get started with the library news so we can get on with the event. Again, thank you for joining us tonight library community. We appreciate you keeping it in the zoom in the virtual library. And we have tried a couple in person events when we realized folks aren't quite ready. So the virtual realm is where we're at. And tonight we're celebrating the work of Carla when a home will have been since you. And this is part of our on the same page campaign. This is where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. It's a bi monthly literary campaign. And this is the September and October edition. And we are celebrating and book the undocumented Americans. The San Francisco public library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the raw nutrition on people's who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional home. As uninvited guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to ancestors, elders, relatives and of the raw nutrition community. And that chat link that I put in the box has a link to some great websites and resources and reading lists of Bay Area organizations you can learn a lot from and donate to It is Filipino American History Month and we are almost wrapping it up. We have one more amazing program on Thursday with artist Lydia Ortiz who does amazing and vibrant work. Please check out her Instagram and come here for artistic journey on Thursday at 7pm. Next on the same page for November and December is Deborah Miranda and we'll be reading bad Indians, a tribal memoirs, art, poetry and art and art memoir. And we like to have a book club and we like to have an author talk so kind of mixing it up this time. The author talk will be on Friday December 17 at 2pm. So take off work and join us for a midday author talk. On Thursday November 17 we have SF Chronicle crew total SF and they'll be talking to Bonnie sweet and talking about her book why we swim. And yes, that does say the correct auditorium. So please join us in the correct auditorium. A lot of room there. It seats 250 people so we can all spread out. And we also will be streaming that so you don't need to miss. On November events, the one and only Malcolm Mark Golan who is a Bay Area icon founder of heyday books, and he is celebrating his new book deep hanging out and I really highly encourage you all to come to this. It's a zoom only now Malcolm is not in the best of health and I fear that this might be one of our last appearances of this amazing human being so please come out. And some amazing friends of him. On November 7 we are celebrating the work of making revolution and other heyday book and the work of Donald Cox, who was a pivotal figure in the Black Panther Party, and his daughter Kimberly Cox and Steve Wasserman who is the new founding is the new director of a day conference will be joining us. It's a heyday month in November. And I want to tell you about this last bit that's also in person up in the Sorority and gallery of the sixth more of the library, a beautiful space. And the Tony Platt has written a book called brave matters, and we've been talking about the politics and the shame and the past of California's buried indigenous peoples. So, heavy heavy programming but please come on out, we will gather together and enjoy each other and learn. All right, without further ado, tonight I am so excited to have Carla Cornejo via Vincent CEO and Jonathan Blitzer in conversation. Carla's book, the undocumented Americans reveals the hidden life of her fellow undocumented Americans from the volunteers recruited for the 911 ground zero clean up to the home of patio botanicas of Miami that provide limited health care to nonsense, non citizens. Cornejo, the, the Vinci, the little Vicencio is a writer from New York City whose work explores complex stereotype defined things of migration, mental illness, beauty and intergenerational trauma. A Harvard graduate, a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale. She's the author of the undocumented Americans. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award nonfiction and was selected for one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, time in PR, the LA Times, the New York Public Library, book riot culture, and the library journal. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Vogue, L and other publications. As an Emerson collective senior fellow Carla is working on dream girl before coming novel for young adults and continues her nonfiction writing. Emerson Blitzer is a staff writer at the New York at the New Yorker. He won a 2017 National Award for Education reporting for American Studies, a story about an undergrad underground school for undocumented immigrants. He has been a finalist three times for the Livingston Award. And as the recipient of the Edward R Murrow award, as well as the 2018 immigration journalism prize for the French American Foundation. His writing and reporting have also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Atavist, Oxford American, and the nation. He is an Emerson fellow at the New American. All right, without further ado, Jonathan and Carla. Hi, thank you so much. And thank you to the library for hosting this. Carla, it's good to see you. Good to see you, Jonathan. It's funny, we should just start by telling everyone who's watching that, you know, the two of us are friends. It's sort of the best kind of event for us in the sense because we're just continuing conversations that we've been having. But it's always funny to have this sort of slightly stilted zoom effect. We're going to look exactly. There's all of that. But anyway, it's, I'm really glad we're doing this. I just want to get right out of the way and start asking Carla questions, because, you know, it sort of goes without saying at this point in Carla I know you hate when I, when I lavish praise on you, so I'm sorry. But here it comes. I mean, I think extremely highly of this book. It's just there's so much in it so much artistry, so much heart so much brains, all of it and rereading it, it was really just a thrill all over again to re-encounter it so I'm particularly, particularly happy and feel very lucky to be able to have this conversation tonight. I was telling Talia that it was really nerdy of you but very characteristic of you to reread the book for the event. I didn't read the book at all after I wrote it. Why is that? You know, I am, I mean, I would I printed it out numerous times, obviously, as you know, with your book and and edited it and then. Right, so I read it in its final stage a few times, but I mean I wasn't going to read it in its galley form or whatever because I, you know, I would find mistakes and I would find things that I, there would be many regrets. I can understand that. I can understand that. I guess the thing that struck me on rereading it was the dates and the kind of timeline, because the first time I read the book, I mean obviously the book starts, your sort of opening chapter starts on election night 2016, and kind of observing things as they're developing as the politicians getting the electoral outlook is getting graver and graver. You basically describe sort of feeling like okay this is the moment. Now I have to write and you say the book, and it's like talisized. And what comes through very clearly both in that opening section then of course as you start to like look at the dates themselves when you've done some of the reporting or at least when you started to have interactions with people who you've been reporting on. It was in years, well before 2016. And I realized that I actually don't know that that full story like when did when did you first start thinking toward this book. And what was your sense of what it was that you were beginning to kind of nourish. It felt like the inevitable book, but I didn't want to write it in some way as like a child of immigrants, I end as an immigrant myself, although I more strongly identify with the child of immigrants category, unless I'm like mentoring a young person which then I really identify with like, you know, the immigrant parent category. I felt like it was inevitable for me to end up doing something in immigration, and I really didn't want to do that, you know, people ask me all the time about the American dream, like so much that I, it's like part of what, you know, we sent out, you know, before an event saying like you can't ask her about about the American dream. But for me it really was as a kid, doing something that had nothing to do with my identity. And it felt like it was something that had been prophesied already, that I would end up doing something with immigration, whether I would become an immigration lawyer or I would go into immigration activism, and something for like the survival of my own people. And for me it was like, if my parents' sacrifices are truly to mean something for me, it was that I would end up doing something that was entirely different and almost, you know, almost, like just purely for aesthetics or just purely for the charm of it. I always said like being a beekeeper or something. And so it felt like the inevitable book. And so I'd always, you know, read things that I didn't like and thought about how I would do things differently. But that was my main obstacle to attempting to do something was just that it felt so predictable. Well, boy, you are glossing over, and I know this a little bit from our friendship, but it's also in the book. I mean, you knew from a very early age that you were a writer. I mean, that much was clear. You felt that conviction, you felt that pull. Is that fair to say here? So it was clear, you knew you were going to be writing something. So maybe it was, it sort of felt obvious that it would, that something, that first something would have to do with immigration. But the fact that you were writing it, the fact that you were a writer, I mean, that wouldn't be obvious to most people, but to you from an early age it was. Well, yeah, but only because like I'm crazy. Like, I remember it was in the New Yorker actually and I've tried to find this article and I'm sure you can find it for me. I read it. I was like on the L train, I was going to school. I think I was in late high school, maybe early college. And there was a piece about Jackson Pollock and the piece said you may remember it. Unless I made it up and this is my origin story, that like he knew he was an artist before he settled on his medium. He just sort of had like a sense of himself and of his temperament and his way of looking at the world and he was like, I'm an artist and he tried different ways before he settled on what became like Jackson Pollock's, you know, like iconic touch. And I sort of felt that about myself the way that I carried myself, the way that I spoke the way that I dressed. I always, I was always good at writing, but I always, I was carried myself like I knew I was a writer, and for me being a writer was like again, like the way that I treat my editor now. Is someone who from a very early age, you know, in hell, it inhaled stories about the way William Maxwell treated his writers or the way that like Maxwell Perkins treated his writers. So it's entirely built upon fiction. Well, or a sense of a vocation just an amazing thing to have so clearly in your head. So early on, but the thing like I impose it on people they don't really want that they're like that doesn't exist anymore and I'm like, oh no. Well, thank God that you're I mean this is you have to keep you have to keep the torch burning, you know, for the cabinet. But it does strike me. And like, again, this is the reporter and me kind of like seeing little signposts in different parts of your book noticing, for example, that you were talking to so and so in 2011, or, you know, when you showed up in a meeting that said, ah, Carla, you've returned. You know, the point being, you know, maybe it was 2016, then I had the election when you finally said, okay, off we go, like now from this moment forward I start to officially write this book. But but you were, you were on this project was underway in some form or another before that. And I wonder what that felt like or even how you explained it to people because I mean it's, you're doing reporting. You're also doing there's a sort of essayistic component a memoirish component. Did you, what was your sense I mean I'm going to press a little because I'd love just love to know as a fan of the book like, you know, how, how many years went into this before you actually started in the right. Well, you know, some of the stories like the stories of that aren't like, you know, in the text but that I have like on background are, you know, from the time I was in high school. And so I was going to my father's coworkers that he would, you know, he would find me sources like not only, you know, where he worked but like delivery guys that he knew in the district and he would chaperone my visits with them and like sit in a corner while I did the work because he was like, older men. And so I had like a tape recorder and, you know, he would, you know, we would do that or I would, I would pitch. I've always gotten a high on pitching. And so I would like pitch pieces about just honestly it was like just the stories of like various people who worked in the back of bodegas or delis in like neighborhoods that I liked. Like, Soho or Tribeca. And, and I would like find a way to not get the attention of the bosses but, you know, go back and say hi to the like, you know, the Mexican guys and, and I was fully aware that I had this kind of access because I was like, you know, a reporter girl and I was like 15 years old right. And I didn't I at the time I felt like, you know, I was like, I'm going to pitch this to the village voice right. But if the stories didn't go anywhere. I still started, you know, gathering them. And it's sort of how I started forming relationships with certain people like Orlando Tobong, who, even if he is doesn't appear in this book is just like in my consciousness as you know how I come to know the history of immigrants in New York or, you know, like the story of repatriation in the book is not, you know, I don't talk about all of the things that I know about repatriation but, you know, I've gone all across Jackson Heights talking to people about it. I've gone to funeral homes I've gone to mosques and, you know, I, I spent a lot of time in what's called in, you know, an ethnography like deep hanging out. And, and I think I have like a really good. I feel like pretty casual about the fact that it doesn't have to all go in the book. But you know I was also not sure that it was going to be published so for me it was just kind of like, I was just trying to kind of solve something for myself as well. And how do you, this is something that comes up for me a lot. And I've always enjoyed talking to you about these aspects of the craft. What this strange enterprise that is writing journalism interviewing is, because I don't think it's necessarily intuitive to people and that's not to say people aren't open people end up often being open and wanting to talk and share. But I wonder, you know, you're not it's not like in the book you're talking to people who are public figures were politicians were kind of used to this sort of attention. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that that process was like, how you even almost pitch yourself to perspective subjects and explain a little bit what you're up to who you are why you're so intensely interested in their lives. You know, I feel like we have probably. Well I'm going to tell you what my experiences and you tell me what you relate to or not, because you know I feel like it's specially in New York. Like, in a lot of these communities, especially where there's like a density of undocumented people, they're used to reporters coming in and out. What the resistance might be to talking to people is that they've had like bad experience with reporters. And so I think what what obviously what helped was that I looked like them, and that I spoke like them. And that when I was writing this book I was undocumented like them. I also think that the Spanish that I speak is Spanish that just immediately sounds to to people like the Spanish of like a child of immigrants who grew up here. And like, you know, it's like, it's like an accent that is just kind of like I was raised in New York. And there is I think, I think they just soft and when they hear that. And they think, well there's a dreamer. And what I did tell everyone was that I was writing a book, but that I did, I was a dreamer but I was not writing about dreamers. And that I wanted to write about people like my parents. And I wanted to write people about people who a lot of American readers might not want to read about, because they didn't really know their stories. Or they might have read stories that weren't accurate, and that I thought I could do a better job, which is essentially the pitch that I gave, you know my publisher. I told them that I was getting my PhD at Yale, and that I was a writer, and I told them that I would change their names. And I would stick around afterwards. And, you know, sometimes like I would go to worker meetings or whatever and I would, you know, get their numbers. And it would just, I felt really shy with like what go around and be like, Oh, you know, shake their hand. And then they'd be like they'd give me their number or not. And the ones that like wouldn't give me their number would like tease me about it. So, yeah. You, you said a few times now that you felt like you weren't happy with the kinds of storytelling around some of these issues that exist in the world at the time that you started to work on your book. What were some of the at the risk of belaboring this point slightly but I do think it's valuable for us to get into a little like what were some of the what are some of the problems with writing on these subjects what what's what are the sorts of things that frustrated you that kind of drove you to feel like okay, there's a real need for someone to do this kind of thing right and I don't want to make light of how truly singular your book is, but I even just from a kind of reporting standpoint. What did you feel like was not coming through in coverage that you wanted to try to correct. Well, you know, I think that there are some things that could be learned and that are applicable to reporting, which some reporters do do like you, you know, which is why you are your reporting is immigration writing that I read. It doesn't make me like, like nuclear have a nuclear meltdown. And then there's some writing that I think is is journalistic writing that doesn't have a doesn't have any boundaries. So, well, I'll explain is like, um, there's there's a lot of reporting that I see where like in the lead in the first paragraph, they'll have very sensitive information about the person that could get them into a lot of legal trouble has like a lot of information about crimes they committed where where I'm not sure if the immigrant question, like necessarily knows what's at stake or if this if they knew that certain things could be set off the record, or you know whether they they know that this is going to end up on, you know, the internet if they know that digital literacy to understand, like that this could, you know, could be could end up everywhere. And so I don't know the extent to which people inform their subjects how these things are. But, you know, I went to lengths that some journalists can't go to, because of their publications rules to disguise the identities of people, not just in terms of like legal safety, which is probably not the concern of a lot of publications. But, you know, in case that I didn't want people in their community to know that it was them, which is something else or because I was concerned about, you know, an abusive husband knowing it was them it was just it was a lot of individual people circumstances and all of that. You know, I talk a lot about this book having been written once to show what the possibilities are. It's kind of like a book written in in a utopia that was for me personally kind of hell. You know, I was showing what it was like to write a book as a person from within this community, who had this kind of access, and yet chose to still do it ethically, right, because having this kind of access and being from this community doesn't automatically make you an ethical writer or reporter. And so I think I did it in these ethical ways like telling, like I'm telling you where I write protected people. But I still use my access to show stories that are usually not not reported on. But at the same time the lack of boundaries with subjects was not good for me. I can't do that again, I haven't reproduced it in my reporting sense. It is not something that you can sustain it is not a kind of reporting that has longevity. It is not a kind of reporting that can, you know, that is really, it's storytelling. And I wrote the book, and it is now out there, and it shows what it shows. But I personally can't write a book like this again. And I, you know, just certainly don't want to suggest that it is a model for boundaries and reporting or in life at all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, tell everyone a little bit about what you mean by boundaries because I know what you're referring to but I don't think it's necessarily obvious to people I mean, you're talking about talking, you're talking about a relationship you have with individual subjects that is so deep and so continuous that you're on the phone all the time you're texting all the time. I mean, what is that, what does that feel like I mean, was there any way to kind of contain what some of those interactions were like or were you kind of constantly for a matter of years in touch with all these different people just continuously. You know, in one of these cases, I'm, I'm still very close to a family and it is a matter of absolute chosen family and the kids that I met are, you know, I think of them. I mean, I hate kids and you know that and I want to make that very clear, but it says if they were my own kids. And, but in a lot of these cases, you know, I already walked into this with an enormous amount of survivors skill. And for that, I just wanted to make sure that like everyone fit on my life raft. And so I felt like I had to check in on everybody, the way that I checked in on my parents, which was like, you know, whenever there was a hurricane and they're part of the country. Whenever there was, when there was COVID when there was everything there was just a lot of people to check up on. You know, for one of these families who didn't appear in the book but also appeared in my reporting during this time, when I was getting involved I am one of his guardians got sick and I was like, Oh my God, do I have to adopt this child. You don't want to live like that and it's also, you know, the kind of writing that I've been doing has been writing to a place where, where, where, you know, I, I try to model that you can have a life of your own, without trying to pay back your entire, you know, the entirety of your parents lives as you know that they sacrificed for you with your own life, thereby losing your own life. And, and, and you know, it, it is sort of the same thing, if you project the image of your parents onto older immigrants, you sort of try to do the same thing. And so now I, you know, I, I try to pass on, you know, certain cases to people who are better equipped than I am, who just, I'm just a writer, you know, to, to lawyers and activists and donors and, and I, you know, I don't try to think that I can, I can do it all. No, no, that makes, that all makes a lot of sense. You know, tell me, I know, I know you're a gracious reader, a student of writing and other writers, as I guess we all are inevitably to some degree. Who, were there any writers or books that maybe weren't models exactly for what you're doing here because it doesn't seem to me like there's any easy model for what you're doing and we can talk about that a bit more later. Who, what, what sorts of traditions did you see yourself working at with this book, any writers that kind of came to mind any books that kind of felt to you like okay this is, this is sort of in this general vicinity of what I'm after. Were you taking, you know, little tips from anyone along the way as a reader. I would say Garcia Marquez is news of a kidnapping and Eileen Miles Inferno, you know, news of a kidnapping is like, you know, classic the testimonial. It's Garcia Marquez started out as a journalist famously, and then started making things up. And then it was like maybe I should just start writing fiction. I think before that crossover was made. I think there was a little spark that led to him eventually writing these like reporting based, you know, fact based narratives. And Inferno is a novel told through prose and I was like also I could write a, you know, this is a nonfiction book but it's essentially a collection of essays. But, you know, essay collections don't sell and this is under one theme so it's a book. Well, it's the Garcia Marquez point is an interesting one too because I was struck rereading this that at a certain point. I mean you are very explicitly blending forms. I mean you're there there's a way in which what you're doing here is journalism of the highest highest order. Just in terms of little details you're picking up the depth of the relationships that you have with subjects that the number of people you're talking to the insights you have the way you paint scenes and all of that. It's enough to make any journalist very, very envious to be clear. Interestingly, there are a few moments when you come right out and you say, like, I'm actually, you kind of imagine a situation beyond what what it was you immediately observed. And then at the end of those moments you will sometimes say, what did I just do. Is this nonfiction. Is this real, like, is this what it looks like to kind of reclaim stories for our own community. I can feel I mean you were made to feel as readers, you kind of doing all this journalistic work, all of the reporting, all of the firsthand observation, but somehow also there's a sense which that's not enough to capture some of the realities that you're trying to to describe and the only tool that's sufficient to that is something more novelistic. Yeah, I mean, I always felt like magical realism to me was, I mean, it was, it was certainly a decision to use it because I was like, I don't want to use something that's just so, you know, again so obvious but magical to me has always felt more like a belief system in that it just made sense that like in Latin America where there is just, it's just cloaked in such a, it's just so cursed, you know, and then there's you know there's going to be total impunity and you're never going to see justice at the hands of, you know, judges or police or government governors or, you know, and then your families are just always holding all of these secrets for many generations. You know, the church, it's like the only way that your suffering can be acknowledged or witnessed outside of yourself is, you know, like the earth bearing this, you know, this, this truth and these, you know, these things and it's sort of like when I, when I look into the mirror, I obviously again I've established that I'm dramatic but when I look into the mirror, I like can see the conquest on my face. I can just, I can, you know, the see the features of mine that are indigenous and I can see the features of mine that are, you know, that are European. I would just always been like, you know, I can sort of, you know, when I haven't been back since I was five but it just makes certain sense that, you know, this would be the land that bore forth magical realism where it's like your, your family may have seen these secrets and, you know, these, these common graves and all of these things but like the, you know, the fruits of this tree bear a better fruit, right. And it's like a taste like tears or something, or like, you know, this child is born with a pig's tail, and you know the family has a secret. And so for me it was like, you know, I don't think as, you know, as a people, you know, undocumented immigrants are going to see retribution for the suffering that we've faced. We'll see reform at some point, you know, whatever that means but I felt like there needed to be like a, you know, some kind of larger witnessing. So it made sense to use magical realism in the book. You know, I had an experience recently I actually haven't told you about this yet that was very striking for me and it even before this event and kind of unrelated to this event made me think immediately of your book which was, you know, as everyone knows, there was the huge storm Ida that came that happened in the Northeast a few weeks ago, or maybe a month or so ago. And there were suddenly all these stories that came to light really tragic ones about people, many of them undocumented immigrants living in different parts of New York City were trapped in basements. And there is a scene in your book where you, you know, you brought us really intimately through reporting into this world of day laborers on Staten Island. And you then talk about kind of what Hurricane Sandy looked like for them how they kind of mobilized to help how they were treated in response. And then you make reference to one person who a lot of the day laborers you were close with new and who died in Sandy, while in a basement, during one of these floods. And, and you kind of imagine what that moment might have been like. And recently after Ida, I got a call from an old friend in El Salvador, who who's been living in El Salvador now for many years, but who lived in the US for decades. And the first thing he said to me, you know, we always check in with each other and the first thing he said to me was he mentioned the basements. There were storms in the city, the basements. I mean, he simply just said that word. And it was amazing how evocative just the mere fact of a storm was for him that was where his mind went first, certainly not where my mind went first. And I felt almost journalistically like, my God, like, I had a real blind spot here. This wasn't something that was immediately obvious to me. And it made me think, going back now and rereading your book, that, you know, there are limits to to like what journalists do, not just in terms of protecting sources and all the rest, like you mentioned. But there are like certain dictates to how you do strictly journalistic work, nonfiction work, there's fact checking that you have to be very kind of clear about what you delineate as a known detail versus something that's more speculative. And yet lost somewhere in that world of right of writing conventions is this deeper truth. And it's something like what it felt like to receive this message from my friend in El Salvador, who decades later on just seeing news of a storm thought immediately of the basements. And it made me really think of that that scene where I mean this is one of the this is the first scene in your book where you turn to magical realism as you describe it to try to get at this thing that you're describing, which is like not a thing that you can easily put into words or lay out in simple narrative fashion. And it made me just kind of admire that scene all the more, because it clearly captured something very real. And that's you know what we call that that that's not journalism but it's reporting in the deepest sense. Anyway, it's it's not really even a question it's more just like a kind of general. Yeah, I mean, I think that like, there's, there's just like those, like those spasms of like bodily knowledge and aches like that your friend was just like the basements you know, like, I'm sure he didn't know what he was what he wanted to ask or what he wanted to do or what he wanted to do. But it just, it was just like an urgency, you know, and I think I'd always felt that regarding regarding the, the, the certainty, but you know just the idea of, of migrants dying alone, or migrants dying without anybody to grieve them. I think one of it comes from just, you know, my continent's experience with, you know, the disappearances and, you know, all the violence and, you know, the, the mass graves and the unmarked graves and the disappearances there's always been like, like the bogeyman in my mind has always been like the, the idea of just like una fosa como right like just the idea of you disappearing and nobody knowing where you were, and not like having the certainty of just of seeing you gone and, you know, the, the idea of being deportable, you know, the, the fear was like that my, you know, my mom or my dad would be picked up and then I would, I just wouldn't see them like, like it would happen, you know, in, in the middle of the night or and then our neighbors wouldn't see us like we would be disappeared. And I thought about it as being disappeared. And so for me, I think I just gravitated to those stories where that became a possibility for people. And like in this case, that was something that just didn't seem like I could leave alone. And like, since when you grow up, like in the neighborhood that I grew up in and like the social class that I grew up in, where they have someone like me, and, you know, you like make it to Harvard you make it to Yale and they kind of see you as like this anointed being. You know, just they're like, you know, give us advice about this and, but the, the anointed us that they sort of directed at me. I felt like as a writer, I did have a certain set of tools. And I was like, well, I could certainly rectify his death so that there was a witness to his death. And not only was there a witness but there was, you know, it felt like, like a military salute, you know. And so, yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny, listening to you talk now and, and then kind of just paging back through the book. I'm also struck by, like the degree to which a lot of this writing, maybe another word that we can use to describe the kind of blended forms that you're using here kind of, you know, reporting almost tools of fiction, essay, memoir. There's also an element of translation in there. It's almost like you're, you're a translator, giving us as readers a tool for understanding certain moments of emotion, certain observations. And it really kind of hit home to me, there's a, there's a scene in the Staten Island section where someone is speaking to these day laborers and there is a one of one of the members of this group that that helps day laborers in different ways is doing simultaneous translation. And you're catching all of the things that he is not translating. And, you know, there's a very, very limited audience there, people who could understand both who could follow the choices this guy is making. So someone speaking in English, and he's simultaneously, simultaneously translating into Spanish so everyone can follow what's being said. And you're noticing, huh, he didn't say that he didn't translate that when when the Anglo speaker says this thing about, well, we hope you will enjoy American food. And I'm like, okay, translator left that one out wise. All these references to Trump translator left them out wise. And I realized that in some ways reading the book. A lot of you know, I read of course as a fan of yours. I read a lot of the coverage of your book and a lot of the coverage kind of has your kind of cast your book as a memoir which it is in part. But the more I think about it, your personal story and what you tell us about your life and your relationship with your parents is almost serving as a kind of running. I don't want to say translation, but kind of commentary. That helps elucidate and clarify some of the moments that you bring to us in your reporting. I wonder if, I mean, have you felt, I'm curious, I know we've talked about this a bit, just between us. People often I think, ask you all these big ticket items about immigration when they read this book, because they feel like okay you're a sort of spokesperson now for a community, and you certainly are a spokesperson in the highest sense of the word and that you're a writer. You feel like something has been lost a bit in how people regard this book as a memoir or just as a kind of expression of your own personal experience without maybe seeing how your own personal experience and the world you're writing about are designed to interact on the page for us to take us even farther than what we would otherwise be able to see. Yeah, I mean, most people are dumb. So like, of course, they talk about things in dumb ways. Like, you know, history will will will, you know, say that this book is a masterpiece as it is, you know, the thing is like a lot of people have been like that I tell my story in this book. And I, you know, I've thought about that a lot because, you know, I've, I've, you know, a lot of a lot of people go on like, you know, Oprah, or morning talk show is whatever and talk about their story. And their story is usually like being a burn victim, or like having, you know, run a marathon, you know, days after giving birth or something. And it's, it's, that's what it sort of sounded to me like they were sort of trying to say. And, you know, the, the parts of myself that I talk about in the book are my childhood as it relates to my parents. My relationship with my parents, as it relates to my parents. I skip high school, I skip college, even though, you know, Harvard comes up in all the reviews. I skip grad school entirely. I skip my writing career entirely. I skip all of my romantic relationships. And yet still it's my story. And it's, you know, it suggests that, that my story is the fact of my undocumentedness and my relationship with my parents. And it's very telling that people think that, and you know, future PhD students can write about that. But, you know, what I did, you know, why, why I chose to parallel those two is because my dynamic with the people that I wrote about, you know, mirrored my dynamic with my parents. And I chose to write about the people that I wrote about in the way that I think about and the way that I think of my parents as characters, you know, the fact that I did simultaneous translation, while I was doing the interviews was meant to sort of like capture in the methodology of the book that, you know, like the embodied knowledge of children of immigrants who have to do that simultaneous translation their entire lives as children to with their parents, usually in front of authority figures in very sensitive situations. And I felt that there would be a kind of like truth and urgency conveyed in that. And so I was just trying to convey that relationship, both in methodology and form. But you know, I think that that's what sort of makes it very powerful and heartbreaking is that I see my subjects as like my elders and my parents, and I see my parents as my subjects. And so you sort of see that mirrored. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's, that's really, it's well said, that's really well said. Let me, I'm trying to I could just keep talking. Let me go to some of the questions. Some of them we've hit on a bit. But one actually that's kind of a maybe a nice follow up. Someone asks, what the experience was like translating the book. I know you have thoughts about Spanish and its different incarnations, particularly like in kind of the publishing world. Do you want to say anything about that. I recently got in trouble for talking about that but I'll say that I'm, I'm happily looking for a translator of the book that you know specializes in English to Latinx Spanish. I'm not qualified. Let my publisher know. What do you mean by Latinx Spanish. I mean, tell, tell, elaborate for people. Latin American Spanish is different from Latinx Spanish. I don't know. I mean I'm not an academic like I grew up in New York, right. Latin Americans are Latin Americans. But once they move to America and have spent 30 years here. They sort of like anamorphed into Latinos, because they live in New York, they live in Queens. They live amongst Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Dominicans. I don't know how to say Nicara Winces, like they're, they picked up words in Spanish from all of those people, lots of slang, lots of ways of saying friend. Lots of purses. They also we'd also grew up around African Americans we went to school all these people. We picked up a lot of work like African American vernacular. We also speak English, my parents to varying degrees. But sometimes they don't even know they're speaking English they'll just put words in right. And so the Spanish that they speak is not the Spanish that people speak even in Ecuador. It's the Spanish that a lot of like literary people in like in the media speak is usually like a Mexico City Spanish, like standard Spanish. But that is not what we speak here on the state side, but like you know the Spanish that I speak is like, you know, from New York, New Jersey, if you want to speak there's border Spanish, which is, which is different. If my book was translated into border Spanish, it wouldn't sound like me, you know, Juno Diaz sounds a little bit more like me. So, you know you want somebody who's cognizant of those different vernaculars because you know, you don't want to translate. I don't know, JD Salinger to sound like, I don't know, Scottish, you know, yeah totally. I mean there are so many different linguistic styles and traditions and flavors. John knows Latin American Spanish and Latino Spanish. Here's another question for you. One person writes that he was blown away by your section of the book about the botanicus in Miami. And it really was admiring of that section and he wonders, were you surprised by these underground pharmacies. And I would add to that question. Sort of what was the, was there anything in your reporting or work on this book that was particularly surprising to you that you kind of didn't see coming that was a real sort of shock. No, I was not surprised by the botanicas because you know before my parents became, you know, before my parents started thinking differently of such things. I remember, you know, my lean PSS and I remember all of the evil eye stuff that they, because they thought I was a cursed child, and they think that I somehow forgot that. So now that they're like Jehovah's Witnesses, they think that I forgot that they thought I was a cursed child, but they had me going to like these witches, and the witches were like rubbing guinea pigs on me, and like rubbing like eggs on me and blowing like so many adults in my childhood, like blowing a guardian in my face. So I was not surprised. And was it anything surprised me. I was surprised that I did not dedicate my book to my parents. I certainly thought I was going to. I certainly think that a lot of first time authors do. And I didn't. And that surprised me. Here's another question. How did your subjects react to reading your book. What was that experience like, parents by the way. Well, some of some of them that are like English readers, and that, you know, read and had access to the book, and that are in the book. They, they loved it. You know, some of them told other people that they know who don't read English and don't have access to the book that way about it and they were really excited. And, you know, other people can't read it because it's not out in Spanish yet. And, you know, again, like there was a version of Spanish that I, that was translated that I took a look at but it was not a Spanish that I was accessible to like even people like my parents so parents have read a couple of parts because they've been excerpted in a couple of places and so I translated, you know, those parts by hand for them, because they were those places like it was this American life in the New Yorker and those places fact check. So I was like, these are the questions are going to ask you. Well, I didn't know the questions are going to ask you but I was like they're going to ask you questions. I was like, these are the parts that are being published, and I translated them to Spanish. And you know, my mom was like, yeah, this is fine. And my dad, you know, if you read the book, he had a sense of my dad he is a he loves being written about and he has a great sense of being a man of biography so he was on the with on the phone with the fact check over three hours. Was that stressful for you to know that conversation was going on. My brother and I were on the on the phone we were like, what is he doing. We were like dad goes Hollywood. Dad goes Hollywood because he would have like, he would not disagree, but he would have be like, you know, okay, here's one thing. There's a part in the in the opening of the book, the opening of the book, where I say that my dad would like full go under his steering wheel during crossfires while he wasn't used to work as a taxi driver with a jumbo slice of pizza. That is, you know, illustrating New York. And also it is a reference to the story of how he ate his first slice of pizza in America, which he tells all the time. And then he tells the fact checker, I don't love I don't like pizza. And I was like, that is not. I didn't say you liked pizza. I was like, but I want to make it clear. I don't want people to think that I like pizza. Let the record reflect. Yeah, we had like a whole back and forth about it this bastard. I mean, to be on the receiving end of the fact checking phone calls also extreme in his in his general defense is extremely weird. So, you know you you grasp what you can like making making clear your feelings about pizza. Here's another question. And this will maybe do two more and then we're running up on time. So someone asks, you know, in the in the your bio, there's mention of your next project, which is a novel. And, you know, I don't I know it's this is like talking to a picture in the middle of a, you know, shut out or something you're sort of not supposed to jinx it or talk too much about it. You know, you don't want to award me off if you don't want to talk too much about this. But but someone asks, and it's an interesting question that, you know, the book was initially described as a YA young adult novel. And I know through, you know, deep reporting and, you know, careful motivation of sources that the project has shifted a bit and that that's in fact maybe not the general trajectory of the novel. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what what you're working on one of the questions actually concerns the YA genre label and the person wonders, you know, what makes a novel YA versus something else. And I know this isn't even thinking about. I think a lot of it is marketing. And because this book the undocumented Americans is often like, you know, listed in libraries as either adults or YA. I think because I just write in the voice that I write in which is pretty conversational. You know, I think, you know, I tend to talk in really long winded sentences that just go on and on. And I think that's how I write to. I think fiction voices are different, but I'm pretty conversational in my voice in general, and like pretty manic. And sometimes it's labeled as adult sometimes it's labeled as YA sometimes it's labeled as memoirs. It's nonfiction whatever. So a lot of it is marketing. And so now it's technically an adult novel, but it's about a teenage girl and it's like about, you know, like a few months of her and during her junior year of high school. So, you know, my goal is that everyone who likes my writing reads it and who also, you know, is interested in exploring these themes, which is, you know, like a relationship of a young girl and her dad the girl is on DACA. But it's like, you know, young girl and her dad. And, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's about a lot of things. So maybe one last question, and then we'll release you for the night. I'm just scrolling through I want to be sure I'm trying to sort of combine different questions as they come in I'm squinting at the chat window so you're seeing me do. Let's see. Here's here's a heavy one to end on but I but I think it's I think if there's real value in this question. It's, you know, how writers can share deep and personal truths that involve trauma without kind of inflicting pain on themselves in the process. And again that's quite a heavy note to end on I realized I could have curated this better. Sorry, but tell us because that's I mean look I to a lesser degree I experienced this myself and some of the reporting and it really can wear on you. I mean you feel a great need and responsibility to write through it, but it can wear on you so what you know what's that experience like for you and are there certain. processes that you take yourself through to kind of like ease out of the writing to kind of try to get yourself into a different headspace. Well, for me, I can't. It's a case by case scenario right, but for me it was choosing whether I could continue to live like an unhealthy, like an emotionally unhealthy life with a lot of chaos and no boundaries with like my family but also people who just brought me a lot of pain and a lot of chaos into my life. I'm a person who, you know struggles with mental illness with, you know, who mental illnesses with mental illness, and I just like stability, and I like routine, and I like calmness. And so I could either have the chaos in my writing, or have the chaos in my life, and I couldn't do both. If I did both things got bad, and I would like, you know, turn to drinking or something. And a writer friend of mine said that you don't get longevity by like doing chaos and both and resorting to self medication. And I chose like sticking to the chaos in my writing. So I like cut down on the number of people who could access me, like over text or who had my number. I created a lot of boundaries with my parents. I got off Twitter. I don't read the news. I mean I check in on the news like every day but I'm not like on my phone all the time. I made a lot of decisions to make my life as peaceful as possible so I could, you know, enter those darker spaces in my writing when I had to. Has the experience of writing the novel been different? I mean you're also more experienced a little bit too in some of these rhythms, but like does it feel totally different? Is it, you know, do you write in a different way than when you were working on nonfiction? Is your schedule different or your habits different? It is, it's still like some upsetting themes, you know, it's like sexual abuse and like, you know, relationship with a dad and like race and things like that. But you know, I was like, I think I was like 26 when I started the last book. I'm 32 now. There's a lot of maturing that has happened. I've done a lot of therapy. I've taken a lot of dbt. I, you know, I'm not on clonopin anymore. There's just there's just a lot more. I outline now. Yeah, that's like, wow, I mean, welcome to late adulthood, you know, outlining. Well, look, this is, you know, such a pleasure for me. Thank you again to the lot to the San Francisco Public Library for letting us have this conversation to Carla for writing this absolutely brilliant and unmissable book to everyone who's attended. This has been great. Thanks for thanks for having us. So amazing. Thank you so much, Carla. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you library community. Still, you can check out the book. This has been such a great combo. Thank you for being so often. And Jonathan, thank you for being such a great moderator. All right, friends, have a wonderful night and we'll see you.