| | | An essay about immigrant parents banning sleepovers, plus facing face-lifts and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | June 6, 2017 | Letter No. 89 | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
Welp, we did it, we are nearly halfway through 2017, and like one John Francis Bongiovi Jr. would say, we are livin' on a prayer. I'm not even going to get into whatever crazy thing the president has done recently, because his idiocy moves too fast for our publication schedule. Like, does breaking news even mean anything anymore? Not really. It's all word salad!
So instead let's just hold on to what we've got, because what we've got in this week's issue is really great! Angely Mercado writes about how she wasn't allowed to go to sleepovers as a kid, because her parents –– immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic –– feared she might bring a devil back with her. Although growing up I never had a problem sleeping over at friends' houses, I do remember my mom using the "I don't know that family very well" excuse a few times to keep me at home.
But Angely's essay is about more than a sleepover ban. It's really about navigating life with her feet in two different worlds — her parents' culture and American culture — and becoming her own person. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, as I am making an adult life here in New York and not in Puerto Rico, where I grew up and where my family is. I think about how if and when I eventually have children, I will want to pass on my traditions to them. Will they feel Puerto Rican? Will they speak Spanish with my accent? And I wonder if in the end, my children will feel like Angely does. (I am scandalized when I find out that some of my American friends had boy/girl sleepovers, like … what? Not in my house!!!)
On another side of the immigration conversation, Monika Zaleska interviews Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican novelist and essayist who has volunteered as an interpreter to help child migrants seeking asylum navigate the New York court system. She has written a book, Tell Me How It Ends, about her experience.
Elsewhere in this issue, Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, candidly recounts her decision to have a face-lift, and the reactions of those around her. Our own Molly Elizalde interviews the artist Anicka Yi, who works with unusual materials like bacteria and snails to create highly emotional and poignant works of art.
And last but not least, we have horoscopes from our guru Melissa Broder. This month she tells all the Libras out there to "try looking for beauty in truth and truth in beauty." Although I am a Leo, that one resonated with me, and maybe that's how I ended up feeling so many things about a Bon Jovi song? But the truth is we do have each other, and that is a lot for now. Let's give it a shot.
Love,
Laia | | | | | | | | | | | | Why You Can't Leave Your House: A Guide for Children | | | | By Angely Mercado | | |
I like to think that immigrant parents are capable of alchemy. My mother created things right in front of my eyes, like her mother did back in the Dominican Republic post-dictatorship, and in the United States post-occupation. Post Parsley Massacre and before women's liberation. And sometimes I'm scared that I don't possess that skill. I'm afraid that my strain of magic is weaker; it's tainted by too many insecurities and processed foods in comparison with my parents and grandparents, who were always sure about the direction that they wanted to take our family in.
When I would bring it up to my mom that maybe she has some sort of concealed wizardry with her — "I dreamed about this and that; we have to play 24 in the lottery" — she'll just say, "I'm not a bruja," and she'll do the sign of the cross to show God her piety because no muchacha.
And she doesn't think that what she and my father do is any sort of special; it's what they do. I disagree because it's almost graceful and mystical how they go through the world dealing with people who have laughed at their accents and sound things out slowly and loudly as if they were hard of hearing. At times like those, I remember grabbing my dad and telling him, "Tell the lady you're not deaf, you're just Puerto Rican." And I said it in Spanish because I didn't want the lady to know that I was talking shit about her, which is the best part about speaking more than one language. You can talk shit about people with your dad.
It was unreal how my mom held us together when she worked nights after my dad was injured on his job and he had to have several surgeries. He couldn't work for years, and he raised us during the day. My grandmother and father had a gracefulness that they'd use to spin a story out of nowhere. It taught me about folklore and it taught me about how to listen. I know how to catch lizards, I know where spiders are in the grass in Puerto Rico, because my dad taught me how to listen and look. It's this weird mountain magic that he passed on to me even though I was born in Queens. He taught me to listen for accents so I know how to not say the wrong words to the wrong people. And I know to tell the difference from when someone calls on the phone and my dad's in the room signaling that no, he's not here.
I know how to say "Perdon, el no esta disponible" and "El ta busy" and "I'm sorry, he's not available," and meanwhile he's in the room motioning for me to shut up.
My mom doesn't think her magic is a big deal, no matter how much I tell her it is. But the best trick of all has been the number of excuses she has come up with so that I wouldn't go to a sleepover. I've heard I think over 100 worst-case scenarios. Some I didn't know were humanly possible until she said them out loud.
Over the years, other POC or immigrant kids and I have learned how to trade these worst-case scenarios, not unlike how you would trade baseball or Pokémon cards. It's not necessarily a pissing contest, but it is fun. We're often trying to find whose parent had the craziest thing to say about a sleepover, or why you can't do something, or why you can't go out. Here are a few of my favorites:
"I don't know all the fire exits in that house. If something happens, the house could burn to the ground and you'll be inside. And mami is going to be so sad."
"You know at these sleepovers, you kind of sleep on the floor with other people, and you have to share a mattress or a blanket, you don't know if they wash their hair, if they might have lice. Remember the doctor warned us about that weird lice, the one that doesn't go away with the stuff you use from the pharmacy. And then you'll have to burn all your stuff to get rid of that lice. And you don't want to have to burn all your stuff to get rid of lice, do you? And I don't know if these people clean, do they clean? 'Cause you don't know if they clean, so I don't think this is a good idea."
"But this is your house; mami y papi bought you a perfectly good house, why would you want to sleep somewhere else? Mami and papi are here, the bed is here, our bird, he's here. Your toothbrush is here, all your stuffed animals and pillow covers, they're here. They're in this house and not in that other house, and mami and papi are going to be so sad."
So … number four. This last one is a unique combination of several scenarios other Latino children and I have actually agreed on, and we're still very confused as to why this is a thing:
"I don't know that family very well, and neither do you. They could be Satanists, and then you'll come home with a demon following you around, and it takes a long time to get through to the Vatican. Or they could be robbers. A lot of people get robbed at sleepovers. Did you know that? I saw it on the news, they did this whole report on this girl and her stuff was stolen. So are you sure you want to go to that sleepover? Are you sure? You can stay until 11; papi will pick you up in his car. Have your phone out, papi will pick you up."
When she says "I saw it in the news," she often means the television version of a tabloid in Spanish. Their opening sections are sometimes "There's a two-headed goat in Central America" or "There's a cloud that deadass looked like Jesus" or "There's a soda fridge in a bodega somewhere with the Virgin Mary etched on it and now people are leaving candles." And so she'll say "I saw it on the news," and I'll ask if it was Al Rojo Vivo, she'll say yes, and all I'll think about are two-headed goats.
My mother recently asked me what my magic would be, and what I would create with it. And I responded that I would write a picture book that will be titled Why You Can't Leave Your House: A Guide for Children. Part two of the series will be titled El Diablo. A guide for all things you can't do because the Devil is bringing his fuckery.
And if this dream comes to fruition, which I really hope it does, because if another writer can write a book called Go the Fuck to Sleep, I can write a book titled El Diablo, and I'll be able to educate another generation of immigrant children as to why they will be socially awkward into their 20s. And why when they watch movies about sleepovers and sleepaway camp, it's going to feel really weird because of that hole in your heart.
I knew it was because they wanted to protect my siblings and me. My parents didn't understand the lack of ceremony behind all those movies where kids had sleepovers just because. They had taught me that bedrooms are intimate; going to someone else's house is intimate, too, and they were worried that we'd fall too far away from their wisdom. Maybe they were afraid that we'd become those kids they warned us about. The kind that opened other people's fridges without asking or who didn't speak formally to adults.
That, and once my mom saw two teens kiss in one of those movies that took place at a sleepaway camp, and she was convinced that keeping a better eye on us meant us staying home, or only having sleepovers with cousins.
If my dream of El Diablo doesn't come true, then I know for certain that I'm not an alchemist like my mother. But people like me who come from people who come from other places, I like to think that we do have something special. Our challenge wasn't leaving one world and going to the next one, it's creating a world where something else already exists. It's learning how to become several things at once, be several people at once. We're creating and molding into categories we aren't even sure about yet. We are shape-shifters, code switchers, language and accent swappers. And with each one, it feels as if I wear a new face.
I'm hoping to pass my craft on to my children, because it seems like the world is still a place where you have to switch, you have to become one of everything to make everyone else happy — even if it means passing down weird family folklore, seeing the Devil everywhere, and switching back between swearing in English, Spanglish, and then Spanish. I'll teach my children to be the soothsayers of conversations and situations. We'll mold them into other things time and time again. And underneath all the segmented parts of who we are, we're still whole.
Angely Mercado is a Queens native and writer whose work has appeared in DNAinfo, City Limits, HelloGiggles, the Billfold, and more. | | | | | | | | | | | | Facing Face-lifts | | | | By Sheila Nevins | | |
1.
"DR. BAKER," I said, "I look awful."
He looked at me with a tragic smile and said, "Fear not. We can do a lift. You'll be just fine."
"I'm 56," I said. "And I think it's about time. Don't you?"
He put his arm around me and said sorrowfully, "It's time."
"Is there anything less invasive than a lift?" I had heard about a nip-and-tucky kind of thing.
"We'll fix you up. Don't worry," he said. "You'll look seven years younger."
"And how long will that me last?" I asked.
"Seven years," he said.
He gave me a mirror, a hand mirror, under the brightest of fluorescent lights. It said MAGNIFIER X8.
I looked in. I got dizzy and started to gasp. Clearly, there was no way out.
In the mirror I saw a wrinkled, witchlike, scrunched-up, squashed face.
The mirror spoke to me menacingly, whispering in my ear. It said, "Without any doubt, you are not the fairest of them all. You are not fair at all!"
I put the mirror down quickly so Dr. Baker would not hear it.
"How long will it take?" I asked the doctor cavalierly. "This new me?"
"If you do an eye lift, two weeks. Without that, maybe nine days," he said. "In any case, it varies. And you can tell them at work that you're going on a vacation."
"OK, I'll do both eyes and face," I said. I wanted to get it over with at once.
And the hand mirror said, though indirectly, I had no choice.
2.
I made a date for the new me, three months away.
How would I face myself, I thought, with a new face?
And how awful I really looked! Why hadn't anyone told me?
But then again, not everyone has fluorescent lighting and a X8 magnifying mirror.
Most of my age-appropriate friends said I looked pretty good.
But let's face it, they had age-related dimming vision.
I left his office and hailed a taxi. My heart was still racing. Was I brave enough to go through with this superficial scalping?
To make matters worse, the traffic was awful.
I told the driver to slow down, please. He took it personally. He said he hadn't had an accident in twenty years.
I explained, with my regular excuse, that I thought I might be pregnant.
He looked in the rearview mirror, and this is the truth, he said, "You don't look like you could be pregnant."
OK, Dr. Baker. That was it.
The driver must have been a plant. The cab had been too easy to get. Baker probably owned the cab company.
We laughed a little, the driver and me, and I told him he was right.
I admitted to a bad back and told him I was 48.
Lying about increasing numbers had become part of everyday life.
I remember nostalgically the days when I asked them to slow down because of my pregnancy, and taxi drivers would congratulate me and ask if it was a boy or a girl.
And now I have to lie even more. I have to lie at work about going on vacation.
Lies, lies, lies.
But there was no other choice. It was now or never.
This was the right time to eradicate the old me. I knew it.
I must be perpetually one age — and I picked 51 and six months.
This would be where I would stay forever.
You see, I must be young at any price.
Young was in.
I worked in media.
Nobody wanted advice from an old broad.
My bosses wanted a young audience.
Had it occurred to them that an older brain could think smart and young?
I thought most likely not.
In any case, I had to hide my age.
For those who knew the true number, they must be rehearsed to say, "My God, you don't look your age!"
That might give me comfort.
3.
I told my husband and my son about my upcoming operation.
Each extolled my present beauty and assured me of my imminent death by surgery.
"It's ridiculous," my son said. "You'll look like Michael Jackson." My husband said, "You look fine just the way you are."
"OK, OK," I said to them both. "I'm beautiful enough. But not young enough. Maybe I'm young enough, but I'm not young enough for the rest of the world."
Then, while waiting for this miracle, my Barnard College 40th reunion arrived.
I opened the door marked with my graduation year.
Old ladies glared at me through thick glasses. I closed the door quickly.
This must be the wrong room, I thought.
Hadn't they heard of contacts? Old ladies with advanced degrees and high IQs.
Barnard College was a place where brains were supposed to be more important than beauty.
I pretended that was true but never bought into that philosophy.
I opened the door again and walked bravely into the room.
"Oh my God," said an elderly classmate. "You look exactly the same as when we graduated."
"You do too," I said.
This old lady was me as well.
And we were lying to each other.
4.
The day came.
After a sleepless night, my superficial self arrived at Dr. Baker's office at 5 a.m.
In addition to being fearful of the anesthesia and ultimately of my death, I was betraying my liberal, earnest, '60s self.
Could this artificial mannequin be me? Could this still be the Woodstock, March-on-Washington, antiapartheid liberal? Could I be this deceptive mid-50s liar? Lying to taxi drivers and trying to keep seven years at bay? What happened to the honor system?
I moved on to the gurney.
I was then prepped by an annoying nurse who gave me enough Valium that I would have allowed the Boston Strangler to do the operation.
I had given my life to vanity.
Here I was — brainless, vain, terrified.
The last thing I remember is being too drowsy to run away.
What kind of woman would do this to herself anyway?
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five …
5.
I awoke several hours later, seemingly alive, with a helmet wrapped around my head and swollen eyes, and immediately puked.
I was given apple juice in a paper cup, a saltine cracker, and the mean nurse who would take me home. It was a package deal.
She was 24-hours-inclusive.
Nurse Ratched eyed me with clear resentment.
She was even older than me and looked at me as if I were a foolish and frivolous female.
Ratched clearly had done this many times before and did not approve of "rich bitches who lie." She coldly washed the dried blood from around my eyes.
Blasé, she had seen it all.
She was disdainful.
She knew how shallow I was.
We spoke little, and as soon as her shift was up, she left me alone with my face.
This new face was black and blue. These new eyes were swollen. The punishment was severe.
I had earned this suffering and had even spent money on it.
6.
I informed the office that I was on vacation.
"Where?" they said.
"Hades," I answered, and they laughed.
And so it came to pass that the turban was taken off, the staples removed, stitches pulled, blood gone, the face refreshed at a price too dear to explain.
Sheila Nevins is the president of HBO Documentary Films. She is also a New York Times best-selling author, the winner of 32 individual Primetime and 33 News and Documentary Emmy Awards, 46 Peabody Awards, and 26 Academy Awards. | | | | | | | | | | | | Bacteria, Ants, Snails: When the Art Is Alive | | | | By Molly Elizalde | | |
I first learned about Anicka Yi in 2014 when a friend who worked as an assistant at Chinatown's 47 Canal gallery mentioned her then-current exhibit. It was the show Divorce, about a break-up. Among cardboard boxes and text messages displayed as oversized inflated speech bubbles were live snails that existed on a diet of oxytocin. I've been a follower of her work ever since.
Anicka didn't arrive at art-making until her mid-30s, and her log of nontraditional materials — dried shrimp, temper-fried flowers, snails, kombucha leather, antidepressants — reflects that. Ten years into her practice (and without an art-school pedigree), the artist has found her voice through an unexpected, scientific approach. Anicka explores themes of identity (gender, ethnicity, and even genus) most notably through biological samples and scents.
Now Anicka has a new show up at New York's Guggenheim Museum, the result of her winning the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize this past October. Called Life Is Cheap, the show is just as alive and conceptual as you'd expect. Two window-display-style installations are set up across the gallery: One is a vibrant presentation of bacteria growth (the diorama is a self-contained refrigerator allowing the bright purple and yellow bacteria to evolve through the show's run), and the other is a mirrored-Plexiglas maze filled with live ants. There are three canisters that, as you enter and exit the space, wash you with a stale, but not unpleasant scent derived from Asian-American women and carpenter ants.
Her new show deals with the issue of intolerance, and what it would mean if we could understand the experiences of other humans, other species. Our meeting happened on the same day that the president (whom Anicka referred to as the "mango Mussolini") was visiting town for the first time since his inauguration. Although we hardly acknowledged his presence beyond the traffic that led to Anicka's lateness, the event was a fitting frame for our conversation.
| (Force Majeure, 2017. Courtesy Anicka Yi and 47 Canal, New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) |
Molly Elizalde: You create a backstory before you begin new work. What was the original premise of this show?
Anicka Yi: I wanted to create a drug that would allow for humans or whoever took the drug to experience the perception of another living being, whether that is the perception of another human or a dolphin or a plant or a monkey. I was interested in the idea of tolerance and empathy. It is actually a riff on this contemporary moment of virtual reality. I wanted to extend it even further, to experience a coral reef's pain, for example.
ME: Can you tell me about your relationship to scent?
AY: People always come up to me and say, "I think it's cool that you're interested in smells, but I can't smell anything. I'm not even aware." I think that that's very symptomatic of where we're at as a society here in the West, and the kind of repression that we have around smells. You can actually go through maybe an entire day, if not an entire week, if not an entire lifetime, without having any acknowledgment of the smells around you that you're taking in and that you're transmitting. When people tell me that, I always think, You don't just stop smelling. Obviously, certain people have compromised nasal passages, but for most of us, it's a psychological shutting down.
I think that smell can be objective, and it is objective. It's just really hard to talk about because we don't have a language for it.There are some indigenous cultures in Southeast Asia that have maybe 300 words that are just designated to talk about smells. We really have no vocabulary to talk about scent. When we say, "Oh, that sure smells citrusy," that's a metaphorical placeholder. If we had an objective vocabulary around smells, then we could really start to talk about them in a way that is not so binary, that's not so reductive, good and bad.
ME: I read that your mother and sisters had an obsession with fragrance while you were growing up. Can you tell me about that?
AY: I grew up in a family primarily with females. I have three sisters, and we all engaged in and bonded over very similar interests in fragrance and fashion and food. There was always lots of experimentation with personal accoutrements in terms of scent, whether it was in the form of a hand soap or body lotion or shampoo or perfume. You didn't want to smell like your sisters, and you didn't want to smell like your mother. In a crowded home where my sisters and I were all two years apart, we wanted to stake out some kind of distinction, and what better way to do that than through smell?
| (Lifestyle Wars, 2017. Courtesy Anicka Yi and 47 Canal, New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) |
ME: In your exhibition You Can Call Me F and your Guggenheim show, you've taken biological samples to create scents from women you've come in contact with and Asian American women, respectively. Can you tell me more about how you explore identity through scent?
AY: I like to activate our senses, whether it's through taste and touch or smell, in order to think about ethnic, gender, or national identities. [In this show,] I was thinking about our current political climate and the insurgent wave of intolerance that has taken over the discourse in this country. It is deeply troubling and threatening and dangerous. I wanted to think about tolerance and address it through our lesser-known senses — something like smell and how it seems to function in this very murky area.
Through pure scientific realms, we have no conclusive evidence that you can say this human ethnic group smells like this. There's no raw data that would substantiate or support that because an individual smell is comprised of three primary things: your unique genetic makeup, your gut bacteria and individual diet, and the soap, shampoo, perfume, and deodorant you use.
I make the distinction that it's an Asian American female because I think that complicates things a lot more than to say someone who is from mainland China or someone who is from Japan. I think America is a really interesting model because it raises a lot of questions around economic class and lifestyle, much more than being purely ethnic and cultural.
ME: In your 2014 show Divorce, you used snails, which are hermaphrodites, and in this show you're using ants, which live in matriarchies. Can you tell me more about your use of living organisms?
AY: I'm interested in information — intelligence sharing — that snails can teach me, that I can teach the snails and the ants. I think it has a lot to do with this kind of anxiety around extinction. When I went to the Amazon, the biggest lesson for me that was so obvious was that the species that adapt the best are the ones that survive. Our species, as good as we are at adapting in certain ways, we completely annihilate ourselves in other ways.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Molly Elizalde is Lenny's assistant editor. | | | | | | | | | | | | June Horoscopes | | | | By Melissa Broder | | | |
GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
Happy birthday, Gemini! You already have plenty of air, and what I mean by that is you spend a lot of time in your mind. Give yourself some time off by getting in touch with the other three elements. If you don't live near an ocean, lake, or river, take a lot of baths. If you don't have access to a fireplace, fire pit, or campground, burn incense and candles. And if you can't get to a mountain, forest, or garden, buy yourself one new plant, name it, and tell it everything that goes on in that mind.
CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
Sometimes we get mad at people because we are genuinely mad at them. Other times we get mad at them because we think we are supposed to — not because they've done something that genuinely hurts or offends us, but because we feel we are supposed to be upset. In those cases, we often act in punishing ways that only really serve to punish ourselves. This month, when you perceive you have been wronged or harmed, ask yourself if you really care and how much.
LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Sometimes it feels like we are afraid of 10,000 things, when in reality we are only afraid of one or two things that underlie the 10,000 things we think we are afraid of. This month, take a look at what scares you and ask yourself what it has in common with all of your other fears.
VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
As a Virgo, it's important to get some alone time in the dirt. Getting messy, smelling the soil, and, if possible, growing something are really important for us. Every time I'm in the forest, I feel my best, but getting my ass there is hard. Going to the park sometimes just seems like, What's the point?, and planting things can be tricky, because somehow I manage to kill everything green, but it's good for us to get in that earthy mess so that the rest of life's messes don't affect us so deeply. It's like an earth-sign-defense shield. So let's get our asses in the grass as much as possible this month, and see how we feel.
LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
Beauty and truth don't have to be separate. Sometimes it seems like a person or event is too good or lovely to be real or lasting. And in hardship, we can feel like we aren't allowed to find any beauty. This month, try looking for beauty in truth and truth in beauty. And when you find it, trust that it's safe to be there.
SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
Love doesn't have to be dramatic, difficult, or full of adrenaline to be love. As a Scorpio moon, I want love to look and feel like the heightened longing I see in poetry, music, and art. But songs end, poems end, and still our lives go on. This month, if love, or potential love in any form, doesn't feel like a movie, remember that it might still be love.
SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
Nobody knows how to pray — but everybody knows how to pray. This month, ask the unseen forces that you do or don't believe in for help. In 2017, when all the information we think we need is at our fingertips, it's important to Google the universe directly sometimes and cultivate some mystery.
CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
Look for purple flowers this month. Why purple? I don't know. I only know that it's better than looking for trouble, slights, or things we think we need to have to be happy. Every time you see a purple flower — in nature, in a painting, online — see it as a wink from me to you that there are more delicious things to think about than whatever it was you were thinking about.
AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
Trying to convince people of things is really exhausting. Also, most of the time it doesn't usually work. This month, take a look at why you are so invested in imparting what you feel you need to impart to others. Ask yourself whether it is about them and the world at large, or if it is really about you.
PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
One cool thing to do is to ask someone you see frequently but never speak to how their day is going. Another cool thing to do is to just smile at a stranger on the street — even in New York (especially in New York). It can be scary at first and feel like a lot of exposure to put oneself out there like that, but doing little experiments like these remind us that humanity can have a soft underbelly — in spite of what's going in the world — and that we can help expose it.
ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
People say "Stand for something or you'll fall for anything." I'm not saying that isn't true (maybe). But we also do a lot of falling for things in the name of ardent belief. This month, ask yourself why you believe what you believe and how you know it's worth standing or falling for.
TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
A women's magazine made its way to my house and I found myself reading it on the toilet. As usual, they informed me that the sexiest quality in a woman is self-confidence. Well, what if you just don't have effortless self-confidence? Is there a self-confidence store? Personally I find honest and humorous self-deprecation more desirable than confidence (though perhaps it does take confidence to be open about one's shortcomings). This month, think about the ways you perform desirability and whether they come from your core or from something outside yourself.
Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016), as well as So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | | | | | A Story Without an Ending | | | | By Monika Zaleska | | |
In the summer of 2014, Mexican novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli was waiting for her green card to be either accepted or denied. In the meantime, she began following a greater immigration crisis. Between October 2013 and June 2014, 80,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the U.S.-Mexico border. Later, it became known that more than 102,000 children arrived between April 2014 and August 2015, hoping to join family already living in the United States.
These child migrants journey primarily from the Northern Triangle countries — Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala — facing sexual violence, abduction, forced labor, or even death at the hands of drug cartels on the way. Traveling with "coyotes" paid to take them to the border, they ride on the top of La Bestia, a system of freight trains that travels through Mexico. At the border, they are left in the desert or on the side of the road, hoping to be picked up by immigration authorities, detained, and then sent to their families around the country. Because these children want to become documented residents, turning themselves over to immigration officials is their best hope at receiving Special Juvenile Immigration Status (SIJ) or asylum, but only if they can find a pro bono lawyer to represent their case.
Tell Me How It Ends is Luiselli's account of volunteering as a Spanish-English interpreter in the New York court system. Faced with this surge of child migrants, the Obama administration created a priority juvenile docket to accelerate their processing, leaving children with just 21 days to find a lawyer and build a case before being deported. Nonprofits such as the Door responded to this crisis by screening children: those with strong cases were matched with lawyers, though many more were deported before they ever made it to court, again facing mental and physical abuse, coercion from gangs, and the extreme violence they were hoping to leave behind.
I first came to Luiselli's work through her novel The Story of My Teeth, the ballad of an eccentric auctioneer who sells, among others, the teeth of Marilyn Monroe. Her work is engrossing, vibrant, and strange, and Tell Me How It Ends is no exception. Yet the children's stories recounted here are not fiction, and she can't tell you how — or where — they end. We talked on the phone about her experience as an interpreter and the advocacy work she and her students are doing now.
Monika Zaleska: In Tell Me How It Ends, you describe your role as the "fragile and slippery bridge between the children and the court system." The children you talk to are sometimes very young but are usually not allowed to have their sponsor or guardian speak for them. Sometimes, they don't know the answers to the questions you pose, or their answers are fragmentary or incomplete: they don't know how long they've been traveling, or where they crossed the border. I was thinking about this tension in the book between the desire to create an immigration narrative and the idea that it's almost impossible.
VL: The ethical dilemma is knowing that you're not getting the answers that you need to convince a pro bono lawyer to take on a case. If a case has no chance of getting won, it's a waste of time for the lawyer. The temptation is to tilt the questions in a certain way, or bias the questions so that the kid might give you enough information to help them. But you can't, one has to remain ethical and principled and hope that if you've asked enough questions enough times that the kid actually will say something. As far as I understand, most of the kids that have applied for SIJ or asylum with lawyers have gotten what they fought for.
MZ: So the biggest hurdle is getting the representation.
VL: No doubt.
MZ: You draw an important distinction in the book between the U.S. government, who sees the record number of child migrants arriving as a "bureaucratic emergency," a problem that needs to be fixed, but doesn't want to acknowledge the emergency situation in the Northern Triangle and its reverberations. I'm thinking of one boy's story in particular: he was granted SIJ status with his aunt, only to find that the same gangs that killed his best friend in Honduras were harassing him at his new high school in Long Island, New York.
VL: There is a failure to acknowledge the crisis as something that is not just bureaucratic, but as a crisis that concerns the social fabric of our whole hemisphere. That failure comes from governments' greater failure to acknowledge their participation: the American government's failure to acknowledge their historical participation in the roots of this crisis, as well as the Mexican government's unwillingness to acknowledge their complete incompetence in the so-called fight against the drug wars.
Tell Me How It Ends is not a history book, but I do give a genealogy explaining how American money was pouring into El Salvador [during the civil war of 1979–92] to support the military government, which massacred Salvadorans and led to many refugees coming into the U.S. Some of those communities of refugees ended up in LA gang culture, where the gang MS-13 for example, sprouted. They were later deported in the '90s, and this disseminated [gang organizations and violence] all over the continent. I think acknowledging this is not hard for an educated — or even just not cynical — Mexican or American, but it's harder to get government institutions to acknowledge their role.
MZ: Despite the rhetoric surrounding immigration these days, most of the child migrants entering the U.S. are not Mexican. In fact, the only children that are deported without being allowed to contact family or receive a formal hearing are Mexican, yet we so often associate "illegal immigration" with people coming from Mexico, without interrogating where these migrants are actually from.
VL: Mexican children are not eligible for [the legal aid] that I describe in the book, or very few of them are, under very peculiar circumstances. Also, Mexican immigration to the U.S. has been negative for many years, meaning there's a lot more people returning to Mexico than coming in to the U.S. So it's a great misconception, the idea that Mexicans are "pouring in" through the borders.
MZ: You write of people protesting the arrival of these children along the border, holding signs that say things like "Return to Sender," and then wonder "if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color." You also write of your daughter painting her face white and then coming to you and saying, "Look, Mamma, now I'm getting ready for when Trump is president. So they won't know we're Mexicans." Could you speak directly on the role of racism in immigration now?
VL: It's the elephant in the room with immigration. But there's less silence around the issue now that the Trump administration has targeted Mexicans, Central Americans, and Muslims. My feeling is that immigrants that are targeted most violently for their race are the Arabs, Central Americans, and Mexican Mestizo and indigenous peoples. I do often think people would have more empathy, would want to help more, if the children were not Mestizo and indigenous. [When Trump began campaigning,] all of a sudden it became incredibly clear how so many people in this country despised Mexicans for being Mexican, for being brown.
MZ: You work with the group TIIA (Teenage Immigration Integration Association) with your students at Hofstra. I wonder if there are any other organizations in addition to TIIA that you've encountered or worked with that you might let us know about.
VL: There's the Door and Safe Passage in Manhattan, and nationally there's KIND (Kids in Need of Defense) and the Young Center. All of them are doing fantastic work.
Writer's note: Since Luiselli wrote Tell Me How It Ends, she has received her green card and is now, in the dystopian rhetoric of immigration, a "resident alien" along with the rest of her family. However, the situation for migrants has become all the more precarious. Stricter surveillance by the Mexican government, with support from the United States, has made old passages to the border unpassable, and migrants are taking even riskier routes through the waters of the Pacific. Many hoping to leave behind violence in their home countries have been barred from entering the country under the Trump administration, and many more fleeing persecution have abandoned the idea of a future in the United States, hoping, instead, to make a life in Canada.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. She is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Review, as well as a contributor to Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Sweet, and Rookie. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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