In Tell Me How It Ends there are no answers, only more questions. In this urgent, haunting, exquisitely written little book, the questions asked by Valeria Luiselli are her own, her children’s, and those she finds on intake questionnaires, the official interview documents elabo- rated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the tens of thousands of Central American children who arrive in the United States each year after being smuggled across the Mexican border. These children are the most vulnerable members of an ongoing exodus of Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence in their shattered nations in the expectation of finding a better life in the United States. Many of the children are raped, robbed, or even killed along the way.

As a Mexican woman living in the United States, facing her own travails with the immigration service for a green card that would grant her U.S. residency and permission to work, Luiselli became transfixed by the surge of child refugees during the summer of 2014. She began working as an interpreter with an immigra- tion court in New York City, where she was given the task of assisting the children with the intake questionnaire,

Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends : An Essay in 40 Questions, Coffee House Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=4818096. Created from csusb on 2019-11-11 15:04:42.

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asking its questions of them in Spanish and then trans- lating their answers. Depending on those answers, they might or might not be granted legal sanctuary of some sort—and thus a future—in the United States. Luiselli soon realized it was impossible to fit the children’s lives neatly into the boxes provided, observing, “The chil- dren’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shat- tered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.”

The result of Luiselli’s experience is this book, in which the questions posed to the refugee children become catalysts for her own questions about the nature of family, childhood, and community, and above all, about national identity and belonging. She offers a fasci- nating rumination on the complex nature of the attrac- tion of the United States for the refugee children and their families—and even for herself—despite its unwel- coming nature, casual racism, and official disinterest in their very existence. “Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting,” she concludes. “I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a

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tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging.”

Luiselli’s book appears during an especially raw junc- ture in the relationship between her birthplace, Mexico, and her adoptive home, the United States. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, the nature of the relationship between the two countries became an essential plank in the candidacy of Republican billionaire Donald Trump, who notoriously referred to Mexicans as unwelcome intruders, as “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists” and called for a wall to be built along the border, one that, in an apparent effort to be as humiliating as possible, he insisted “Mexico will pay for.”

In this hallucinatory global political climate, in which bigoted notions about national identity, sect, and race have reared their heads to a degree not seen in many decades, Trump’s statements gained him a size- able American following. It is distressingly clear that the fears and hatreds he has unleashed—especially since he, and not Hillary Clinton, won the election to become president—will not be easily put to rest. What does this mean for the refugee children and their families who flee shattered communities to the United States, hoping to make themselves whole again? Luiselli does not know,

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but she feels certain that whatever their reception in the United States, the children will keep coming as long as there is a need to escape from realities too frightening to bear. “Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, what- ever may be waiting there for them.” And what awaits them is a bewildering and often daunting reality, with little in the way of guidance to help them adapt. After six months adjusting to life in a tough neighborhood of New York, one Honduran youngster tells Luiselli what he has learned thus far: his new home “is a shithole full of pandilleros, just like Tegucigalpa.”

In the course of her work, Luiselli’s young daughter has heard about some of the children’s stories, and she repeatedly asks, as children do, “Tell me how it ends, Mamma.” Luiselli has no answers for her. There are, as yet, no happy endings, but toward the end of the book she offers a small hint of promise. It comes in the form of a decision by ten young Americans, just a few years older than the children of the intake questionnaires, to form a group that will help teenage refugees who have made it to the United States and managed to stay.

This is a profoundly moving book, one that, with its modest hundred pages and simple, teasing title, pre- sents itself as a mere story guided by forty questions. But

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appearances are, after all, beguiling, and this is a most powerful story, beautifully told by Valeria Luiselli. I feel sure that whoever reads it will not regret it, nor easily forget it.

Jon Lee Anderson Dorset, England January 14, 2017

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BORDER

“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unac- companied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children in court, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.

But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spo- ken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex nar- ratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

When the intake interview with a child is over, I meet with lawyers to deliver and explain my transcrip- tion and occasional notes. The lawyers then analyze the child’s responses, trying to come up with options

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for a viable defense against a child’s deportation and the “potential relief ” he or she is likely to get. The next step is to find legal representation. Once an attorney has agreed to take on a case, the real legal battle begins. If that battle is won, the child will obtain some form of immigration relief. If it is lost, they will receive a depor- tation order from a judge.

I watch our own children sleep in the back seat of the car as we cross the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. I glance back now and then from the co pilot’s seat at my ten- year- old stepson, visiting us from Mexico, and my five- year- old daughter. Behind the wheel, my husband concentrates on the road ahead.

It is the summer of 2014. We are waiting for our green cards to be either granted or denied and, in the meantime, we decide to go on a family road trip. We will drive from Harlem, New York, to a town in Cochise County, Arizona, near the U.S.- Mexico border.

According to the slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law, for the three years or so that we had lived in New York we had been “nonresident aliens.” That’s the term used to describe anyone from outside the United States—“alien”—whether or not they are resi- dents. There are “nonresident aliens,” “resident aliens,” and even “removable aliens”—that I know of. We wanted

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to become “resident aliens,” even though we knew what applying for green cards implied: the lawyers, the expenses, the many vaccinations and medical exams, the months of sustained uncertainty, the rather humiliating intermediate steps, such as having to wait for an “advance parole” document in order to be able to leave the coun- try and be paroled back in, like a criminal, as well as the legal prohibition against traveling abroad, without losing immigration status, before being granted advance parole. Despite all that, we decided to apply.

When we finally sent out our applications, a few weeks before leaving for our road trip, we started feeling strange, somewhat out of place, a little circumspect—as if throwing that envelope in the blue mailbox on our street corner had changed something in us. We joked, some- what frivolously, about the possible definitions of our new, now pending, migratory status. Were we “pending aliens,” or “writers seeking status,” or “alien writers,” or maybe “pending Mexicans”? I suppose, deeper down, we were simply asking ourselves, perhaps for the first time, that same question I now ask children at the begin- ning of each intake interview: “Why did you come to the United States?”

We didn’t have a clear answer. No one ever does. But the deed was done, we had filed our applications, and while we waited for an answer we were not allowed to

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leave the country. So, when summer arrived, we bought maps, rented a car, packed a few basics, made playlists, and left New York.

The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpi- tude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! The green card questionnaire has a retro kind of candor, like the grainy Cold War films we watched on VHS. The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked- up place than anyone could have ever imagined.

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The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator- interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become general- ized, distorted, appear out of focus.

Before the formal screening begins, the person con- ducting it has to fill in basic biographical information: the child’s name, age, and country of birth, the name of a sponsor in the United States, the people with whom he or she is living at the time, and a contact number and address. All these details have to be written down at the very top of the questionnaire.

A few spaces down, right before the first formal interview question, a line floats across the page like an uncomfortable silence:

Where is the child’s mother? _________father? _________

The interviewer has to write down whatever infor- mation the child can or will give to fill in those blanks— those two empty spaces that look a bit like badly stitched wounds. Too often, the spaces remain blank: all the chil- dren come without their fathers and mothers. And many of them do not even know where their parents are.

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We are driving across Oklahoma in early July when we first hear about the wave of children arriving, alone and undocumented, at the border. On our long west- bound drives we begin to follow the story on the radio. It’s a sad story that hits so close to home and yet seems completely unimaginable, almost unreal: tens of thou- sands of children from Mexico and Central America have been detained at the border. Nothing is clear in the initial coverage of the situation—which soon becomes known, more widely, as an immigration crisis, though others will advocate for the more accurate term “refu- gee crisis.”

Questions, speculations, and opinions flash- flood the news during the days that follow. Who are these children? What will happen to them? Where are the parents? Where will they go next? And why, why did they come to the United States?

“Why did you come to the United States?” I ask children in immigration court.

Their answers vary, but they often point to a single pull factor: reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthink- able circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme vio- lence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but

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rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

Then comes question number two in the intake ques- tionnaire: “When did you enter the United States?” Most children don’t know the exact date. They smile and say “last year” or “a few months ago” or simply “I don’t know.” They’ve fled their towns and cities; they’ve walked and swum and hidden and run and mounted freight trains and trucks. They’ve turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers. They’ve come all this way looking for—for what, exactly? The questionnaire doesn’t make these other inquiries. But it does ask for precise details: “When did you enter the United States?”

As we drive deeper into the country, following the enor- mous map I take from the glove box and study from time to time, the summer heat becomes drier, the light thin- ner and whiter, the roads more solitary. We start hunting down any available information about the undocu- mented children and the situation at the border. We collect local newspapers, which pile on the floor of our car, in front of my copilot seat. We do constant, quick online searches and tune in to the radio every time we can catch a signal.

More questions, speculations, and opinions flood media coverage of the crisis: some sources elaborate lucid

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and complex conjectures on the origin and possible causes of the sudden surge of arrivals of unaccompa- nied minors, others denounce the inhumane conditions and systematic maltreatment the children must endure in detention facilities near the border, and a few others endorse the spontaneous civilian protests against them.

A caption in a web publication explains an unset- tling photograph of men and women waving flags, banners, and rifles in the air: “Protesters, some exer- cising their open- carry rights, assemble outside of the Wolverine Center in Vassar [Michigan] that would house illegal juveniles to show their dismay for the situation.” In another photograph that we find on the web, an elderly couple holds signs saying “Illegal Is a Crime” and “Return to Senders.” They are sitting on beach chairs, wearing sunglasses. A caption explains, “Thelma and Don Christie (C) of Tucson demonstrate against the arrival of undocumented immigrants in Oracle, Arizona. July 15, 2014.” I zoom in on their faces and wonder. What passed through the minds of Thelma and Don Christie when they prepared their protest signs? Did they pencil in “protest against illegal immi- grants” on their calendars, right next to “mass” and just before “bingo”? What were they thinking when they put their beach chairs inside their trunk? And what did they talk about as they drove the forty miles or so north, toward the protest in Oracle?

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In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen—these men- acing, coffee- colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes. They will fall from the skies, on our cars, on our green lawns, on our heads, on our schools, on our Sundays. They will make a racket, they will bring their chaos, their sickness, their dirt, their brown- ness. They will cloud the pretty views, they will fill the future with bad omens, they will fill our tongues with barbarisms. And if they are allowed to stay here they will—eventually—reproduce!

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, lis- ten to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.

In a diner near Roswell, New Mexico, we overhear a conversation between a waitress and a customer. As she refills his coffee, she tells him that hundreds of migrant kids will be put on private planes—rumored to have been funded by a patriotic millionaire—and deported that same day back to Honduras, or Mexico, or some- where. The planes full of “alien” children will leave from an airport not far from the famous UFO museum,

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the one our children have been set on visiting. The term “alien,” which only a few weeks ago made us laugh and speculate, which we had been passing around the car as an inside family joke, is suddenly shown to us under a bleaker light. It’s strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.

The next day, driving out of Roswell, we look for news on what happened with those deportees. We find no details of the exact circumstances under which they were deported, or how many there were, and if it’s true that a local millionaire financed their removal. We do, however, come across these lines in a Reuters report that read like the beginning of a cruel, absurdist story by Mikhail Bulgakov or Daniil Kharms: “Looking happy, the deported children exited the airport on an over- cast and sweltering afternoon. One by one, they filed into a bus, playing with balloons they had been given.” We dwell for a while on the adjective “happy” and the strangely meticulous description of the local weather in San Pedro Sula, Honduras: “an overcast and sweltering afternoon.” But what we really cannot stop reproducing, somewhere in the dark back of our minds, is the uncanny image of the children holding those balloons.

In our long daily drives, to fill in the empty hours, we sometimes tell our children stories about the old

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American Southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. I tell them about Saint Patrick’s Battalion, the group of Irish Catholic soldiers who joined the U.S. Army as cannon fodder during the Mexican- American War, but later changed sides to fight along with the Mexicans. I tell them about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after that war, in which Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Their father tells them about President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, approved by Congress in 1830, and explains how it brutally exiled Native Americans to reservations. He tells them about Geronimo, Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, and the other Chiricahua Apaches: the last inhabitants of a continent to surrender to the white- eyes, after years of battle against both the U.S. Bluecoats and the Mexican Army. Those last Chiricahua resisted for many more years after the Indian Removal Act was passed. They finally surren- dered in 1886 and were “removed” to the San Carlos Reservation—in southern Arizona, toward which we are now driving. It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal” is still used to refer to the deporta- tion 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 high- way, perhaps trying to put together the many pieces of

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the story— the unimaginable story— unfolding just out- side the small and protected world of our rented car. Though all of it resists a rational explanation, we talk it over and consider its many angles. We try to answer our own children’s questions about the situation as best we can. But we don’t do very well. How do you explain any of this to your own children?

The third and fourth questions on the intake ques- tionnaire are ones that our children, too, ask many times, though in their own words: “With whom did you travel to this country?” and “Did you travel with anyone you knew?” All children travel with a paid coyote. Some of them travel also with siblings, cousins, and friends.

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. Were they to find themselves alone, crossing borders and countries, would my own children survive?

The fifth and sixth questions are: “What countries did you pass through?” and “How did you travel here?” To the first one, almost everyone immediately answers “Mexico,” and some also list Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. To the question about how they traveled

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here, with a blend of pride and horror, most say, “I came on La Bestia,” which literally means “the beast,” and refers to the freight trains that cross Mexico, on top of which as many as half a million Central American migrants ride annually. There are no passenger services along the routes, so migrants have to ride atop the rail- cars or in the recesses between them.

Thousands have died or been gravely injured aboard La Bestia, either because of the frequent derail- ments of the old freight trains or because people fall off during the night. The most minor oversight can be fatal. Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails. And when the train itself is not the threat, it’s the smugglers, thieves, policemen, or soldiers who frequently threaten, blackmail, or attack the people on board. There is a saying about La Bestia: Go in alive, come out a mummy.

But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along with it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half- stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them

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to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.

La Bestia’s routes start either in the town of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, or in Tenosique, in the state of Tabasco—both towns near the Mexico- Guatemala border. They slowly make their way up to the U.S.- Mexico border, following either the eastern Gulf route to Reynosa, the border town near the southeastern- most tip of Texas, or the western routes that lead either to Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua, or to Nogales, in Sonora, which share borders with Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The journey atop La Bestia’s freight trains ends at the U.S.- Mexico border. And there begins another jour- ney: one that is not as dangerous, objectively speaking, but is equally terrifying in the children’s eyes. Once off La Bestia, and having reached the border, the coyotes’ job is usually done and the children are on their own. They try to turn themselves in to the migra, or Border Patrol, as soon as possible. They know their best bet is to be formally detained by Border Patrol officers: cross- ing the desert beyond the border alone is too dangerous, if not impossible. They also know that if they are not caught at this point, or if they do not surrender them- selves to the law, it is unlikely that they will arrive at their final destination—the home of a relative in some

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city, usually far from the border. If the legal proceed- ings don’t begin now, their fate will be to remain undoc- umented, like many of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. Life as an undocumented migrant is perhaps not worse than the life they are flee- ing, but it is certainly not the life that anyone wants. So, the children who cross the border, into the desert, try to stick to the busier roads and walk openly along high- ways, until someone— hopefully an officer and not a vig- ilante—sees them.

I remember a teenager who, during an interview in court, told me of his increasing desperation when, after hours of walking the arid plains of New Mexico, the Border Patrol still hadn’t appeared. It was not until his second day of walking in the desert under the burn- ing sun that a vehicle finally appeared on the far hori- zon. He stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms. And when the vehicle pulled over beside him, to his immense relief, two tall officers stepped out and detained him.

My mom always told me I was born under a lucky star, he said when he finished his story.

As soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, com- monly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The ice- box derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

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custody. The name also points out the fact that the deten- tion centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly— naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are treated more like carriers of diseases than children. In July 2015, for example, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a complaint after learning that in a detention center in Dilley, Texas, 250 children were mistakenly given adult- strength hepatitis A vaccinations. The children became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized.

By law, the maximum time a person can remain in the icebox is seventy- two hours, but children are often kept for longer, subject not only to the inhumane con- ditions and frigid temperatures but also to verbal and physical mistreatment. They sometimes have nowhere to lie down to sleep, are not allowed to use the bath- rooms as frequently as they need to, and are underfed.

They only give out frozen sandwiches twice a day there, another teenager I once screened told me.

That’s all you ate? I asked. No, not me. What do you mean, not you? I didn’t eat those things. Why not? Because they give belly- sadness.

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As we drive from southwestern New Mexico toward Arizona, it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the uncomfortable irony of it: we are traveling in the direction opposite the children whose stories we are now following so closely. As we get closer to the border and begin tak- ing back roads, we do not see a single migrant—child or adult. We see other things, though, that indicate their ghostly presence, past or future. Along the narrow dirt road in New Mexico that goes from a ghost town called Shakespeare to another town called Animas we see a trail of flags that volunteer groups tie to trees or fences, indicating that there are tanks filled with water there for people to drink as they cross the desert. Occasionally, we are overtaken by big pickup trucks, and it’s hard not to imagine the men behind their steering wheels: big men with beards or shaved heads or abundant tattoos; vigilant, patriotic men who carry pistols and rifles by constitutional right and feel entitled to use them if they see a group of aliens walking in the desert. As we approach Animas, we also begin to see fleeting herds of Border Patrol cars like ominous white stallions racing toward the horizon.

We decide not to tell anyone in diners and gas sta- tions that we are Mexican, just in case. But we are stopped a few times by Border Patrol officials and have to show our passports and display big smiles when we explain we are just writers and just on vacation. We have to con- firm that yes, we are only writers, even if yes, we are also

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Mexican. Why are we there and what are we writing— they always want to know.

We are writing a Western, sir. That’s what we tell them, that we are writing a

Western. We also tell them we came to Arizona for the open skies and the silence and the emptiness—this second part, more true than the part about writing the Western, which is untrue. Handing back our passports, one official says sardonically:

So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.

We know better than to contradict anyone who carries a badge and a gun, so we just say:

Yes, sir. 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.

We roll the windows up and keep driving. To dis- tract ourselves from the aftertaste of the Border Patrol encounter, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle. One song that often pops up is “Straight to Hell” by the Clash. We didn’t suspect that that song would become a

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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. These icy lines give me belly- sadness:

In no- man’s- land There ain’t no asylum here King Solomon he never lived ’round here.

Question seven on the questionnaire is “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” The children seldom give details of their expe- riences along the journey through Mexico upon a first screening, and it’s not necessarily useful to push them for more information. What happens to them between their home countries and their arrival in the United States can’t always help their defense before an immigration judge, so the question doesn’t make up a substantial part of the interview. But, as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else.

The numbers tell horror stories. Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who

cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the

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way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333.

Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disap- peared in their transit through Mexico.

Beyond the terrifying but abstract statistics, many horror stories have recently tattooed themselves in the collective social conscience in Mexico. One specific story, though, became a turning point. On August 24, 2010, the bodies of seventy- two Central and South American migrants were found, piled up in a mass grave, at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Some had been tortured, and all had been shot in the back of the head. Three migrants in the group had faked their deaths and, though wounded, survived. They lived to tell the complete story: members of the drug cartel Los Zetas had perpetrated the mass murder after the migrants had refused to work for them and did not have the means to pay a ransom.

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I remember the dark days when this news broke out in Mexico—thousands or perhaps millions of people in front of newspapers, radios, and TV screens, all of them asking: How? Why? What did we do? Where did we go wrong, as a society, to make some- thing like this possible? Even now, we don’t know the answer. No one does. What we do know is that, since then, hundreds of additional mass graves have been discovered. Every month, every week, they continue to be discovered. And even though the story of “Los 72”—the seventy- two men and women, girls and boys, all brutally murdered— changed the way in which both Mexican society and the rest of the world views the sit- uation of migrants crossing Mexican territory, nothing has actually been done about it.

There are, of course, some redeeming stories in Mexico. There is the story of Las Patronas, the group of women in Veracruz who, years ago, started throwing bottled water and food to the migrants aboard La Bestia and are now a formal humanitarian group. There are also the many shelters that offer food and refuge to migrants as they travel through Mexico, the most well- known of which is Hermanos en el Camino, run by Father Alejandro Solalinde. But these stories—small oases in the no- man’s- land Mexico has become—are only exceptions. If anything, they are fleeting glints of hope in

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the dark and raucous nightmare where the metal wheels of La Bestia continually screech and howl.

So when I have to ask children that seventh ques- tion—“Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?”—all I want to do is cover my face and my ears and disappear. 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 closely, in case a child does happen to reveal a particular detail that can end up being key to his or her defense against deportation.

The danger migrants face in their journeys doesn’t end when they finally reach the U.S.- Mexico border. Question number eight addresses crimes and rights violations in U.S. territory: “Has anyone hurt, threatened, or fright- ened you since you came to the U.S.?”

There are many stories about such violations. Some are liminal, like the well- known case of a sixteen- year- old boy on the Mexican side of the border who, in 2012, was shot to death by an American officer on the U.S. side who later claimed the boy and other people had thrown rocks at him. The officer argued self- defense: his bullets for their rocks. And the dangers continue once the border is crossed. We know, for instance, that civilian vigilantes and owners of private ranches go out to hunt undocumented migrants, either as a matter of conviction or merely for sport.

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Many migrants also die of dehydration, hunger, or accidents. At the forensic institute of Pima County, Arizona, alone, more than 2,200 human remains have been registered since 2001, the majority of which are still unidentified. The area surrounding the border between Mexico and the United States is a big common grave, and the migrants who die in this portion of our continent become no more than “bones in the desert”—as Sergio González Rodríguez once said about the many women murdered in and around Ciudad Juárez during the peak of the femicide crisis, perhaps also foreshadowing the destiny of many more people. It is almost impossible to identify human remains recovered from the desert, as they are frequently discovered in a very advanced state of decomposition and the lines of communication between family members looking for their missing and the institutions responsible for the remains are limited, if not completely absent. One notable effort to counter this desolating map of current and future anonymous dead was organized by the nonprofit Humane Borders, which, among other important work, created an online search mechanism that matches names of deceased migrants to the specific geographical coordinates in the desert where their remains were found. That way, family members of the missing can type a name into a search bar and either confirm their worst fears, when the map zooms in on a red dot in the desert, or continue to wait and

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hope. Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantú has written poignantly about these death maps and all the “clearly marked ghosts” that dot the wide deserts in the southern United States.

Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the sto- ries 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.

We returned to Manhattan at the end of the summer of 2014. The family’s green cards were waiting for us in a stack of mail piled high by the door—all of them except mine. My stepson went back to Mexico, my daughter went back to school, my husband and I went back to work, and life went back to normal—almost. I still had to figure out what to do with my lost green card, so I began to consult my lawyer regularly. We discussed possible reasons for the delay. Maybe, she suggested,

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Homeland Security was doing a more thorough back- ground check:

Do you travel to Muslim- majority countries? my lawyer asked more than once.

I had only been to Jordan and Turkey, and that was ten years before.

Are you sure? I went to Indonesia as a girl, I remembered when,

on another phone call, she repeated the question. There were other questions:

Have you been a member of any organization that represents a threat to the United States?

My answer was probably boring: I’m a veteran member of the United World Colleges

and a recent member of both the Modern Language Association and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs—congregations of nerds, basically, with a cer- tain enthusiasm for education, academics, and literature.

Her questions seemed increasingly unreasonable and bizarre. But we had to come up with plans B and C, so I complied and answered, filed more petitions, and spent endless hours on the customer service line for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). We had already applied for temporary work permits, which came in the mail a few months later. But there was still no sign of my green card. We looked for other solutions until, one day, my lawyer told me she had to

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hand my case over to someone else because she had just been offered a job at a nonprofit organization, working on cases defending child migrants, and had to give up her private practice.

Ever since I was left somewhat alone, without gods, I have been a ferocious believer in the power of small coincidences. That is how chance works, at least for those of us who do not have the certainty of grander schemes. It was thanks to my lost green card, and thanks to my lawyer abandoning my case, that I became involved with a much more urgent problem. My more trivial pur- suits as an “alien writer” or “pending Mexican” took me into the heart of something larger and more important.

As I walked down Broadway one morning, speak- ing to my lawyer over the phone one last time before she handed off my case, I inquired about her new job. She explained that the Obama administration had decided to create a priority juvenile docket in immigration courts to deal with the deportation proceedings of thousands of undocumented children. Suddenly, with the surge of arrivals, there was an urgent demand for lawyers in the immigration courts, and thus, she had been offered this new position. Since the majority of lawyers were mono- lingual, she explained, there was a special need for law- yers who, like her, spoke Spanish. Before we hung up, I asked if there was a need for translators or interpret- ers in court, even if they weren’t lawyers, and she said

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