Valeria Luiselli tells stories to shame us - The Mail & Guardian

Do we still believe in literature? The ongoing decline in fiction sales suggest we don’t. A 2018 article in Publishers Weekly attributed the decline to a “broader cultural shift”: the rise of social media and television streaming services. In other words, the inner circuitry of our imaginations is no longer attuned to reading a 350-page novel.Novelist and non-fiction writer Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.

Undocumented children arriving at the border were given about a year to find legal representation before having to appear in an immigration court, but that window narrowed to 21 days with the introduction of the priority juvenile docket. In practical terms, “since the priority docket was created”, Luiselli writes, “children are being deported in much greater numbers and at a much faster rate.

The “coyote” takes the children through Mexico on top of freight trains known as La Bestia that drop them at the border. The trains are death traps; thousands die each year “either because of the frequent derailments of the old freight trains or because people fall off during the night”. Death is a fellow traveller. There are gangs, corrupt policemen and murderous soldiers to be evaded along the way. As many as 80% of the “women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped.

The rest did follow, but now the girls are in protracted legal battle to remain in the US. “Tell me how it ends, Mama?” Luiselli’s daughter asks her. “Sometimes I make up an ending, a happy one,” she says. “But most of the time I just say: I don’t know how it ends yet.”Lost Children Archive

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