Petit Récits of Belonging: Reading Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans as Counter-Narratives to Dominant Discourse about Citizenship in the United States

This essay examines Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans (2020) as a testimonio that challenges dominant narratives of citizenship, immigration, and terrorism in the United States. Moving beyond traditional reportage, Cornejo Villavicencio conducts and cites interviews with undocumented immigrants which are contextualized by her own autobiographical reflections as a DACA recipient, producing a hybrid text that resists singular classification. Through close attention to its chorus of voices, I argue that the book disrupts monolithic portrayals of undocumented Americans by foregrounding diverse, localized experiences. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's theory of petit récits in The Postmodern Condition (1984), I situate these testimonios as small narratives that subvert the reductive grand narratives reinforced in post-9/11 U.S. political and media discourse. By foregrounding the lived experiences of undocumented Americans, Cornejo Villavicencio's work both affirms the testimonial tradition and destabilizes rhetorical apparatuses that cast undocumented people as dangerous outsiders, offering instead a heterogeneous vision of belonging and resistance in the United States.