Riding the Beast: Of Borders, Aliens, and Hospitality in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

Abstract

In Borderlands/La frontera, published in 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa described the US-Mexico border as “una herida abierta,” an open wound where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (1999, 25). Almost four decades later, the figurative bleeding in this dividing line has often turned into literal bleeding, with thousands of racialized migrants/refugees constantly exposed to threats of violence, actual violence, and death. The border has thus become “a big common grave” (Luiselli 2017, 28), a necro-political boundary characterized by a system based on governance by terror, securocracy, and exclusion. In both Tell Me How It Ends, an Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and award-winning Lost Children Archive (2019), Valeria Luiselli looks critically at this necro-political space, where the obliteration of the Other human is a “shameful emblem of our moral […] handicap” (Echchaibi 2019, 286); these narratives tackle the dire consequences of the successive anti-immigration policies on unaccompanied migrant children who flee their countries in Mexico and Central America only to find hostility and very often death on their way to, or upon reaching, their destination in the United States. Besides the concrete, topographical barrier along the US southern border that demarcates the geopolitical outer edge of the nation-state, both the essay and the novel lay bare those invisible borders entrenched in the national order, the dynamics that have sustained the country’s cycles of historical and political violence, first against Native American peoples and later against those others who do not belong—aliens, strangers, (im)migrants, refugees, people without citizenship. These b/orders have allowed the establishment of taxonomies and conceptual hierarchies that mark the distinction between inclusion and exclusion, inside(r) and outside(r), as well as the emergence of a whole range of positions that are situated in the in-between—neither fully inside nor fully outside—of this liminal space.