Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.

In our long daily drives, to fill in the empty hours, we sometimes tell our children stories about the old American Southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico.

It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal” is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”

When we run out of stories to tell our children, we fall silent and look out at the unbroken line of the highway, 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.

Sometimes, when our children fall asleep again, I look back at them, or hear them breathe, and wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes and what would happen to them if they were deposited at the U.S. border, left either on their own or in the custody of Border Patrol officers.

One song that often pops up is “Straight to Hell” by the Clash. We didn’t suspect that that song would become a kind of leitmotif of our trip. Who would have known that a song partly about the post-Vietnam War “Amerasian” children and their exclusion from the American Dream would become, forty years later, a song about Central American children in the American Nightmare.

But I know better, or try to. I remind myself to swallow the rage, grief, and shame; remind myself to just sit still and listen

The officer argued self-defense: his bullets for their rocks.

Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. 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.

the words scribbled on the board were also a kind of scaffolding holding all of those broken stories together.

If something goes wrong, and something happens to a child, the coyote is not held accountable.

When children don’t have enough battle wounds to show, they may not have any way to successfully defend their cases and will most likely be “removed” back to their home country, often without a trial.

But I imagine that, in his nights of adolescent rage and desperation, he wonders why, why this story all over again, why he ever came to the United States.

Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive.