placeholders for the personal
This Week in Reading
Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 questions
While waiting for her green card to be approved, Valerie Luiselli, a Mexican writer living in New York, goes to the border to act as a volunteer interpreter for undocumented migrant children arriving from Latin America. The 40 questions in the title refers to the 40 questions on the intake form she went through with every child. Why did you come to the United States? How did you get here?
Each child’s story is painful and specific, but most of their journeys are similar. Most recount fleeing their homes because of gang violence, describe riding La Bestia, a deadly freight train, north, clinging to the top of train cars. The majority of young girls are raped at some point during their journey. Most children report that they don’t know where their parents are. Individual traumas blur into a larger, more universal one.
As a volunteer interpreter, Luiselli is tasked with helping these unaccompanied children tell their story. Not only to tell their story, but to tell it the right way. Because in immigration court there is only one right way to have come to America. In order to have a fighting chance, the child will need a case that is compelling to a pro-bono lawyer. Ideally, the child should have fled their country because of a threat to their life by a local gang. The threat should be severe enough that if they were to be deported back to their country of origin, they would surely die. If they were abused and exploited in their home country, that can also be used in their favor. Can you imagine? That is the ideal, to be threatened and terrified and abused and driven from your home. Volunteer interpreters like Luiselli prompt and prod the children to give answers that they can pin together into this digestible narrative, a narrative that can allow a five year old from Guatemala to win the immigration lottery and stay in America.
There are so many stories-- a flood of them, truly-- but there is also only one story. There is only one story worthy of sympathy, only one story worth rewarding. Moreover, there is only one story able to be understood. The stakes are at their highest as Luiselli translates these children’s lives from Spanish to English, but we do this all the time— look for a pre-written narrative to fit ourselves into. We crave acknowledgement for our uniqueness, but are often willing to sacrifice detail, sacrifice our own specificity for the promise of being seen and understood. This is what this type of story looks like, this is a story everyone already understands. It feels safer, by which I mean it is easier, to present the universal as a placeholder for the personal. We say: this is not my story, but maybe it is close enough, take it instead and maybe you will understand me enough as well.
Many Central American migrants don’t ever make it to the border. The 100 miles south of the Mexico-American border is essentially a graveyard. 72 bodies were found in a mass grave in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, murdered by a drug cartel. When she writes of it, Luiselli describes the shock that swept Mexico when the news broke: “How? Why? What did we do? Where did we go wrong, as a society, to make something like this possible?”
And reading this, as an American, I of course thought, how did we, America, let ourselves become this way. When did we start turning our backs on the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free?
A Mexican living in America, Luiselli is connected to the immigration crisis on multiple levels. Like the children she interviews, she too came from Latin America to the United States. As a Mexican, she feels responsible for the tragedy the children endure south of the border. The seventh question on the questionnaire is “Did anything happen on your trip to the U. S. that scared you or hurt you?” She writes “As a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else.” Now on other side, a professor, a writer, an intellectual, she is a part of America, and is responsible for the actions of her adopted country as well as her homeland. She represents the children and their stories, yes, but she also represents the United States.
I don’t need to tell you that life in America is bleak right now. No these are not new problems, yes America has always been home to systematic inequality and oppression, but I think we can agree that things are actively getting worse, week by week. Children are being separated from their families, the government has lost track of where the parents of these children have been sent. Realistically, we will probably see Roe v Wade repealed within a year, will see many of the civil liberties previous generations fought so hard for, stripped away from us by a group of white men-- out of spite, or vindictiveness or sheer unfeelingness. Why did you come to the United States she asks the children, pencil poised over the intake questionnaire. Why did you come to a country so broken, so unkind. “We can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look,” Luiselli writes. America, a country with so much potential for greatness, that fails to deliver it, time and time again. I am disappointed and embarrassed in America, but I cannot separate America from myself. I cannot absolve myself of America’s crimes. I have spent my life soaking them up. I live on stolen land, profit from the divides of race and class and education that have been baked into American society. I carry my American-ess with me always, and so I carry that embarrassment, that disappointment, with me too.
Further Reading:
Another slim book on the topic: Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, a Salvadoran American poet.
P.S.
I know you know this, but the Senate switchboard number is 202-224-3121, call your representatives and tell them to pass legislation that supports and protects immigrants. You can also donate to RAICES and the Florence Project, two non-profit legal groups that are working to reunite families separated at the border. If you are bilingual and are interested in volunteering as an interpreter in immigration court, you can find local opportunities here.