Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli (October 2019)
Tell Me How It Ends is an attempt to tell the story about child migration across the USA’s southern border. Valeria Luiselli’s experience helping lawyers prepare legal defenses for child deportation cases gives her a unique perspective on the issue. Her account is loosely structured around the forty questions she asks child migrants as they prepare for immigration court. These straightforward questions – about family history, potential living arrangements, the possible dangers back home, and more – drift in and out of the work, helping Luiselli paint the fullest possible picture about the crisis and the individuals caught in its grip.
The fact of these questions is an example of how various political forces can interact over time to place unbearable pressure on our most vulnerable people. The story can be traced back to any and all US interventions in Central America that created dangerous living conditions and crippled the infrastructure necessary for families to build stable futures. As threatened children have done instinctively throughout history, kids from these regions have challenged the odds and fled for safer ground. Those who reach Luiselli and her questionnaire play out roles defined by Obama-era legislation that severely limited the amount of time granted a Central American child to find legal support and build a case against deportation. Each of these forty questions – how did you get here, who did you flee from, who will take care of you in America – looks closely at the symptoms caused by these politics without addressing the disease our policies continue to spread throughout poor regions.
In addition to its references to these larger forces, this book also details much about child migration that I didn’t know prior to reading. I learned that children often seek out border patrol as soon as they cross because these officials offer migrants the best chance of contacting future guardians who live in faraway states. I also learned that one of the major challenges in the aforementioned legal cases is how migrant children might need to call in undocumented relatives to help make their case, a dilemma that Luiselli explains usually weighs most heavily of all on the children. Finally, although the question of the border remains very far away from the daily concerns of most Americans, this book explains that the patterns of migration will demand most communities to do more in the very near future to help integration efforts.
I mentioned at the top that this book was an attempt. I don’t use this word in a snide or dismissive way. As Luiselli herself notes, the lack of a beginning, middle, or end creates major challenges for a storyteller. Like it is the case with many ongoing crises, the story of child migration is being written into some unidentifiable chapter tucked between the front and back covers of an immigration story that spans many generations. The just-visible frame of her forty questions brings the clarity a storyteller needs to draw order out of these chaotic lives and help her readers understand why she feels that the next chapter for these kids should be written on American soil.
For some additional thoughts on this book, please see my notes.
