Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined.

perhaps trying to put together the many pieces of the story—the unimaginable story—unfolding just outside the small and protected world of our rented car.

How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.

Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333.

Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have di...

Some are liminal, like the well-known case of a sixteen-year-old boy on the Mexican side of the border who, in 2012, was shot to death by an American officer on the U.S. side who later claimed the boy and other people had thrown rocks at him. The officer argued self-defense: his bullets for their rocks.

civilian vigilantes and owners of private ranches go out to hunt undocumented migrants, either as a matter of conviction or merely for sport.

One notable effort to counter this desolating map of current and future anonymous dead was organized by the nonprofit Humane Borders, which, among other important work, created an online search mechanism that matches names of deceased migrants to the specific geographical coordinates in the desert where their remains were found.

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.

(Later, in the summer of 2015, it became known that between April 2014 and August 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the border.)

he explained that the document was a copy of a police report he’d filed more than a year and a half ago.

From the beginning, the crisis was viewed as an institutional hindrance, a problem that Homeland Security was “suffering” and that Congress and immigration judges had to solve.

In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.” How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?

So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has the physical injuries to prove it.

Later, his screening, like many others, is filed and sent away to a lawyer: a snapshot of a life that will wait in the dark until maybe someone finds it and decides to make it a case.

Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable.

Programa Frontera Sur is the Mexican government’s new augmented-reality video game: the player who hunts down the most migrants wins.

The attitude in the United States toward child migrants is not always blatantly negative, but generally speaking, it is based on a kind of misunderstanding or voluntary ignorance.

Sometimes I make up an ending, a happy one. But most of the time I just say: I don’t know how it ends yet.