Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
As they moved through France and then Germany, their numbers grew into the thousands.
These children and they were all children had one destination: Jerusalem, to capture it from Muslim forces.
But no one knows for sure.
Luiselli, 35, has been thinking about these children for quite some time.
I was too involved.
I was also wondering about the politics of fictionalizing immediate reality.
I had always had a very clear stance about not writing what is on the news.
I think about it a little bit differently now.
Why the story of unaccompanied children?Its a very old obsession.
As a Mexican in the U.S., its impossible for that issue not to be in your deepest bones.
Its something that you grow up with.
All the pieces ofLost Children Archiveare in constant conversation with each other.
The split narratives, the lists, the photographs, the maps … its a palimpsest.Thats quite right.
I guess everything is an echo of another thing.
Its not necessarily clear who emits the original sound.
Its like an echoing where the original source is lost.
I like the kind of fiction that is often self-conscious about its artifice.
That doesnt mean that I conceive of my work as autofiction.
Im not at all interested in the discourse of that like, is it about your life or not?
Who the fuck cares?
That does not add anything to the conversation.
Im talking about a kind of fiction that is porous, that documents, but also observes itself.
I am happy to have messy footprints everywhere.
The media doesnt always do stories a favor in the way that they tell them.
Its illegal aliens, illegal children, wave, surge, …
I mean thats how the story is told.
I dont know what has to happen for that to change.
How come people didnt complain that they were talked about that way?
This violence is normalized through language.
Lost Children Archiveis concerned with the question of narrative order.
Are there spaces where its impossible to impose order?Its a complex question.
So it was a means to an end.
They wouldnt be considered trustworthy.
Its the particular violence of institutions or more than that, of language owned by an institution.
In some really fucked-up way, that institution owns that narrative.
What you produce in confinement is not your own.
And it can be used against you.
So language can also become a weapon against you.
But theres still a huge gap between the last novels ofthe Boomand then Bolanos novels.
My generation is being translated a lot more, but theres an entire generation behind us thats been forgotten.
This is your first novel written in English; the rest were in Spanish.
You were born in Mexico and grew up in South Africa and India, among other places.
Youve spoken about not feeling at home in either language, and referred tolinguistic transvestism in your writing.
So I guess there are insecurities in both languages.
And theres the style that ensues from standing in a place that is never completely inside or outside.
Its the quality of observation, the tentativeness of things, the kind of insecure way of proceeding.
I cant help but be a little cynical about what it takes to belong.
But then again, one stays in a place for a reason, right?
But the circumstances in which they will stay are inhumane.
The Trump administration has really exacerbated the inhumanities of the Obama administration and the prison-industrial complex.
There are more and more people detained, and for much longer amounts of time.
Because every undocumented body produces at least $200 a day, and you know what?
An undocumented minor produces usually double that of an adult.
And the brutality of what Im saying is that sometimes, that is better than the not coming.
Even though coming means being incarcerated.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
