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

Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Border”

Luiselli begins by documenting her volunteer work helping unaccompanied child immigrants fill out their intake questionnaire (the “40 questions” of the book’s subtitle) that she began in 2015. She translates for them as best she can, then passes the work on to lawyers who help find the child representation in court.

The work reminds Luiselli of the road trip she took in 2014 as a nonresident alien waiting on her family’s green card status. The first question on the child immigrant questionnaire—“Why did you come to the United States?”—is the same question she asks herself as the family goes on a road trip during their time of uncertainty (9). The green card application, though, is filled with frivolous questions about vice, whereas the child immigrant questionnaire “reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality” (10). Many of the children do not have basic information about themselves or do not know the names of their parents or where they are, and they are in America either to reunite with family or flee horrific circumstances.

On her road trip, Luiselli hears a radio story about the refugee crisis as thousands of children arrive from Mexico and Central America. She and her husband gather what information they can as they travel, and Luiselli focuses on the people who come to protest (some of them armed) the arrival of the refugee children; she wonders if the children would be welcomed with dignity if they weren’t brown. A group of children is reportedly flown out of New Mexico to Honduras on a private jet financed by a local millionaire, and Luiselli is struck by the surreality of it.

As the family travels across the Southwest, Luiselli and her husband tell their two children about American history in the region, focusing on how the land used to belong to Mexico and Indigenous populations, and Luiselli finds it telling that the word “‘removal’ is still used to refer to the deportation of ‘illegal’ immigrants,” since it is the same term used to refer to Indigenous peoples’ forced migrations onto reservation land (17).

Thinking back to the survey questions, Luiselli wonders if her children could survive at the hands of a coyote (a term for a person who smuggles refugees/migrants for pay). Many of the children she interviews also traveled on La Bestia, a term they use proudly to describe riding on the top of freight trains that travel from Central America through Mexico, a harrowing and often deadly journey. Luiselli imagines what the children must be running from to take such a huge risk.

Luiselli describes what migrant children face once arriving at the US border. Their best bet to survive the desert is to be caught or surrender to a Border Patrol agent so that the process that leads to being given to the custody of relatives can begin. Migrant children in government custody are put in detention centers and treated inhumanely; though they are only allowed to be held for 72 hours, they are often held much longer, and one child tells Luiselli that they are only given frozen sandwiches to eat.

Luiselli’s cross-country trip brings her closer to the US-Mexico border, where she encounters Border Patrol agents who question her right to be in the country. She and her husband claim to be writers working on a Western and are hesitant to clarify or disagree with the agents, though Luiselli sees the Southwest as “a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, […] so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless […]” (24).

Luiselli returns to the questionnaire, which asks migrants if they encountered anything frightening on their journey. The children are hesitant to respond, but Luiselli knows that they encounter awful things, particularly in her home nation of Mexico. She lists the alarming statistics that demonstrate that most women and girls are raped on their journey, abductions number in the thousands per month, and disappearances and death are commonplace. She relates the story of three migrants who were part of a group of 72 people, the rest of whom were tortured and murdered by a cartel. As Mexican authorities discover more mass graves, nothing is being done by the society that is horrified by them.

The next question on the questionnaire is about what the children have faced since arriving in the United States. Luiselli knows that vigilantes kill migrants, that many die of exposure in the desert, and that there are multiple cases of American agents killing migrants, often claiming self-defense.

Back in Manhattan at the end of summer in 2014, the family’s green cards arrive, though Luiselli’s is delayed. Her lawyer asks her a series of questions about her travels and associations that Luiselli finds increasingly bizarre. The case drags on long enough that the lawyer has to hand it over, as she is going to work for a nonprofit that helps migrant children. In this way, Luiselli’s quest to secure her citizenship led to her acting as a translator for the migrant children, and the interwoven timelines of the narrative intersect.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Court”

Luiselli begins working as an interpreter in March 2015 alongside her 19-year-old niece, who is living with her. They travel to immigration court and are met by a lawyer who works with The Door, a nonprofit that provides comprehensive services to migrant children. The intention is for the two of them to shadow lawyers for the day and learn to use the questionnaire to conduct interviews, but so many children arrive that they are left on their own to run interviews. Luiselli knows that most of these children are fleeing gang violence and that the huge spike in the number of migrant children arriving in the US in 2014 and 2015 has been labeled a crisis.

What Luiselli does not know as she does her first interviews is that they are dealing with an emergency that is legal in nature. The Obama administration has created a priority docket to deal with the migrant children, which means that migrant children who were previously given a year to move through the court system now have only 21 days, meaning they have very little time to build a defense against deportation. Though nonprofit groups responded and worked together to help represent the children, many are deported before finding a lawyer, which Luiselli depicts as a de facto denial of due process and a cruel injustice.

Luiselli recalls the first interview she conducted with a young man she has since kept in touch with. In it, he shows her a police report he filed in his home country regarding the gang that had been threatening to kill him, a document he keeps on him as a kind of lucky charm and as a statement of history and purpose.

The news coverage of the immigration crisis provides geographical details and numbers, but Luiselli says it does not properly explain the cause. She criticizes the narratives as prevailingly telling the story of the institutions struggling to manage the problem rather than the stories of the children who fled their homes. Questions 9 through 11 on the questionnaire ask about children’s feelings of safety and happiness in America; Luiselli suggests that a country that sees them primarily as a burden and an illegality is one in which they cannot feel safe or happy.

As they conduct interviews, Luiselli and her niece see that much of the problem stems from two gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18. Both gangs began in Los Angeles, and MS-13, with its roots in exiled Salvadorans, can be traced to a US-backed military government whose brutal practices led to up to one-fifth of the country’s population fleeing. When the MS-13 members were part of a push for mass deportation in the 1990s, the result was unintended. Instead of removing the problem of MS-13, the gang became “a kind of transnational army, with more than seventy thousand members spread across the United States, Mexico, and the Northern Triangle” (46).

The next two questions that Luiselli asks in her interviews concern whether the children have been victims of crime in the US. Some victims of crime may be eligible for expedited visas, but only if they actively cooperate with the police, which Luiselli sees as an unequal bargain by an institution that has criminalized them.

Several questions on the questionnaire concern family relations, and they reveal how the migrant crisis is reshaping families. Most migrant children are trying to reunite with their parents or relatives, and the typical migrant family is made of “those who leave and those who stay” (48). Since many migrant children are staying with undocumented relatives, they worry that they are opening their families up to further legal trouble and deportation, as guardians must give their full information in court. Migrant children are also hesitant to provide information about their former living situations, as their home lives in their countries of origin are often a big part of the reason they’re fleeing. Luiselli reveals that almost none of the children have kept in touch with their parents or know where they are.

Through her months of interviewing, Luiselli comes to understand the broad narrative that migrant children face. It is a harrowing journey in the care of a coyote who does not accept true accountability for them, one fraught with the danger of accidental death, rape, and murder. From there, they are taken into custody and treated inhumanely before being reunited with family members they may not have ever met, only to face the immediate threat of deportation. There is one exception to this process that Luiselli notes: being Mexican. Mexican children can be immediately deported in a process called “voluntary return” with little recourse and no due process, which Luiselli sees as the final harmful legacy of George W. Bush’s immigration policy.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

The first chapter of Tell Me How It Ends intercuts Luiselli’s vacation across the Southwest with the undocumented migrant children’s far more harrowing experience. There are natural points of comparison, as Luiselli is of Mexican descent, and her documentation status is in limbo at the time of writing. Her journey, though, is one of leisure, which reveals her inherent privilege as someone who can contemplate what it means to want to live in the United States and situate herself as part of the long philosophical conversation about the role immigrants play in American life. The children, on the other hand, are at the terminus of a harrowing journey that often includes the threat of sexual violence and death, subjection to bureaucratic mistreatment and neglect in detention centers, and finally, the insecurity of the looming threat of deportation. Luiselli returns to the first question on her questionnaire frequently—“Why did you come to the United States?”—revealing that the answer is both obvious and deeply complex (9).

In her liminal position as an immigrant whose future in America isn’t secure, Luiselli is uniquely equipped to interrogate America’s meaning and her own desire to belong. Her run-ins with Border Patrol agents on vacation reveal the inherent suspicion that her brown body creates, meaning that she must be appeasing and dishonest to maintain her safety and freedom; the answers she gives to the Border Patrol agents must be blunt and simple, and she is inclined to agree with one who says she and her family must be traveling the Southwest to be inspired. What Luiselli sees, though, is a brokenness, a disconnect between the American ideals of being a nation of immigrants and a melting pot and the reality that she’s seeing on the news and in the local response to immigrants arriving in America, which is intensely hostile and racist. Luiselli compares the media’s depiction of children fleeing violence to descriptions of Biblical plagues as a barely heightened representation of the reality. The children arriving are dehumanized and seen as a problem to be solved rather than as people in crisis.

That attitude extends to the government and legal response to the crisis, with which Luiselli becomes familiar as she begins her volunteer work. The priority juvenile docket that the Obama administration creates is a political response to a humanitarian problem—it is presented as a solution to the crisis at hand, but Luiselli sees that the solution only benefits the court system and the strained government institutions. Due to the increased processing speed, children are given vastly reduced time to build a case for staying, and there are not enough lawyers to take on the caseload. The priority juvenile docket’s primary goal is to make the problem go away, not address the underlying causes, and doing so only increases the harm that the undocumented migrant children face.

Luiselli sees clear links between the brutality that the children flee in their home countries and the bureaucratic brutality they face in America. It will be revealed that Manu, for example, was stuck between joining Barrio 18 or suffering at the hands of MS-13, an impossible choice that is similar to the choice he faces once in America. He must submit to the institution that may deport him, trading gang violence for the possible institutional violence against his desire for freedom and security that deportation represents. Luiselli also traces the origins of the problem causing so many children to flee their home countries to Reagan-era policy and the consequences of poverty and crime in Los Angeles in the 1970s-1990s. The later chapters will strengthen the argument that the child migrant crisis is a transnational problem with shared culpability among many nations, including the United States, and the perception that the roots of the problem lie with the countries of origin ignores the more accurate, broader picture of the complex international systems at work.