Tell Me How It Ends

Valeria Luiselli was already an accomplished writer in both Mexico and the United States when she wrote Tell Me How it Ends; her first two books, Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd, had won her acclaim as an up-and-coming immigrant novelist. Since the publication of Tell Me How it Ends, she has continued to combine literature with activism, including work supporting migrant children and frequent writing about mass incarceration, particularly detention centers. Tell Me How it Ends has a companion novel in Lost Children Archive, Luiselli’s 2020 work that fictionalizes some of the events described in this essay. She has also won a MacArthur Fellowship and has been widely published in English and Spanish.

Luiselli’s liminal status as a Mexican immigrant to America seeking citizenship gives her a unique perspective on what it means to want to belong in America. She uses it to help articulate her argument about the injustice that undocumented migrant children face. She is keenly aware of her privilege in relation to her subjects, and she uses her position as an academic to trace the political and social forces that are at play in these children’s lives and to analyze the impossible positions they’re being put in by the priority juvenile docket. She is also an outspoken progressive; the coda of the book is written during the beginning of the Trump administration, and she posits as a given that the next period in history will be more difficult for immigrants, a prediction that she would unquestionably see as coming true.

Her politics are deeply informed by the injustice she sees when interviewing the children who make up the subject of this long essay. As an interviewer, she sees clearly how the system dehumanizes the children she’s interviewing, turning them into cases that only have merit if the children have suffered exceptionally to have special consideration. For Luiselli, the commonplace story that she sees in these children is more than enough to grant them safety and dignity. Still, she sees time and again that the bureaucracy of the New York immigration court that she prepares the children for has an impetus to turn away many to most children seeking refuge or asylum in America. There are not enough lawyers to take on the cases. When she becomes a professor at Hofstra, she takes advantage of the situation to motivate her students to start their own activist organization, the TIIA, which she portrays as a small way forward in a bleak situation.