Now they are in New York, and have received a court summons, a Notice to Appear. Before they left Guatemala, their grandmother, having failed to get the girls to learn their mother’s ten-digit telephone number, sewed it onto the collars of their dresses. They want to reach their mother, who lives on Long Island. One of the stories Luiselli tells is about two sisters from Guatemala, ages five and seven, who have turned up in the New York courtroom. The subtitle refers to the forty questions of the standard intake questionnaire for undocumented children the title gestures at children’s habitual questioning of parents, and the difficulty of telling a story whose apparent ending-safe arrival in New York, say, after the long journey from Central America-is only another difficult beginning. Yet Luiselli also knows that what writers do best is write: the moving nonfiction account of her journey to the border and her involvement with the immigration system, “ Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” (2017), is also an achievement of activism. in comparative literature from Columbia-she watched with pride as her students formed an advocacy group to help newly arrived teen-age immigrants. At Hofstra University, where she taught in the Romance-studies department-she has a Ph.D. Less than a year later, back in New York, Luiselli volunteered as an interpreter at a federal immigration court. “It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born,” Luiselli observes. Desperate to reach relatives in the United States, they would first have to surrender to the Border Patrol, in order to begin the long, fraught, uncertain process of legal accommodation.
The majority of them had made unspeakably dangerous journeys, riding on a freight train known as La Bestia. While driving through Oklahoma, the family began to hear news of a crisis: unaccompanied children, most fleeing violence and intimidation in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, were turning up at the border in sizable numbers-eighty thousand between October, 2013, and June, 2014. A privileged immigrant, on the lintel of legality, she set out with her husband and their two children for Cochise County, Arizona, near the border with Mexico. In the summer of 2014, the writer Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico but resident in New York and awaiting the arrival of her green card, went on a road trip.
0 kommentar(er)
