As an employee at a refugee-serving organization and former megaphone-wielding activist for undocumented folks, I admit I’m likely a mark for stories like the ones in The Undocumented Americans. However, since I spend quite a bit of time with these stories and the discourse around them, I usually have my fair share of critiques of how the stories are being told or used. Cornejo Villavicencio’s unvarnished depictions of the undocumented in all their human oddity, mundanity, and trauma resists the common romanticization of the immigrant community and creates an infinitely more familiar portrait of the undocumented. Cornejo’s coverage of Flint’s undocumented community and the undocumented who served as first-responders during 9/11 are especially provocative examples of the injustices undocumented folks suffer that usually get overlooked within the explosion of discourse around them. My only real criticism of the book is that at one point Cornejo Villavicencio critiques newspapers for referring to the undocumented as “undocumented workers as if all these men are worth is their labor” (paraphrase). For a community afforded so little, I get where this critique is coming from; however, I do see value in hearkening to the labor rights traditions of the left and in acknowledging the contributions of undocumented folks.  Regardless, I cried several times when reading this book and found its stories a useful reminder of the actual conditions too often invisibilized in the US. 5 out of 5.