Oscar Villalon of the San Francisco Chronicle hailed Underground America as an “excellent introduction to an ongoing social disaster.” He reviewed the book for KQED’s California Report. You can listen to a stream of the show on the California Report archive here. The full transcript is as follows:
One thing is clear from Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. The U.S. is a doing a lousy job in how it treats the workers who toil in its fields, factories, and restaurants—even its offices and nurseries—but don’t have the papers saying they’re allowed to do what they’ve already been doing for so long. Beyond that, this surprising book presents a nuanced understanding of the problem. One so thoughtful, it may help us sort out what does remain unclear: how to improve the situation.
Novelist and teacher Peter Orner, and a group of graduate students from San Francisco State University, with the help of lawyers, writers, and filmmakers, fanned across the country for this book. They talked to a wide group of undocumented workers, and compiled the interviews into twenty-four first-person accounts of men and women existing in a constant state of anxiety. Orner and company not only interviewed poor, sometimes politically oppressed immigrants from Mexico and Central America, they also get on record the voices of young people and old from Iran and Pakistan, to China and Cameroon. We hear the stories of immigrants who come from the middle class and with university educations. We meet people who have assimilated well, even prospered and employ U.S. citizens in their businesses. And given the absurdity of viewing a person as a walking crime, dark pieces of humor and stinging bits of irony can’t help but pop up in these accounts.
What most of these lives have in common are years spent shuttling between grueling, sometimes abusive workplaces, and barebones, sometimes rundown homes. These workers are afflicted by loneliness, because their families are sometimes thousands of miles away, and they are assailed by isolation, because they fear being deported. As one woman, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher from South Africa explains, they wind up where they don’t trust anybody: “You don’t want to talk to other people. You’re always quiet,” she says, “If you’re illegal here, you’re not free at all.”
Underground America is McSweeney’s third book in its Voice of Witness series—oral histories from people around the world who have had their human and civil rights violated. What Underground America argues is that by classifying a group of people as illegal, you make them vulnerable to brutality and exploitation. Discouraged by the draconian punishment that comes with discovery, these workers do not report crimes and abuses against them. The book’s importance rests in how well it illustrates the consequences of that for the rest of us. For one, our policy of criminalizing immigrants fosters corruption. Free from worker complaints, slaughterhouses, for example, can skirt around sanitation and safety laws, thus affecting the food we eat. Free from the accountability shown to citizens, federal agencies can house undocumented people in hoard facilities, neglecting them to the point of death. And the criminally low wages paid to workers indirectly leads to the growth of street gangs. Also, these testimonies show that callousness toward the undocumented is in no way limited to white Republican males. Kind victimizes kind. And in a couple of instances, heartening acts of decency are performed by men who vote for the GOP. Underground America is an excellent introduction to an ongoing social disaster. It gives a face to people in the country who are one injury, one legal problem away from ruin. A situation, of course, all too many legal Americans are familiar with.
