Tell Me How It Ends

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 4-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Community”

Luiselli gets a job teaching at Hofstra University (near Manu’s new home), and in her class on conversational Spanish, she begins talking about the migrant crisis. As the weeks go on, the students begin to invest in the issue, some abandoning their previously held beliefs that the migrant is not the United States’ concern. Meanwhile, Manu is having difficulty finding a new school, as the influx of migrant children has led to local school administrations resistant to more enrollees despite the legal requirement to provide free education.

In response to a visiting lecture from Nimmi Gowrinathan about the value of turning emotional capital into political capital, Luiselli’s students decide to use their conversation class time to create a political organization. They plan to help migrant children integrate into the community by providing social and community services that leverage university resources since Nassau County will not or does not provide them. They form the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association—TIIA, a play on the Spanish word for aunt—to provide English and college prep classes, sports, a radio program, and other community services. Luiselli sees that America is a country of many problems, but many people are looking to solve those problems through community action.

Luiselli muses that, since her green card was still missing when she began writing the essay that became Tell Me How it Ends, she had to resign temporarily from her role as a professor since she was barred from working and volunteering. She wondered if writing was allowed, even, but she knows it is the only thing she could do. Luiselli closes the book by thinking about the first question—“Why did you come to the United States?” She recalls the Immigrant’s Prayer, which has the translated lines “‘To leave is to die a little / to arrive is never to arrive’” (98). Luiselli reflects that through the many problems and injustices of America, migrants build lives here, and migration is one of the central aspects of American life.

Epilogue Summary: “Coda (Eight Brief Postscripts)”

This portion of the essay is written in 2017. Luiselli has her green card, and Trump has been elected president, which has also affected Mexico since President Nieto, Luiselli says, is a sycophant. She thinks she should have seen it coming, and she feels things are falling apart, but the TIIA has begun doing active work, which bolsters her feelings of dread. They try to organize a soccer match, and Luiselli helps them organize. Only five children arrive, including, to Luiselli’s surprise, Manu. After the soccer game, one of Luiselli’s students remarks after driving Manu home that they were proud to have one of the people they’re trying to help in the car with them.

On the day Trump is elected, Luiselli puts on a shirt she bought for herself and the TIIA members that says, “Refugees Welcome Here.” On her way to work, she tries to talk to one of his supporters on the A Train about empathy. The man laughs in her face. In class, the students mostly wear the same shirt as she, and they bolster her mood by brainstorming and organizing. She reflects that she has been able to retain her sanity in the present (and with the looming future of the rest of the Trump presidency) thanks to the TIIA students and their hope. She talks about the various personalities in the group, many of them with immigrant stories of their own, all of them passionate about the work.

Luiselli closes by writing about Manu, who has special immigrant juvenile status. He wants her to use his real name in the book, but his lawyers disagree, so she includes instead a silhouetted photo series of him doing a backflip in his front yard, “practicing the art of flight” (106).

Chapter 4-Epilogue Analysis

Luiselli’s teaching naturally incorporates her experiences as a volunteer translator since it’s a subject of importance in the Spanish-speaking world, and she is teaching conversational Spanish courses. She sees her students’ efforts to volunteer and create local activism for the children who fled their homelands as a hopeful sign. They demonstrate the empathy she had failed to find in the bureaucratic systems and immigration policy. For Luiselli, The TIIA represents the best version of the American character: creating a welcoming community for people who came here to belong. In it, she recognizes what it takes to make change: the direct creation of empathy. Turning emotional capital into political capital is a difficult change that happens at the interpersonal level, and Luiselli presents that as an alternative to the cold bureaucracy that undocumented child migrants face. This also mirrors the central project of the essay itself, as her writing is trying to put individual stories in the context of the larger sociopolitical problem.

The postscripts in the “Coda” chapters look to the future of a Trump presidency with apprehension. His party has a platform that has long been hostile to undocumented immigrants, and, to Luiselli, his campaign had a tenor of xenophobia and brutal disregard. Her encounter with one of his supporters on her commute shows what she sees as the central inhumanity of Trump’s worldview, and it’s worth noting that Luiselli’s apprehension was largely born out by Trump-era policy and aggression toward undocumented people and immigrants who had every legal right to be in the United States. She ends the codas on a hopeful note, however, presenting Manu’s assimilation and growing comfort in America as a sign of the good that is still possible in America; the photos of him and her description of him as learning to fly symbolize the freedom from violence and fear that he is finding in his new home.

The essay’s closing attempts to answer the first question Luiselli asked her interviewees—“Why did you come to the United States?”—having invested it with nuance and symbolic weight throughout the essay (98). In reflecting on her own understanding of America and her desire to make it her home, she sees that the cruel bureaucracies that people must face are “only a thin crust” and that underneath is the possibility of a rich, fulfilling life of meaning. The closing answer to the essay’s central question (“Because I wanted to arrive”) conflates the concept of arrival with the concept of freedom from violence and fear (99). For the undocumented child migrants, a life in America means having the possibility and a chance at a better future instead of continuing a life in which most choices are proscribed by violent, inhumane forces.