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BOOKS I READ: Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli (2017). Luiselli volunteers as a court translator, helping unaccompanied minors respond to a questionnaire they must complete to stay deportation. It is forty questions long, hence the subtitle, “An Essay in Forty Questions.” Her Mexican background, her uncertain resident status—she’s awaiting her green card—and her own kids give her a unique perspective into the culture, the desperation, and the vulnerability of the children.
It’s a sad and eye-opening depiction of the terrible transit so many undertake. She gives voice to the children who would otherwise be lost in the mind-boggling statistics, over 100,000 of them in a one-year period a couple of years before her publication. She urges us to recognize that these are children, refugees from dysfunctional countries, many with corrupt governments that have been propped up by the interests of their biggest neighbor. They are escaping brutal circumstances, “that it’s not even the American Dream they pursue, but rather… to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.” She’s struck by the callousness of a couple who, on their spare time, set up lawn chairs to protest the sequestered children in la hielera, the “ICEbox.” She wonders whether they had just come from mass that Sunday.
Luiselli, besides her work as a court translator, is a novelist and a professor. The only bright spot in the book is when her students’ decide to take action, setting up an organization to help the children with the labyrinth before them. Luiselli was the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant.
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