Date of Award

8-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English and Writing Studies

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

Kyriakos Smith, Robert

Abstract

The growing concerns of immigration has been a fraught topic in both U.S. society and the American political landscape. Certain political narratives are formed which fuel the debate for and against immigration. This coincides with how immigrants are treated and how legal processes change throughout each term of presidency within the United States. This has sparked outrage from both advocates and adversaries of immigrants coming into the United States. Papers, speeches, news articles, and more have been created from both sides of the argument concerning how to handle the immigration crisis along with the question of how immigrants and asylum seekers are being treated. Many false narratives find their way into American politics which are then used to spread hate and continue the mistreatment of individuals and families trying to form new lives in the United States. To counter those narratives, Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli has written two works that delve into the problems of the immigration crisis. Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive help explain the immigration crisis while also forming their own narratives on the subject. Tell Me How It Ends is a book-length essay based on the questions that Luiselli herself asked undocumented children who had just made the journey to the United States when she was serving as a translator for immigration services. Lost Children Archive is a novel that centers on a family—consisting of a mother, father, son, and daughter—on a road trip to Arizona for the mother’s and father’s respective work projects. The mother’s work is focused on the undocumented children being processed through immigration services and being deported out of the United States. The father’s work concerns Native Americans, particularly the Apache tribe. The novel is narrated alternately by both the mother and the son as both have different perspectives of the undocumented children and the history of the Apache tribe. The mother and father’s relationship is strained throughout the novel and is evident by the way the mother narrates the story while navigating through their respective projects.

In this project I examine how, in both her fiction and nonfiction, Luiselli extends her work as a translator for undocumented children by narrativizing their traumatic experiences crossing the border. By channeling her advocacy for undocumented minors through her art, Luiselli demonstrates the need for new, more imaginative solutions to the immigration crisis in the United States. In her writing on immigration, I argue, Luiselli leverages storytelling across the perspectives of multiple generations. Her transgenerational narrative approach, especially in Lost Children Archive, offers a strategy for combating the superficiality and ephemerality of 24-hour news cycles and social media.

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