Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? 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.

constant coverage of the children’s crisis had slowly made the general picture a little clearer for everyone who followed the news. This much, at least, became clear. Most children came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the three countries that make up the Northern Triangle—and practically all of them were fleeing gang violence. Although the flow of youths migrating alone to the United States from these territories had been observed for years, there had been a considerable and sudden increase in the numbers. From October 2013 to the moment the crisis was declared in June 2014, the total number of child migrants detained at the border approached 80,000.

Before the immigration crisis was declared in the summer of 2014, minors seeking immigration relief were given approximately twelve months to find a lawyer to represent their case before their first court hearing. But when the crisis was declared and Obama’s administration created the priority juvenile docket, that window was reduced to twenty-one days.

The original Barrio 18 members were second-generation Hispanics who grew up in L.A. gang culture. The MS-13 was originally a small coalition of immigrants from El Salvador who had sought exile in the U.S. during the long and ruthless Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), in which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups.

We looked more deeply into the war and the struggle between the left-wing guerilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and the military government. The primary ally of that government, we discover (and should have predicted), was the United States. The Carter administration and, perhaps more actively, the Reagan administration funded and provided military resources to the government that massacred so many and led many others to exile. Around one-fifth of the population of El Salvador fled.

Mexican children detained by Border Patrol can be deported back immediately. They don’t have to be given temporary shelter, are not allowed to attempt contact with parents or relatives in the U.S., and are certainly not granted a right to a formal hearing in court where they could defend themselves, legally, against a deportation order.

The procedure by which Mexican children are deported in this way is called “voluntary return.” And, as unbelievable as it may seem, voluntary return is the most common verdict. Other than a handful of lucky exceptions, all Mexican children are deported under this procedure.

This—irrational, if not completely absurd—practice is legally backed by an amendment to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President G. W. Bush in 2008. The amendment states that children from countries that share borders with the U.S. can be deported without formal immigration proceedings.

When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seem to be that the origins are circumscribed to “sending” countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a trans national problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.

The belief that the migration of all of those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution. The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.

The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “immigrants,” not “illegals,” not merely “undocumented minors.” Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum.