An Undocumented Immigrant Admitted to the Elite World of Harvard

CATALINA, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Unlike this nation’s ailing body politic, our caste system is alive and robust, as the journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues. Nowhere is that more apparent than amid the couture quadrangles and clock towers of elite universities. For Catalina Ituralde, the winsome narrator of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s sparkling fiction debut, “Catalina,” a scholarship to Harvard thrusts her to the apex of that system.

Catalina is a blue-collar brainiac raised in a cramped Queens apartment. She’s acerbic, full of moxie — think Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood but with an Instagram makeover and carrying the baggage of being an undocumented immigrant. (The novel’s opening sentence plays on Plath’s famous opening line in “The Bell Jar.”)

When she was an infant in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, Catalina survived a car wreck that killed both of her parents; an uncle and aunt looked after her until the age of 5, when she settled with her paternal grandparents — also undocumented, and staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses — in New York. The family maintains a low profile, flying beneath the radar of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

Catalina sails through school with straight A’s before matriculating to the Ivy League, an assimilationist’s dream: “My grandparents were now positive that God set me aside to do something special,” she opines. “Being an immigrant has always been a game of chance, and here I was before them, a lottery ticket.”

The novel mostly unfurls during her senior year of college, 2010-11, as Congress debates the Dream Act, which could toss a buoy to Catalina. She’s invested in the legislation: It would clarify her legitimacy as an American. At Harvard, she becomes a member of Signet, an exclusive arts-and-letters society, where she hobnobs among the (Caucasian, moneyed) influencers of tomorrow. Like her friend Kyle — who is Black, Jewish, gay and the editor of the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson— she grasps that her “urbane” vibe (according to her peers)gives her entree into these spaces. But she also recognizes Signet and other snobbish clubs as training grounds for the overly privileged. Her job is to mingle, learning their codes of self-regard.

Catalina likes boys. A lot.She seduces them with the same gusto as Cornejo Villavicencio’s prose seduces her readers. Early in the fall Catalina sets her eyes on the handsome Nathaniel Wheeler, the son of Byron Wheeler, a renowned British director, who later proposes a short film on Catalina’s life in the shadows — “trauma porn,” as her friend Delphine points out. Catalina’s inner Elle Woods can’t refuse a star turn, but her Latina side ultimately balks at the way Wheeler’s approach would gloss over painful truths.