VALERIA LUISELLI, TELL ME HOW IT

ENDS (2017)
The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really
six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was
inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in
New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied
migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently
with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same
topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an
argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these
children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a
heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold,
reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.)
Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a
narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across
America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card
applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the
thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by
themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real
stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely,
clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from
forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of
this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship
between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries
in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse
moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and
vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose
what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have
never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of
Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country. –
Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow