Tell Me How It Ends: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Luiselli has started teaching a Spanish conversation class at Hofstra University, which is in Hempstead, Long Island. Since the main objective of the course is simply to give students a chance to speak Spanish, Luiselli decides to talk about the immigration crisis. Her students respond very well to this, and after a few classes, everyone decides that the class should be a “migration think tank.” In keeping with this, Luiselli invites various experts to visit the course, and the students participate in engaged discussions about undocumented minors.

There are laws in the United States dictating that all children are entitled to public education, but many school districts have created “obstacles” for child migrants, implementing rules that make it hard for them to access free education. Luiselli explains that Nassau County—where Hempstead is located—is one of the places where school districts have actively “denied entrance to many children based on their lack of appropriate immigration papers.” This, Luiselli notes, is an “illegal practice,” but schools nation-wide have continued to defy the law in this regard. As a result, it has been very hard for Manu to switch schools to avoid MS-13 and Barrio 18. After having gained entrance to a school in Long Beach, he was subsequently informed that he didn’t speak English well enough to attend. Similarly, other high schools claimed he didn’t meet their requirements because of his immigration status.

One day, Luiselli’s students tell her they want to form a nonprofit organization to address the issues they’ve been discussing in class. Luiselli listens carefully, thinking that their idea is “simple and brilliant.” “The crisis will deepen and spread,” the students observe, saying that newly-arrived immigrant children will continue to suffer unless they can “find a way to become quickly and fully integrated.” Otherwise, they will—like Manu—find themselves the target of gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, just like they would in their home countries. Since the schools in Nassau County are so “terribly deficient when it comes to public education and services,” the students argue, private institutions like Hofstra should step in, using their resources to help the immigrant community.

Luiselli’s students decide that their organization should provide “intensive English classes, college prep sessions, team sports, a radio program, and a civil rights and duties discussion group.” The group will be called the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association, or TIIA. Luiselli loves the idea, realizing that “it only takes a group of ten motivated students to begin making a small difference.” And though the reach of groups like TIIA might be “small,” they are one of the only things that make Luiselli hopeful about the future of the immigration crisis.

Luiselli acknowledges that some things “can only be understood retrospectively.” The nuances of the immigration crisis, she believes, are among these things. “While the story continues,” she writes, “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words, and from many different angles, by many different minds.”

When Luiselli begins writing Tell Me How It Ends in 2015, her green card has still not come. Because her temporary work permit eventually expires, she’s forced to quit her job at Hofstra right before the end of the semester. She asks lawyers if she can continue as a “volunteer” instructor, but they tell her she can’t, since the country’s immigration laws are quite strict. With nothing to do, then, she begins writing about the immigration crisis, feeling as if she’ll never be able to write about anything else until she puts this story on paper.

“Why did you come to the United States?” Luiselli asks herself, examining the question once again. “Perhaps no one knows the real answer.” All she knows is that people who stay in the United States long enough are eventually willing to “give everything” to “stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging.” This is because staying in the United States is, for an immigrant, “an end in itself.” Staying, Luiselli writes, means relearning how to live one’s life, “no matter the cost.” “Why did you come here?” she once asked a little girl. “Because I wanted to arrive,” the girl replied.