Tell Me How It Ends

Valeria Luiselli was already an accomplished writer in both Mexico and the United States when she wrote Tell Me How it Ends; her first two books, Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd, had won her acclaim as an up-and-coming immigrant novelist. Since the publication of Tell Me How it Ends, she has continued to combine literature with activism, including work supporting migrant children and frequent writing about mass incarceration, particularly detention centers. Tell Me How it Ends has a companion novel in Lost Children Archive, Luiselli’s 2020 work that fictionalizes some of the events described in this essay. She has also won a MacArthur Fellowship and has been widely published in English and Spanish.

Luiselli’s liminal status as a Mexican immigrant to America seeking citizenship gives her a unique perspective on what it means to want to belong in America. She uses it to help articulate her argument about the injustice that undocumented migrant children face. She is keenly aware of her privilege in relation to her subjects, and she uses her position as an academic to trace the political and social forces that are at play in these children’s lives and to analyze the impossible positions they’re being put in by the