The title of Valeria Luiselli’s book, “Tell Me How It Ends,” highlights the human tendency to yearn for cohesion and logical conclusions. Luiselli revealed that it was in fact her daughter that took an interest to the story of two girls travelling together to seek asylum in the US, where she asks “how does it end?” Luiselli herself wants to find out how the story of migrant children ends, thus the title was born through her daughter’s question and her own. However, many Americans don’t have the same sympathy for migrant children, where even publications such as the New York Times describes these children as poor and violent. Little do they know that these causes are deeply rooted in a shared hemispheric history. The irony is that the US government doesn’t attribute the trafficking of arms as a reason for why people flee, or that the US are mass consumers of trafficked drugs which proliferate gang violence, hence if there wouldn’t be demand then there wouldn’t be supply.
Luiselli notes that while Trump has exacerbated the issue, it was poor policies from the past that brought us to where we are today. For instance, under Obama, children who were seeking asylum has under a month to secure legal assistance, in addition to the violence that people seemed to ignore. Additionally, the Clinton administration had already began building the wall between Mexico and the US. The precursors to Trump had normalized the violence and scrutiny of migrant children. It’s incredibly difficult to unpack everything that lead to the situation of illegal immigrants in the states, so that’s why the story is ongoing because we all have much to learn.
Hi Milena! I love how you mentioned we “yearn for logical conclusions.” I agree, and I think the way media portrays endings has a lot to do with that. Especially in the Global North, we are raised to be sheltered from harsh realities. As kids, every form of media we consume, like movies or cartoons, concludes in happy endings. Teaching us that we can achieve a fulfilling life as long as we are good, hard-working individuals. This is why when Luiselli’s child says, “Tell me how it Ends,” she is hearing her mom’s stories as a narrative that REQUIRES a happy ending since there is no way children like her deserve the violence they are exposed to. I think we begin just like Luiselli’s child, expecting a good ending, “yearning for logical conclusions,” but as we near the end of the book, we realize happy endings are not a guarantee of the human experience.
I think it is interesting how throughout the essay there is uncertainty, no one knows what is going to happen and the only way to find out is to keep moving forward. The journeys that the children are making have an end goal, the United States but that is only the beginning of another journey, attempting to stay in the US. There is no true ending to these stories and it is impossible to know what the rest of their journeys will be like. Luiselli does not know how these journeys will end, she is only involved in a small part of their story.