Karla Cornejo-Villavicencio Reimagines the ‘Sad Latin Girl’ in New Novel “Catalina ”(Exclusive)

The author of the acclaimed book 'The Undocumented Americans' calls “refusal a kind of resistance”

Karla Cornejo-Villavicencio is a self-proclaimed survivor of the first phase of indie rock music that dominated her college years.

“There was a lot of skinny jeans, lots of acoustic renditions of hip-hop songs,” the author tells PEOPLE. “There was American Apparel leggings and the music you'd associate with that.” While she was listening to Pitbull and Radiohead in the privacy of her dorm room, Cornejo-Villavicencio also had two friends sing Santana and The Product G&B's “Maria Maria” to her on her first night of graduate school.

“In some ways, Catalina was born in that moment,” she recalls. “I wanted to take that stock image of the sad Latin girl and do something with it.”

Catalina, Cornejo-Villavicencio’s debut novel, which publishes July 23 from One World, is a fresh and unflinching take on the campus novel. Its titular protagonist, a Harvard student, finds her senior year overtaken by a budding romance with an anthropology student, elite social circles and her dreaded thesis project. She also faces the uncertainty of what life will look for her and her undocumented grandparents after graduation.

Catalina comes four years after Cornejo-Villavicencio’s nonfiction debut, The Undocumented Americans, a finalist for the National Book Award. Weaving together elements of memoir and magical realism, the book tells the often-unheard stories of the United States’ undocumented population, including workers who cleaned up Ground Zero after 9/11 and a community living in Flint, Mich. amidst the city’s water crisis.

“For the first book, I was sort of writing to the empty void, whereas this time, I hope to reach as many readers as possible,” Cornejo-Villavicencio says.

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The Undocumented Americans is personal for Cornejo-Villavicencio, who was born in Ecuador and was an undocumented resident in the U.S. until 2020. While an anonymous essay she wrote for The Daily Beast about being an undocumented student at Harvard gained attention from literary agents, Cornejo-Villavicencio has been writing professionally since she was 15. She covered jazz for a local New York paper, and later wrote for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times. Fiction is a departure for her, but a welcome one.

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“Fiction is a little bit more like baking, I think,” she says. “I'm not much of a baker, but I wanted to give this a good try.” A devoted reader of authors like J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth, Cornejo-Villavicencio also noticed early on that the “literary canon” hasn't always featured people like her.

“I think Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby was maybe the first immigrant I encountered in fiction,” she says. “The more you read, the more you realize that you are not really included in that world, that that world isn't really made for you.”

Working on Catalina, Cornejo-Villavicencio says, was a collection of “little challenges,” but also an opportunity to write against the depictions of Latina characters that she often encountered. Catalina, in true early 2010's fashion, has a devoted Tumblr following and creates breakup playlists for celebrity couples. She interns at a prestigious literary magazine and daydreams about Truman Capote. Cornejo-Villavicencio wanted to subvert expectations, including with the novel’s sex scenes, where she intentionally withheld “what a reader would want.”

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“I think about ... refusal as a kind of resistance, or withholding as a kind of resistance,” Cornejo-Villavicencio says. “I think withholding is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off.”

Catalina also sees her share of challenges over the course of the novel, like navigating the U.S. immigration system and her predominately White college, as well as the weight of her familial obligations. Cornejo-Villavicencio, who has previously spoken about the pressure she’s faced as an author, says that she also tried to write against what was “trying to choke” her protagonist’s spirit.

“What I wanted to show is someone who slips and falls and makes mistakes and has breakdowns and has good days, but someone who is committed to not letting that fire in them go out,” she says. “And so you see Catalina face some pretty heavy problems, but it is her response that I think really shines.”

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Working on Catalina, Cornejo-Villavicencio notes, also helped her to learn more about herself as an author, including how “deeply neurodivergent” she is.

“I can't think chronologically,” she says. “I have difficulty understanding plot, and so I try to honor my own brain.” In doing so, Cornejo-Villavicencio created her own style with Catalina — one that is, undoubtedly, her own.

“I'm not using the style for effect, to convey chaos,” she says. “The chaos is already there. The chaos is my brain. The chaos is [Catalina’s] brain. And what art is is just being able to take a moment of quiet amidst the chaos to say something true, right?”

Catalina is now available, wherever books are sold.

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