One immigrant's story of what it means to be undocumented
One immigrant's story of what it means to be undocumented | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on June 18, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. each with their own unique story. This is the story of one of them - Alix Dick.
Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Hello, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, but what does it mean to be undocumented? Every one of their stories is different, and the broad strokes coverage of migration you often hear can't possibly touch on everyone's reality. Alix Dick and Antero Garcia decided to focus on the story of just one undocumented person, Alix herself. Their new book, The Cost of Being Undocumented, One Woman's Reckoning with America's Inhumane Math, is on bookshelves now. And I'm joined by the authors Alix Dick and Antero Garcia to discuss. Thank you both for being here.
Antero Garcia:
Thank you.
Alix Dick:
Thank you so much for having us.
Taylor Wilson:
So Antero, I want to just start with this. How did you two meet and what led to this idea for a book?
Antero Garcia:
I've spent most of my time, my career as an educational researcher spent in classrooms thinking about educational inequalities and thinking about historically marginalized young people and teachers and communities and families. And during all of that, I was privileged with my wife to have a pair of twins. We hired Alix as our nanny. The pandemic happened and our world shut down to just the five of us in a very small household for a long time. And after Alix was no longer working with us, as my children got older, we really started to explore this question of the kinds of inequalities of what I experienced during this disruption of the pandemic was built on the privilege of being able to employ Alix and to use her labor. And that really led to us having some hard conversations together about what that work looked like.
And so I invited her to do participatory research alongside me. There are some difficult conversations between the two of us of how to negotiate what that research process would look like. But that is the impetus is the ways invisible labor helps maneuver even well-intentioned individuals to be able to thrive in this country.
Taylor Wilson:
Interesting, and we will get to that research partnership here in a bit, but Alix, could you just tell us a bit about you and your family's life in Mexico before you arrived to the US and what spurred the decision to migrate?
Alix Dick:
I feel that most people believe that our stories begin when we become undocumented, and that's not the case. My story began in Mexico. I grew up with a wonderful family, the happiest kid that you could imagine. I had the best parents, the best siblings, and then life happened and tragedy hit. And unfortunately during that time there was so many economic issues that my parents lost at all in the process.
They used to be very successful business owners, and when things got really bad, my parents weren't able to pay off debt. So we started receiving life threats and during that process we got in trouble with a lot of dangerous people. And then my dad got sick in that process when we were trying to stay safe, and unfortunately he passed away and the only thing that we have left was to immigrate to the United States to save our lives.
Taylor Wilson:
Alix, I'm so sorry for your loss and that you went through that. I can't imagine what that decision process was like to then have to cross the border. And we'll talk a little bit more about your story here in a second. But Antero, you call this a unique research partnership between you and Alix. I want to hear a little bit more about that. And can you tell us a bit about the platica approach to telling this story? What is that?
Antero Garcia:
I think one of the unique things is oftentimes in educational research, in social science research in general, you go in, and this was my pitch to Alix, was, "I'm going to interview you. I'm going to engage in ..." And I'll talk about platica in a moment, "... But we're going to have these conversations. We're going to do some co-research together, and then we're going to publish this in a boring academic journal, and I'm going to change your name in. I'll give you a pseudonym."
That was the intention. And very early on, Alix was very clear that that's not the case. "This is my story, and if we're going to do this work together, I need to be recognized as a co-contributor." And I think it really helped me think through the limitations of how social science research functions and who gets to participate in those systems.
And so in moving through this and thinking through, all right, we're going to move beyond the boundaries of what traditional research looks like, and we're going to do this alongside each other, that invited us to engage in platica, a Spanish word for having conversations with one another. And so this was no longer me interviewing Alix, it wasn't subject, participant and going back and forth. Instead, this was having co-constructive conversations. She would share fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams. I would share the same.
There's always differentials in our perspectives and understandings. And it meant that oftentimes we didn't necessarily agree on the same things. There's a chapter in the book and we had ongoing conversations around things like faith and Christianity and very different perspectives on these. And that led to being able to get a more robust understanding of the world around us by trying to bridge the shared sense of empathy between different worldviews, even with shared similar social justice commitments.
Taylor Wilson:
Alix, you outline the costs of undocumented life in this book in a variety of ways, and I want to just break down a few of those sections. Let's talk about the cost of time. What did you mean when you wrote that, Alix?
Alix Dick:
I feel that the first thing that might come to people's mind might be, "Oh, the cost. It has to do with money, right?" But how about the time? How about the youth that has been stolen from me? How about the years that life is changing and moving and I'm missing my family? I'm missing a lot of things, and that has a lot to do with time. There is many things I cannot recover and I would say time was the first one of them.
Taylor Wilson:
Tell us about the cost of mental health as well, Alix. I know this is a big part of the book as well.
Alix Dick:
Yes, mental health is very important for me because I've been dealing with mental health since the beginning, even before I got to United States. But life here has made it absolutely more difficult. And that was important for me, especially in the immigrant community because there is so much stigma about talking about these issues, talking about being depressed, and a lot of times we don't even have that luxury to sit down and actually understand, is this because I'm really busy or is this because I'm actually in need of medications? Or the fact that it's so difficult for an undocumented person to get the help that is needed is also alarming and something that I never thought that I would be part of. But the struggle to be able to get the help that I needed just to barely survive was very alarming to me. And that was one of the main reasons why I was like, "I need to speak about this."
Taylor Wilson:
So much of the migrant experience as it pertains to the US comes alongside this long held ideal of the American dream. We hear this all the time. What made you want to outline this cost of dreaming as well?
Antero Garcia:
So I'll say a couple things around that. And one is, as you've been going through and asking these questions, I think you're highlighting, for folks who are listening to this, that each chapter is a different cost, the cost of time, the cost of mental health, the cost of dreaming. And part of this is my own bitter sense that the people who oftentimes get to tell these stories are economists. And oftentimes this is a way where can we use these tools to think of other ways to imagine costs.
And so I want to say before I answer around cost of dreaming, that we do offer a breakdown of the actual costs towards the end of this book. We try to offer a financial number. Some people might think it's too big, some people might think it's too small. But I want to name that because I think there's an economic cost to Alix's dreams. Before she came to the United States, one of her dreams, one of her aspirations, one of the things that she was making legitimate progress towards was to be a lawyer. This was a thing that she intended to do. She was receiving the marks in school and she was a pre-law student, tried to continue that work in the United States and time and again, financially is not able to do that. And so that's a double cost, right? Both the time and money that Alix invested into this, that she lost and will no longer come back, as well as the lost cost for the United States and for the rest of the world of not having a lawyer with the kinds of gifts and sensibilities that Alix has.
So when we think of the cost of dreaming, it's not just a cost that's felt and shouldered by undocumented folks in this country because of the things that they may feel sad or bad about not being able to achieve while they're here. But it's also the ways that American progress, the American dream, is no longer being able to move forward. To use particular kinds of rhetoric, our country is not as great because we're not fulfilling the kinds of dreams of all of the people who currently live in this country. And so I just want to think of both sides of that cost.
Taylor Wilson:
Antero, many of the people who buy this book are already sympathetic, potentially, with undocumented migrants. How do you reach readers who are not? Is this about building awareness? How do see this?
Antero Garcia:
Yeah, so on the one hand I think yes, a lot of people who are reading this are going to probably be do-gooder people who ... And thank you. Hopefully those folks who are reading this, folks who I think are aligned with this and might hand this book or tell this story to a neighbor. This is an invitation to say, "This is one person's life. Imagine the myriad other stories that aren't told in this book that we could imagine." So it's an opportunity for a dialogue.
I think the other side of this is there's a couple of chapters in here that we intentionally tried to think through, who could hear this story that might not otherwise? And so I think we are hoping to think through where are places, where are levers to think through changing the nature of this conversation? And so that might be one local communities, book groups. I think those are some of the ways that we're trying to think about how to get this into other people's hands.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. I want to end with a question for both of you. What's next as it pertains to this work beyond this book?
Alix Dick:
Well, I'm starting to work in other books that I want to write, which they are a little happier than this one.
Antero Garcia:
I think this work continues every Thursday. Alix And I co-edit a website called La Cuenta. It stands for the bill in Spanish, to again use the same language of the cost. And that is a site that other than myself is run and edited and features the voices of undocumented communities and writers all across this country. It's an invitation. So anyone who's watching or listening to this that would like to contribute, we would love to have your words featured on La Cuenta. And this is a place where we're continuing to tell this work outside of the story of just one individual.
Taylor Wilson:
The book is called The Cost of Being Undocumented, One Woman's Reckoning with America's Inhumane Math, and it's on bookshelves now. Thank you both so much for joining me. Great conversation.
Antero Garcia:
Thank you.
Alix Dick:
Thank you.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@USAtoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
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