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 the award-winning Lost Children Archive (2019) and Tell Me How It Ends, an Essay in Forty Questions (2016), Valeria Luiselli tackles the so-called refugee/immigration crisis that has occupied center stage since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. As transpires from the Mexican author’s works, the former president’s anti-immigrant speeches and policies, with his signature promise of building a “big, beautiful wall” between Mexico and the US, clearly evince that borders have increasingly become “necropolitical sites par excellence” (Mbembe 2003), with the racialized migrants/refugees constantly exposed to threats of violence, actual violence and/or death. Luiselli focuses on the unaccompanied migrant children who are forced to flee from their countries in Central America only to find hostility when they reach their destination in the ‘host’ country. Besides the concrete, topographical barrier along the southern border of the US that demarcates internal and external spaces, both the novel and the essay lay bare other types of invisible borders that have sustained the United States’ 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—, borders that have allowed the establishment of taxonomies and conceptual hierarchies that mark the distinction between inclusion and exclusion, between inside(r) and outside(r). In this chapter, I argue that Luiselli challenges and blurs these and other boundaries through gestures of solidarity and hospitality, opening spaces where recognition in alterity as well as contestation can take place. Thus, in Lost Children Archive, the second narrator, a 10-year-old boy, embodies a kind of borderless, relational, and interactional hospitality that points beyond and dissolves boundaries, fostering inclusiveness and connectedness as opposed to exclusion and separation.