ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first analysis of undocumented life writing, i.e., book-length self-representation by undocumented migrants, citing Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented: A Dominicans Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League as an especially noteworthy example. Published in 2015 by Penguin Press, the text is the most prominent one among several other undocumented publications that at first sight follow the traditional upward arc of success invoked in the subtitle. A closer reading, however, shows that in contrast to earlier undocumented texts, which would have concluded their stories with praise and love for America, Peralta’s text does not hold that promise, making the use of the subtitle presumably a smart device to attend to a particular readership: While the story itself showcases many of the traditional facets of the American myth invoked by the subtitle, Peralta’s ending is—and indeed could not be—the same, as his upward arc of success is clearly limited to professional success, but never inclusion in society. Peralta’s story is therefore noteworthy, exactly because it illustrates the tension between the classic American rags to riches myth and another core American value: the ethics of playing—or not playing—by the (literary) rules in a democratic country of kaleidoscopic diversity. This tension, which transcends the book on both a formal and a narrative level, is, as will be argued, eventually the key to understanding Peralta’s underlying message, one that is far removed from a simple reproduction of his life as an undocumented version of the rags to riches trajectory.
