Book Review - Tell Me How It Ends, An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli
(You can read the Danish version here: http://atlasmag.dk/kultur/bøger/fortæl-mig-hvordan-det-ender)
There’s something about children that often seem to bring into relief the extreme hypocrisies that
we adults learn to tacitly accept in our society. There’s something about the angle of their focus,
their oftentimes fresh perspectives that can often highlight the complicated deceptions and
contradictions too many of us accept without ever even realizing it. Children sometimes have the
power to awaken us to the realities at hand – and they can often inspire us to demand better from
this world.
Valeria Luiselli’s uses this catalyst to great effect in her latest book, entitled Tell Me How it Ends,
An Essay in Forty Questions (4 th Estate, London, UK. 2017). The “Tell Me How It Ends” part
happens to be the common refrain of her daughter whenever Luiselli tells her about the cases of the
undocumented, unaccompanied minors that she volunteers to help in the New York City
immigration court. The forty questions are the questions that must be answered by these children,
some as young as six, in order to be granted asylum or not. While some of them, such as question
#1 Why did you come to the United States? Seems innocuous enough, others such as #33 Did you
or anyone in your family have an illness that required special attention, not so much.
For many, childhood is looked upon as a time of innocence, vulnerability and the need to be
protected. What so many of her stories reveal, however, is the oftentimes callous system that many
of these children meet, often after perilous journeys thousands of miles that even claim a large
percentage of lives.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is Mexican American novelist Valeria Luiselli’s
stellar contribution to the tradition of writing as activism. This small book, which is a long essay
just over 100 pages, chronicles Luiselli’s time working as a volunteer interpreter at a NYC
immigration court for unaccompanied minors. Luiselli deftly weaves her own family’s journey towards U.S. citizenship with some of the cases that she is privy to, using the 40 questions that the
children all must answer in order for their fates to be decided – to be granted permission to stay in
the U.S. or to be sent back to where they have come from, a decision which in many cases could
result in certain death.
The book opens in the summer of 2014, when Luiselli and her husband, novelist Alvaro Enrigue
become transfixed by the news of a surge in unaccompanied minors entering the U.S. from Central
America and Mexico. She and her husband become obsessed with the story, searching the news for
whatever they can find about these children. That she and her family are on their own journey
towards becoming “resident aliens” in the U.S. and are driving across the American landscape, in
fact, in the opposite direction that many of these children travel, only further accentuate the inherit
irony in borders, freedom of movements and how children fare in this climate.
In a Rolling Stone article, Luiselli states, “I wanted this essay to change the language around how
we think about immigration,” (Haile, Rahana. Rolling Stone. April 6, 2017
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/valeria-luisellis- book-on- detained-immigrant-
children-w475336)
She and her husband learn that “…tens of thousands of children from Mexico and Central America
have been detained at the border. Nothing is clear in the initial coverage of the situation—which
soon becomes known, more widely, as an immigration crisis, though others will advocate for the
more accurate term, “refugee crisis”.
Tell Me How It Ends is indeed a timely book as Trump’s election has brought to the forefront some
of the contradictions that we as Americans, the land of immigrants, continue to face. But Luiselli’s
book does something else—she shows how these immigration issues did not suddenly emerge with
Trump’s election but started with Obama’s own policies, one of which was to create a priority
juvenile docket in immigration courts to deal with the deportation proceedings of thousands of
undocumented children.
In an April 18, 2017 Newsweek article, Mirren Gidda writes how it was Obama who took a tough
position, especially early in his presidency, toward undocumented immigrants, so much so that in
March 2014, Janet Murguía, president of the National Council on La Raza, a Latino advocacy
group, called Obama ‘the deporter-in- chief.’ The arcticle continues, “From 2009 to 2016, his
administration oversaw the forcible removal of more than 3 million undocumented immigrants—most of whom were sent back to Mexico. Neither Bill Clinton, nor
George W. Bush, Obama’s two predecessors, came close in reaching his tally over their two terms.”
So what is a priority juvenile docket? Luiselli writes,
“Before the immigration crisis was declared in the summer of 2014, minors
seeking immigration relief were given approximately twelve months to find a
lawyer to represent their case before their first court hearing. But when the crisis
was declared and Obama’s administration created the priority juvenile docket,
that window was reduced to twenty-one days. In real and practical terms, what
the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving
unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved
to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the
top of the list, in this context, was the least desirable thing—at least from the
point of view of the children involved. Basically the priority juvenile docket
implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94
percent, and that both they and the organization that normally provided legal
representation now had much less time to build a defense.” P.40
Luiselli, an insider of this process, takes the reader along as well, and shows us that it is the children
who are responsible to find their own lawyer, and that many of the family members that these
children are reunited with in the States are also undocumented. This further creates a catch-22, as
many of the children are now put in the predicament of either lying to the authorities or putting their
own family at risk—adding to the already anxiety-ridden process of migrating to a new country,
undocumented, and from all appearances, a country that wants little to with them.
Who are these undocumented migrant children, what are the forty questions that Luiselli must ask
them, and most importantly, why do they and their parents or other family members send them on
this perilous journey, usually involving thousands of miles, unaccompanied and so vulnerable to the
risks of rape, murder, forced labor, human trafficking and even death from exhaustion, heat and the
elements?
The children, as mentioned previously, are mostly from Mexico and Central America and as it turns
out, are fleeing mostly gangs and criminals. Countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and
Honduras, or known as the Northern Triangle. What Luiselli reveals, however, is that all too often,
the cities where these children flee to—mostly Los Angeles, New York and Texas—are infested
with the same criminals and gangs that they have attempted to flee from. And not least of all, these
countries from which these children flee are all countries that the U.S. has had a hand in military
coups that have taken over democratically-elected governments.
As I read Tell Me How It Ends…, I couldn’t help but think about the situation here in Europe. I
couldn’t help but think how interesting it was that the numbers in Europe and the U.S. were quite
close to each other, with surges around the same years. In 2015 it is reported that there were nearly
a hundred thousand unaccompanied children coming into Europe. Most were from Afghanistan and
Syria and 13,000 were younger than fourteen years old. Experts claim that for every child who
claims asylum, one enters Europe undocumented. (1)
And I wonder, like Luiselli, but now focused on Europe, how will it end?
(1) Collins, Laura. “Europe’s child-refugee crisis.” The New Yorker Feb.27 2017:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/europes-child- refugee-crisis
