Migration and Personal Sacrifice
Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends shines a light on the underlying factors contributing to the mass exodus of immigrants fleeing Central America since 2014. As a volunteer working to help undocumented children access legal representation, it’s Luiselli’s job to ask why they’ve come to the United States. Because of this perspective, she has a strong understanding of what has drawn them to the country and, more importantly, what drove them from their…
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Language and Storytelling
In Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli scrutinizes the complexity and nuances of the immigrant narrative. Tasked with interviewing child migrants about their arrivals in the United States, she tries to make sense of their fractured stories, which often have “no beginning, no middle, and no end.” The careful consideration she places on the children’s words soon becomes a broader examination of language, as Luiselli interrogates the terms and phrases people use to…
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International Relations and Political Responsibility
In Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli argues that the influx of migrants into the United States since 2014 should be considered in the context of international relations and political history. This doesn’t align with the way the United States typically approaches the issue, as the government tends to frame the crisis as “some distant problem in a foreign country.” Eager to shift blame onto Central American nations, the United States ignores its…
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Gang Life vs. Community Engagement
Though much of Tell Me How It Ends concerns Valeria Luiselli’s large-scale ideas for reframing the present-day “immigration crisis,” she also suggests ways to make life better for the individual migrants already living in the United States. The book follows Manu López’s struggle to avoid gangs like MS-13 in both Honduras and the United States. When Luiselli first meets him, he is sixteen and has recently made the dangerous journey to the United…
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