SOMEWHERE WE ARE HUMAN

A genre-crossing anthology of work by undocumented or formerly undocumented writers who migrated to the U.S.

In this collection, edited by Grande and Guiñansaca—self-described migrants from Mexico and Ecuador, respectively—diverse voices and experiences converge around common themes. An undocumented writer from Brazil, for example, conflates weight loss with the safety of invisibility from authorities and control over her precarious life, while an undocumented Mexican American learns how to ski to hide her status from her Wall Street colleagues. A Bangladeshi immigrant remembers the nightmares they had while undocumented, and a Mexican immigrant dreams of a lost friend as she negotiates her trans identity. Poets from Ethiopia and Iran remember escaping structural violence, while a Nigerian American immigrant writes about the emotional violence she faced in her new American home. Several of the pieces purposefully subvert the narrative of American exceptionalism, most notably an essay penned by a Mexican deportee who wonders whether, after her entry ban expires, she wants to return to the U.S. The work is expertly curated, encompassing not only a variety of races and ethnicities, but also a wide swath of sexual and gender identities. Several of the pieces are formally inventive, including “& I Came the Way Birds Came,” by Jennif(f)er Tamayo, who artfully redacts sections of her narrative in a style that invokes government censorship; and Bo Thai’s “Where Do We Go,” a work of striking visual art. Although no compilation can ever capture every immigrant experience, this expansive text captures more than most, incorporating exciting new voices with more established ones and representing a truly kaleidoscopic range of lives. Though several pieces don’t rise to the level of the others, this is an important, instructive book. Viet Thanh Nguyen provides the foreword.

An innovative, artful collection of diverse, undocumented voices.