Luiselli supplements the children’s personal accounts with critical backstory on Central American migration. Contrary to the talk of Dreamers, these children are survivors who come with “the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they are born.” Luiselli stresses that his story is more common than exceptional.
Manu had filed a police report months earlier, and the police had done nothing, so this time he calls his aunt in New York and makes plans for escape. They ran, but the gangsters shot at them and killed Manu’s friend. After school one day, he and a friend were chased by members of Barrio 18. Like those of many child refugees, Manu’s story involves the gangs Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and the Barrio 18. She translates for a sixteen-year-old boy from Honduras, Manu López. The first question is “Why did you come to the United States?” Contrary to popular narratives about economic opportunity, the book’s accounts reveal the far more common and urgent reasons for the children’s perilous migrations: they’re either searching for a parent or relative who’s already migrated, or they are fleeing “extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment.” As their translator, Luiselli must record each child’s answers to a series of questions. Horrified by the treatment the refugee children receive, she becomes a translator in New York’s immigration courts. After she and her family send out their green card applications, they joke about their new status and whether they were “pending aliens” or “alien writers.” A few weeks later, they see news of plans filled with “alien” children about to be deported, which inspires her to take action and wonder “how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.” I was reminded of this incident when I read Valeria Luiselli’s important new book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, in which she describes her own history with the word. Only once I saw how the adults responded did I learn the word’s xenophobic undertones. When I was ten, the girl next door told my three-year-old niece that they couldn’t play together because we were “aliens.” I didn’t understand the meaning behind calling a family of Guatemalan immigrants “aliens,” so at first I thought it was a funny case of miscommunication.
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