Tell Me How It Ends

Luiselli’s daughter asks her how the stories end, and Luiselli usually answers that she doesn’t know yet. One story, in particular, fascinates her daughter, that of two young girls that Luiselli interviews. The girls’ mother left them with their grandmother and made the journey to Long Island. Five years later, the mother called and gave her grandmother instructions to send the girls along. The grandmother sews a phone number into the girls’ clothing, telling them to never remove the garments, and eventually, they are reunited with their mother. To Luiselli’s daughter, that’s how the story ends, but Luiselli knows that the next step is coming: the Notice to Appear.

Children who fail to follow the notice are deported in absentia; otherwise, they must answer a series of questions. Tellingly, they are only able to find legal pathways to citizenship if they first admit to the charge of entering illegally; “the admission of guilt, then, is a kind of door that the law holds half open” (59). Two kinds of relief, asylum and special immigrant juvenile status, are available to most migrant children in some way if the case can be properly argued, as they are often fleeing either persecution or violence at home. Luiselli documents the strange logic that creates in the questionnaire; “correct” answers are the ones that demonstrate tremendous trauma, which opens up pathways to relief from deportation. As Luiselli interviews children, she notices that sometimes she records answers in the first person and sometimes in the third.

The questionnaire can confuse young children, so Luiselli breaks the questions down to arrive at answers. Working through the questions with the young girls in her example, she realizes that their home life in Guatemala does not provide sufficient legal cause for protection, and she knows how impossible it is for such young girls to advocate for themselves in the legal system. Luiselli returns to her daughter’s question and admits she doesn’t know how this story ends.

Luiselli and her niece become frustrated by the number of cases and the narrow pathways for migrant children to stay in the country. Her niece tells her that she’s decided to major in law; their volunteer work has shown that lawyers are desperately needed and that if an immigration case is taken by a lawyer, the chances for relief are greatly improved. Since the immigration court is a civil court, the children are not entitled to free representation, and most cases end up in deportation as a result. While trying to find the right phrasing to help a boy whose brother was killed by gang members, Luiselli sees how hopeless the situation is for most.

Luiselli returns to the first boy she interviewed, a story that has stuck with her throughout her volunteer work. Manu is a 16-year-old from Honduras. He is initially reluctant to speak with her until she reassures him that she doesn’t have any authority over him and isn’t even technically an American. He reluctantly tells her of living with his grandmother, who died recently, and two cousins who also fled to the United States. The reason becomes clear as the interview proceeds. Manu was caught between MS-13, which was trying to recruit him, and Barrio 18. The latter gang cornered Manu and a friend and fired on them, killing the friend. The police did not help, and Manu called his aunt, who helped him flee the country. Manu tells Luiselli that he did not attend his friend’s funeral out of fear for his life. Manu’s aunt pays a coyote $4,000 for his transport, then is forced to pay $3,000 for each of her daughters (Manu’s cousins) after Barrio 18 begins to threaten them once Manu is gone.

In response to the migrant crisis, the Mexican government has instituted a policy called Programa Frontera Sur. It claims to protect the safety and rights of migrants, but Luiselli contends that the program uses surveillance and security measures to capture and deport migrants, ensuring that they go back to unsafe situations. As a result, travel on La Bestia has become more dangerous, and migrants sometimes use more dangerous alternate routes. Luiselli sees this as merely shifting the focus of border control from the Rio Grande to the Mexico-Guatemala border, repeating a familiar pattern of Mexico being “paid to do the dirty work” (79).

Luiselli returns to Manu’s case; a law firm has taken his case pro bono, thanks partly to the police report he carries. Luiselli is pleased to continue translating for him, but she learns that he wants to leave the high school he attends on Long Island. Both Barrio 18 and MS-13 have a presence at his school, and he is beaten by Barrio 18 members so badly that he loses his front teeth. Now that his cousins have arrived in the United States, he worries about his need to protect them. Luiselli notes the clear line between Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Hempstead, Long Island, which she knows Americans do not want to admit. She recalls a 2014 New York Times piece that painted South American countries as poor, violent places and the migrant children as dangerous. What she saw in that article is what she often sees: that the problems migrant children face are depicted as the problems of their countries of origin, not “deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history […] [and], in fact, a transnational problem that includes the United States” (85). She sees an acknowledgment of the true scale of the gang and drug trade as a necessity for any attempt to truly address or understand the situation.

Manu’s comment that his new home of Hempstead is almost as bad as Tegucigalpa leads Luiselli to research and discover the town’s history as a place of gang violence (and gangster rap); though she admits that the Barrio 18 in Tegucigalpa would have done worse than beat him up, she can’t help but wonder why he ended up back in the same situation.

While speaking with Alina, Manu’s aunt, she thinks of the final questions on her questionnaire, which have to do with what the migrant thinks would happen if they returned to their home country. Alina reveals that she has gone into considerable debt to get Manu and her daughters to the US; since one daughter was 19, they had to pay an additional $7,500 to get her released from detention. Luiselli sees that the hardship, danger, and cost of these journeys only became an option because of the inevitable violence the children would face at home. To Luiselli, the migrant children are war refugees.