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128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
“Why did you come to the United States”. That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end.
There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have ended. In the meantime while the story continues, the only thing to do is to tell is over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood , it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds
"It‘s only now, thinking about it, that I begin to feel this book‘s relentless empty chill. American cruelty knows no bounds once it‘s legalized. Here the emotional shocks of how we treat these unaccompanied child refugees come so quickly in this little book that it‘s almost not possible to process while reading, or even at all. What they go through, in the many thousands...the little cruel window Luiselli witnessed...what can you say?"I finished to book two days ago, and it really does go by quick. Luiselli served as a translator of the US federal immigration court with the role of helping unaccompanied child refugees answer a 40-question official questionnaire. These are standard questions for all refugees, but don't exactly apply to young children who can't comprehend them in any language. Why did they come the United States, How did they get here, where did they enter...they don't know how to answer these questions. Helping one girl, she asks, "Texas? Arizona?" The girl response, "Yes! Texas Arizona."
And perhaps the only way to grant any justice - were that even possible - is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don't dare even look.
if someone were to draw a map of the hemisphere and chart a child's story and his or her individual route of immigration, then do the same with another child, and another, and then dozens of others, and then the hundreds and thousands that came before and that will come after, the map would collapse into a single line—a fissure, a rift, one long continental scar.