Tell Me How It Ends

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is Valeria Luiselli’s 2017 book-length essay exploring the influx of undocumented child migrants from Latin America that began in 2014. Through her work as a volunteer translator, Luiselli became intimately aware of what these children experienced, and the essay argues that their inhumane treatment at the hands of American bureaucracy is an unjust denial of due process and the core principles of the American Dream. This guide uses the 2017 UK Edition published by 4th Estate.

Summary

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions loosely follows the questionnaire Luiselli used to help interview undocumented children to determine if their experience warranted asylum or special immigrant status in the United States upon their arrival. The essay is broken up into four parts and a coda. In the opening section, Luiselli recalls the trip across the American Southwest that she took with her family in 2014, which is the first time she hears of the undocumented children arriving at the Southern border. At the time, she is waiting on news of her own green card, and she sees the parallels between her family and the children on the news. The essay cross-cuts between her experience taking in the biased, sometimes racist depiction of the migrant children on the radio during their vacation and the beginning of her volunteer work helping them navigate the court system during the existence of a special juvenile docket that rapidly speeds up the deportation process. The children she works with have almost uniformly had harrowing journeys, traveling across Central America and Mexico on the tops of trains under the custody of coyotes before surrendering to border patrol agents in America in an attempt to reunite with their families or fleeing horrific violence. When she returns to New York at the end of her vacation, Luiselli’s green card is still missing, and it’s through navigating the legal system that she’s put in contact with the agency that is trying to help these children; she and her college-age niece decide to volunteer.

In the second part of the essay, she uses specific interviews—particularly her interview with a boy named Manu who is traveling with a Salvadoran police report as proof of what he’s been through—to demonstrate that the children are refugees fleeing gang violence, domestic and sexual violence, and persecution. Tellingly, she traces the roots of gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 (key players in the violence and crime that the children are fleeing) back to United States foreign and immigration policy since both gangs have their roots in the United States. Through her interviews, Luiselli sees the desperate situation these children are in, and she sees how the desire to leave violent, economically depressed lives has created broken families and intense trauma.

In part three of the essay, Luiselli struggles to explain what will happen to most of these children to her young daughter. The volunteer work has revealed to her and her niece that the vast majority of them will face deportation, and that’s primarily due to the speed with which they are processed, which leaves them little time to find representation or build a strong case for themselves; immigration courts do not provide state-sponsored legal representation for defendants who can’t pay, so most of her interviewees are hoping to find a pro-bono lawyer. In the case of Manu, her first interviewee, a lawyer decides to represent him, and though that’s a promising sign, Luiselli learns that the same gangs he fled in Tegucigalpa are harassing him at his new high school. She argues that the child migrant crisis is a transnational problem that does not originate in the countries from which the children are fleeing. She concludes that the children are war refugees.

In the final part of the essay, Luiselli details the beginning of her teaching work at Hofstra University; in her conversational Spanish class, she talks to the students about the migrant crisis, and they begin to invest in the idea. Together, they create a student activist group, the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association (TIIA), to help undocumented child migrants better integrate into American society. Her green card is further delayed, so she has to briefly resign as a professor, though she continues writing. She closes the essay by thinking about the immigrant experience as a core aspect of the American national fabric. In a series of brief postscripts, she writes about the beginning of the Trump presidency and her fear of the consequences it will have for immigrants. Her students continue their work with TIIA, and Manu is involved with them now; he has won in court and been granted special immigrant juvenile status, which means he will be able to stay. Luiselli sees reason to hope in the work that volunteers and individuals do to fill in the gaps in America’s social fabric.