THE INFERNO OF CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS A Comparative Genre Analysis of the Representation of the Violence in Emiliano Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends

Word count: 23,770

Eva Vanderzande Student number: 01500221

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Ilse Logie, Prof. Dr. Delphine Munos

A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of “Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels-Spaans”

Academic year: 2019 - 2020

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Through me the way into the suffering city, Through me the way to the eternal pain, Through me the way that runs among the lost, … Before me nothing but eternal things were made, And I endure eternally, Abandon every hope, who enter here.

— Dante, Inferno, 3.1-9

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Ilse Logie for inciting my interest in Latin American literature and for introducing me to Valeria Luiselli and Emiliano Monge and their respective literary works. I would also like to thank her for her meticulous readings and suggestions, and, in general, for her guidance, patience, and encouragement throughout the writing process of this thesis. I would also like to express my gratitude to my other supervisor, Prof. Dr. Delphine Munos for her readings and interesting suggestions, but also for introducing me to memory and trauma studies. Furthermore, I would like to thank my boyfriend, my family, and my friends for their encouragement, advice, and trust. Most especially, I would like to thank my father for his readings of this thesis, for listening to my concerns, and for his unconditional support.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 5 1 Theoretical Framework 14 1.1 Violence along the Central American Migrant Journey 14 1.1.1 Subjective Violence 15

1.1.2 Systemic Violence 17

1.1.3 Symbolic Violence 18

1.2 Literary Genre and the Narrative Representation of Violence 19 1.2.1 Testimonio 19

1.2.2 Fiction, Truth and the Representation of Extreme Violence 22

1.2.3 Hybridization of Literary Genres 23

2 Analysis of Tell Me How it Ends 28 2.1 Non-fiction 28 2.2 Genre and the Representation of Violence 29 2.2.1 The Essay 29

2.2.2 The Chronicle 30

2.2.3 Testimonio 36

2.2.4 Autofiction 39

3 Analysis of Las tierras arrasadas 46 3.1 Fiction 46 3.2 Genre and the Representation of Violence 47 3.2.1 The Contemporary Noir Novel 47

3.2.2 Epic Poetry 49

3.2.3 Tragedy 57

3.2.4 Testimonio 62

Conclusion 64 Bibliography 68

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INTRODUCTION

Every year, tens of thousands of women, men, and children undertake the perilous journey through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes of a new life. Although migration from Latin American to the U.S. has a long history, recently there have been some noticeable shifts in regards to from where and why these migrants1 migrate. Whereas before, these migrants came from Mexico, nowadays most of them are from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, also known as the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA). Since 2014 the number of unaccompanied children and women from the Northern Triangle seeking asylum in the United States has increased to such an extent that the U.S. government declared it a migrant crisis2. Important push factors for Central Americans to migrate are the region’s on-going struggle with systematic violence, extreme poverty, and social inequality (Amnesty International 2016; MSF 2020).

Unfortunately, after Central Americans have escaped the violence of their home countries, they are still confronted with violence during their journey through Mexico to the United States. In recent years, human rights organizations have raised alarm over the high rate of violence against Central American migrants as a strategy for profit-making. One of the most concerning tendencies has been the high rate of mass kidnappings for extortion practiced by criminal organizations with the complicity of authorities (CNDH 2009, 2011). If those kidnapped refuse to either pay a ransom or to work as forced labor, they are murdered and buried in a mass grave. On August 24, 2010, the lifeless bodies of 72 migrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, were discovered, piled up in a mass grave, on a recently abandoned ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The discovery of “Los 72”, those seventy-two who were brutally murdered, offered Mexican society and the rest of the world a glimpse of the horrors that these migrants face while crossing Mexican territory. The “2010 San Fernando massacre” wasn’t an isolated incident, since then, hundreds of additional mass graves have been discovered. Therefore, it has become emblematic of a wider pattern of violence against Central American

1 This thesis will use the neutral umbrella term “migrant”, which denotes someone who moves between countries, instead of the term “refugee”. The word “refugee” is preferred by Luiselli, it implies an obligation to protect these people by giving them the chance to seek asylum.

2 Humanitarian organizations refer to it as “humanitarian crisis” or “refugee crisis” to emphasize the push factors that led these Central American migrants to flee their countries.

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migrants in Mexico, ranging from their dehumanization through political processes to the systematic mass killing and abuse of these migrants by drug cartels or gangs.

The need to understand as a society how such atrocities could have taken place and continue to take place at the border has contributed to bringing the humanitarian crisis at the border at the forefront of not only media and political discourse but also of literature. Recently, there has emerged a mini-genre of literary works that gives central importance to the brutal reality of Central American migrants crossing Mexican territory (Sperling 175; Logie 2). Within non- fiction, the subject is addressed by literary essays and chronicles, such as Tell Me How It Ends (2017) by Valeria Luiselli and Yo tuve un sueño (2018) by Juan Pablo Villalobos. In fiction emerges novels like Las tierras arrasadas (2015) by Emiliano Monge, La fila india (2016) de Antonio Ortuño, Señales que precederán el fin del mundo (2010) by Yuri Herrera, and Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas (2013) by Alejandro Hernández. The works of Luiselli, Villalobos, Monge, Ortuño, Herrera, and Hernández share the tendency to approach the subject of contemporary violence not from a pure realist journalistic approach, but from genre hybridization (Logie 2). From this increasingly-growing corpus, this thesis will focus on the literary representation of the Central American migrant crisis and its violence in two contemporary works, Tell Me How It Ends, an essay by Valeria Luiselli, and Las tierras arrasadas, a noir novel by Emiliano Monge.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in many countries such as the United States, Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, etc. She returned to Mexico to study philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Afterward, she moved to New York where she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She currently still lives and writes in New York City. Her first three literary works, a collection of essays and two novels, are written in Spanish. In 2016, she wrote an essay “Tell Me How It Ends” in English for Freeman’s Literary Magazine. This essay was based on her experience as a volunteer interpreter for New York City’s federal immigration court during the Obama administration. In the same year, she rewrote the essay to a more extended version in Spanish titled Los niños perdidos which was published as a book by Sexto Piso. In 2017, the book was also published in English as Tell Me How It Ends by the literary publishing house Coffee House Press. In her

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latest novel, Lost Children Archive (2019), she revisits the themes of her book-length essay, namely the family road trip and the immigration crisis at the southwestern border, however this time in a fictional mode. It is her first novel written in English and has been awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has also been acclaimed internationally. Among others, she won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020.

In her extended essay, Tell Me How It Ends (2017), Luiselli explains how millions of unaccompanied Central American minors are mistreated on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border when they attempt to cross it illegally. Her essay is structured around the forty questions from the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants who seek asylum at the federal immigration court in New York City. Similar to the questionnaire, the essay is divided into four chapters which follow the phases of the unaccompanied children’s journey to the U.S. (border, court, home, and community). Through the questions of the questionnaire, Luiselli chronicles the horrific experiences of these undocumented minors, while she also recounts her own experiences as a “non-resident alien” in the United States and as a volunteer interpreter for the New York City immigration court. In this latest version of her essay, Luiselli added a new section titled “Coda” which contains eight brief postscripta written after Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Although there are many versions of Luiselli’s essay, this thesis will only analyze its latest publication in English.

Emiliano Monge is a Mexican writer and political scientist. He was born in Mexico City and studied political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he also taught as a university professor until his move to Barcelona. After living in Spain, he returned to Mexico City where he currently lives. He has published two short story collections as well as four novels. A common thread through his oeuvre is a great concern for violence and the different ways to narrate violence (Hernández Ruiz n.p.) His noir novel Las tierras arrasadas (2015) was amongst the finalists for the Premio Hammet3 in 2016. In the same year, the novel was awarded the Elena Poniatowska Iberoamerican Novel Prize by the Mexico City Government. In 2011, he was recognized by the Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of the 25 most important writers in Latin America.

3 The Premio Hammet is a literature prize granted by the International Association of Crime Writers (IACW) to the best noir novel written in Spanish.

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Emiliano Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas (2015) is a novel about migration and human trafficking, told from the points of view of both victims and perpetrators. The story is set in the desolate wastelands between the sierra and the jungle of an unnamed country and it spans over one day. Monge represents a nation in which human beings are reduced to goods, in which violence is abundant, in which the individuality of the mass of migrants crumbles little by little. Monge’s plot centers on the two lovers and human traffickers, Epitafio and Estela. After they kidnapped a group of migrants who have just crossed the border, their paths are separated. Throughout the novel, their plot is interrupted by their nameless victims who function as a Greek chorus and are voiced by quotations and paraphrases from Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308-21) as well as real-life testimonies of Central American migrants. These italicized passages are unattributed so that the anonymous testimonies of Central American migrants are seamlessly blended with lines from Dante’s epic poem. The book is divided in three extended books, each dedicated to a different protagonist, respectively Epitafio, Estela, as well as los chicos de la selva (i.e. the sons of the jungle), two boys who guide the migrants through the jungle to hand them over to the human trafficking gang. These books are interspersed by two brief interludes, one dedicated to Mausoleo, the other to Merolico, both characters first belonged to the group of victims, but were chosen by the human traffickers to join their gang.

While both authors were born in Mexico and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Luiselli moved to the United States in 2008 and became a permanent resident in 2017. Contrary to Emiliano Monge, Luiselli’s national identity as a writer is challenged by her geographically diverse upbringing and her U.S. residency. Although some literary critics classify her as a Mexican-American or Latino writer, she often identifies herself as a Mexican writer living in the United States. Luiselli also stresses that both in her life and in her writing she occupies a space of foreignness and displacement (The MacArthur Foundation 2019). She has expressed her annoyance about the critical discourse that reads her literary works from the notion of national identity (Vanney 309). She insists that her writing does not embody a singular or literary tradition, but rather moves between genres, identities, and linguistic communities (Kan n.p.). Their different locus of enunciation is also apparent in their literary oeuvre. Since Monge believes one has to write in a language different from the language of

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power, he only writes in Spanish (RFI Español 2017). Luiselli, in contrast, writes both in Spanish and in English, and in the early stages of her literary work, she often writes by code- mixing the two languages (The MacArthur Foundation 2019). Thus, the comparison of these two literary works allows us to analyze the literary representation of violence against Central American migrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in two different languages. Whereas Luiselli writes from the north of the border in English, Monge writes from the south of the border in Spanish. Their different locus of enunciation also influences their literary representation of the violence inherent to the migrant crisis. Monge’s novel goes more into the systemic violence against Central American migrants during their journey through Mexican territory to the border, namely the mass kidnapping for extortion of Central American migrants by gangs. On the contrary, Luiselli’s essay deals predominantly with the violence against the undocumented Central American children upon their arrival at the border, such as the systemic violence of the U.S. immigration system and the racially biased and anti-migrant discourse in U.S. politics, legal, and media.

The literary criticism which explores the literary representation of the experience of undocumented Central American migrants has been significantly scarce. Moreover, since Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas have been published recently, there has not been done a lot of academic research on these literary works.

Only a few literary critics have analyzes Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends. Both Sagi-Vela González and Logie examine the role of the interpreter and the performativity of their task in Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends. Moreover, they both also briefly approach the hybridization of genres in Luiselli’s work. They both agree that the book is situated between the essay, the chronicle, the autobiographical narration, and the reworking of the testimonio. Logie also remarks on how the work draws from fiction. Whereas Logie argues that, above all, Luiselli seeks to converge the autobiographical narration and the documental narrative, Sagi-Vela González argues that her work can be situated between narrative journalism and testimonial literature. Nevertheless, they both consider the work as a hybrid genre that blurs the distinction between journalism and literature. Similar to Logie and Sagi-Vela González, this dissertation will argue that Luiselli employs conventions and/or strategies of the essay, chronicle, and the

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testimonio. Although Luiselli draws from the autobiographical narration, we will argue that it should be interpreted as an aspect of autofiction. The article of Morales Muños discusses the issue of genre more extensively. She examines how Luiselli employs techniques of the essay, the chronicle, and the interview to represent Central American migration. Similar to Morales Muños, we will examine how Luiselli employs conventions and/or techniques of literary genres to represent Central American migration. Nevertheless, this dissertation will specifically focus on Luiselli’s use of genre hybridization to represent the violence against Central American migrants.

While there has been little research done on the representation of Central American migrant crisis and its violence in Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, the research on Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas has paid more attention to this aspect. More specifically, Monge’s representation of the dehumanization of Central American migrants has been examined by various critics. They distinguish themselves from one another through a difference in focus. Gálvez Cuen analyzes the representation of abject corporality in Monge’s novel, while also drawing a comparison with its representation in Ortuño’s La fila india (2013) and Hernández’ Amarás a dios sobre todas las cosas (2013). For Vázquez-Enríquez, Monge represents the dehumanization of the migrants through his configuration of the Mexican-Guatemala border. Contrary to Vázquez- Enríquez and Gálvez Cuen, Sperling examines how both the migrants and the kidnappers undergo a process of dehumanization in this space. Moreover, he argues that the movements in the symbolic space of the novel not only allude to the trafficking of Central American migrants, but they also allude to the gradual process of disorientation as a result of trauma. Likewise, Calderón Le Joliff and Zárate also study how the border zone is a symbolic space which recreates the extreme violence against Central American migrant in Mexico.

Another group of research explores how the text functions as an allegory of Mbembe’s necropolitics which is achieved through its three intertextual layers, namely the love story between Epitafio and Estela, the excerpts of the real testimonies of Central American migrants, and quotes from “Inferno”, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Among those is the research of Peña Iguarán who specifically examines how the elaboration of the residual body and the testimony of violence supposes a reconstruction of signifiers that questions the

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dichotomy victim-perpetrator. Contrary to previous research, Fuentes Kraffcyk doesn’t only analyze these three intertextual layers but also analyzes in detail how Monge’ employs the form of the classical and modern tragedy in his novel. Like Gálvez Cuen, he compares Monge’s approach to Central American migration with the novels of Hernández and Ortuño. Favaro’s article focuses on the multitude of voices in the novel and the subaltern role in the novel. Her study stands out because she explicitly examines the issue of genre in Monge’s novel. She argues that Monge’s hybrid is in between testimonial tale and narrative fiction.

In the academic research on Monge’s novel, the relationship between the genre hybridization and the literary representation of violence has received little attention. Hanaï’s article is the only study that questions the role of fiction in the representation of violence against migrants. She discusses how Monge employs different modes, namely the excerpt of the testimonies, the Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, intertextuality with The Divine Comedy, and the Homeric epic. Contrary to Hanaï, we will interpret his incorporation of The Divine Comedy and the Homeric epic as evidence of his use of epic poetry. Most of these literary studies recognize the use of the tragedy and the testimonio in Monge’s novel, but they seem to neglect the novel’s engagement with epic poetry and the noir novel. Thus, we will contribute to previous research on the issue of genre in Monge’s novel by discussing his incorporation of conventions of epic poetry and the noir novel.

Until now, research that compares Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends with Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas has been non-existent. The research on Luiselli’s work has given little attention to the relationship between genre hybridization and the representation of violence in her work. Moreover, Monge’s representation of the migration crisis and its violence has been compared to other fictional Mexican novels, but it hasn’t yet been compared to works that predominantly rely on non-fiction. This dissertation will, therefore, add to the previous research by examining the relationship between genre hybridization and the representation of violence against Central American migrants in a non-fiction work and a fiction work4. Moreover, it is interesting to note that most of the research on Luiselli’s and Monge’s literary works has been written in Spanish. Hanaï’s article is written in French and is, therefore, the only non-Spanish source in the academic research of Monge’s novel. This dissertation follows Hanaï’s example by writing in

4 Luiselli’s work is here defined as “non-fiction” and Monge’s work is defined as “fiction” because they predominantly rely on one of the two. However, further in this thesis we will challenge this division and argue that they both draw from fiction and non-fiction genres.

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a language different from Spanish. In writing this dissertation in English, it will seek to amplify the academic interest of Luiselli’s and Monge’s works in the English-speaking literary field.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how Monge and Luiselli employ genre hybridization to represent contemporary violence against Central American migrants. In analyzing their use of genre hybridization, this study seeks to examine how these authors rely on both fictional and non-fictional modes of narration to give representation to the suffering of Central American migrants. The analysis will demonstrate how the hybridization of different genres in their work allows them to approach the different facets of the migrant crisis and its violence. What do their choices of genres imply? How does it affect the narrative and its representation of violence? Which strategies do they use to bring their readers closer to the experience of Central American migrants? Moreover, the comparison of these two works seeks to answer the question of how literature can provide an alternative discourse about the Central American migrant crisis which brings awareness to the violence against Central American migrants and which compels and instigates empathy in their readers for their suffering.

Before the analysis of the literary corpus, this dissertation will provide a theoretical framework that will be divided into two parts. The first part will elaborate on the notion of violence in the context of the Central American migrant crisis. It will explore the violence against Central American migrants through Žižek’s tripartite conception of violence as subjective, systemic, and symbolic violence. The discussion of subjective violence outlines the contemporary trends in violence against Central American migrants. Moreover, it will also briefly discuss the prevailing climate of impunity in Mexico. These aspects of the migrant crisis are thematized in both Luiselli’s and Monge’s novel. In our discussion of systemic violence, we will refer to what Vogt has referred to as “the cachucho industry”, namely the systematization of the kidnapping, smuggling, and extortion of Central American migrants in Mexico. Moreover, it will understand “the cachucho industry” within the theories of Valencia Triana’s “gore capitalism” and Mbembe’s “necropolitics”. These theories about systemic violence in Mexico are fundamental to analyze the violence represented in Monge’s novel. Lastly, the theories about the symbolic violence against Central American migrants demonstrate the use of language as an ideological weapon that contributes to the dehumanization of Central American

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migrants. The second part of the theoretical framework will discuss the relationship between the literary genre and the narrative representation of violence. More specifically, it seeks to provide an introduction to the literary genres featured in Luiselli’s and Monge’s literary works. This second part will be partitioned into (1) a section which will define the testimonio; (2) a section which will discuss the role of fiction in the representation of extreme violence; and lastly, (3) a section which will define the lesser-known genres employed in the analyzed corpus.

In the following chapters, this thesis will analyze how Monge and Luiselli use genre hybridization to represent the contemporary violence against Central American migrants in their literary works. Do they predominantly rely on fiction or non-fiction and why? Which genre conventions and/or techniques do they incorporate in their works and how does it influence their representation of violence? In the analysis of Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, this dissertation will discuss her preference for the non-fictional approach and how she represents violence against Central American migrants by using the essay, the chronicle, the testimonio, and autofiction. The analysis of Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas will discuss why he favors the fictional approach and how he relies on the noir novel, epic poetry, the tragedy, and the testimonio to represent the violence against Central American migrants.

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1 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

1.1 Violence along the Central American Migrant Journey In humanities and literary studies, violence is approached as a social phenomenon within the theoretical framework of sociological and philosophical studies. Contrary to the more traditional studies of violence, these contemporary theories reject the idea of violence as an anomaly of society’s functioning. Instead, they consider it a phenomenon or process emerging from modern societies. In other words, they examine violence as not being attributed to the behavior of individuals, but rather as an institutional, structural, and systemic component of modern society. A significant voice in the contemporary debate about violence is the Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek whose work Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2007) conceptualizes violence as a tripartite structure consisting of subjective, systemic and symbolic violence.5

For Žižek, subjective violence is the manifestation of violence that is most visible, namely the behaviors that “serve to threaten life itself and/or to diminish one’s capacity to meet basic human needs” such as killing, maiming, sexual assault, etc. (Moore: 33). Such behaviors are perceived by society as undermining the presumed ‘peaceful’ normality (or the state of things). This type of violence can be attributed to an identifiable agent, which can be a particular individual or a group of people. Because its origin is identifiable, there can be made a distinction between perpetrator and victim. As argued before, directly visible, subjective violence tends to be interpreted as an irrational outburst of violence exercised by individuals to destabilize the otherwise peaceful society. Nevertheless, Žižek’s theory argues that this type of violence has to be contextualized within more structural and systemic phenomena. In other words, subjective violence is only the tip of the iceberg, it emerges from and is being shaped by the invisible objective violence inherent to this “stable, peaceful society”. Hence, the smooth functioning of capitalist society and its economic, political, and social systems, which allow certain individuals to live a comfortable life, is sustained by objective, invisible violence.

Aside from subjective violence, there are two other forms of violence that are less visible, more latent, and inherent to the normal state of things. These two forms of violence are referred to

5 Žižek’s approach on violence expands further on Johan Galtung’s three-layered understanding of violence as direct, structural and cultural.

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as invisible or objective violence. Contrary to the former, invisible violence cannot be attributed to concrete individuals, instead, it is purely systemic and anonymous. It manifests itself in two ways, namely as systemic and symbolic violence. Systemic (or structural) violence emerges as a consequence of political, economic, legal, and social structures that hinder some groups from “equal access to opportunities, goods, and services that enable the fulfillment of basic human needs” (Moore: 33). This type of violence could be sustained through legal structures or through the functioning of a given culture, for example, the limited access to education and healthcare for undocumented migrants (33). Symbolic violence is violence exercised and embodied in language and discourse which naturalizes relations of inequality, discrimination, or subordination (Bourdieu 111). It designates violence that arises from prevailing social, religious, or ideological beliefs embedded in a given culture that is used to legitimize direct and systemic violence and render it right, acceptable, or invisible (Galtung 291-292; Moore 33).

In the following sections of the theoretical framework, we will use Žižek’s approach to violence to contextualize the violence against Central American migrants. Thus, it will follow his tripartite conceptualization of violence as subjective, systemic, and symbolic.

1.1.1 Subjective Violence

As mentioned in the introduction, Central American migrants flee the Northern Triangle of Central America to escape the epidemic of violence. High homicides rates, the massive presence of gangs, organized crime and drug trafficking, and a climate of impunity has contributed to the deterioration of economic and social conditions in these regions. Unfortunately, the violence from which these migrants try to escape is echoed in their experience along their transit route through Mexico (Vogt 767-768). In recent years, the transit journey of undocumented Central American migrants through Mexico has become “a site of intense violence, exploitation, and profit-making” (654).

According to the survey of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 57,3% of the migrants interviewed by MSF had been exposed to some kind of violence along the migration route

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(2018: 16). Such violence ranges from physical attacks, being extorted, or receiving threats to sexual assault and rape (16-18). In the last two decades, kidnappings for extortion in Mexico have been rising at an alarmingly high rate (MSF 2020; CNDH 2009, 2011). In 2009, Mexican National Human Rights Commission reported that over six months, nearly, 10,000 people, predominantly Central American migrants, have been victims of kidnapping in Mexico (CNDH 2009). In 2010, they reported 11,000 incidents of individual kidnappings and 214 cases of mass kidnappings in six months (CNDH 2011). Central American migrants have become the main target of these kidnappings because criminal organizations saw an opportunity of profit-making in the migrants’ social relations, primarily family relations (Vogt 774). The kidnappers hold their victims in some type of “safe house” while they seek to extort ransoms from their family members (774).

The emergence of routine mass kidnappings on the migration routes in Mexico has increased the necessity of smugglers-guides (772-773). For the migrants, the smuggler navigates the route during which he also offers them protection, including negotiating and paying the appropriate “fees” to corrupt authorities and crime organizations (773). Within the smuggler- guide and migrant relationship, “migrants are both objects of exchange and consumers of commodified social connections between smugglers and organized relationships” (773).

It is important to note that, although Žižek defines subjective violence as violence which has an identifiable agent, in these kidnappings in Mexico this is not true. Countries with a prevailing climate of impunity, such as Mexico, challenge Žižek’s definition (Dhondt 2020). Violence against a vulnerable group such as the mass kidnappings of migrants and the brutal murder of women (i.e. feminicide) remain a persisting problem for which the Mexican state fails to hold perpetrators legally responsible. In such cases, the government silence exempts them from punishment, allowing the perpetrators to be unidentified (Franco 217, 221). As Yuri Herrera argues, the climate of impunity is one of Mexico’s systemic challenges “When more than 90% of crimes remain unsolved, that 90% is the norm, not an error, and omissions of the justice apparatus are not a flaw of the system, but one of its ingrained mechanisms.”6 (n.p.; my translation).

6 Original quote in Spanish “Cuando más del 90% de los crímenes no son resueltos, ese 90% es la norma, no el error, y las omisiones de los aparatos de justicia no son un defecto del sistema, sino uno de sus engranes.”

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1.1.2 Systemic Violence

The abuse of Central American migrants during their journey through Mexico is not something new, however, in recent years kidnapping, smuggling and extortion of these migrants have been systematized to such an extent that it has been referred to as a “dynamic economic industry”, namely “the cachucho7 industry” (Vogt 764). In the cachucho industry, Central American migrants’ bodies, labor, and lives are commodified into products of exchange and exploitation which “may both gain or lose value during their journey in material and embodied ways through their dismemberment, disappearance, and death” (765). Within this industry migrants’ bodies are commodified as “cargo to smuggle, gendered bodies to sell, labor to exploit, organs to traffic, and lives to exchange for cash” (765).

The cachucho industry can be understood within the theory of “gore capitalism” proposed by the Mexican intellectual Sayak Valencia Triana. In her essay, Gore Capitalism (2018), she coined the term “gore capitalism” to refer to “the undisguised and unjustified bloodshed that is the price the Third World pays for adhering to the increasingly demanding logic of capitalism.” (Valencia Triana n.p.). Thus, she frames the systemic and repeated use of extreme brutal violence (i.e. gore practices) in Mexico, as a consequence of “the reinterpretation of the hegemonic global economy in (geographic) border spaces.” (n.p.).

Our contemporary global economy is defined by core-periphery geopolitical dynamics. In such dynamics, there are, on the one hand, First World nations which are part of the core of the global economy, such as Europe and the United States, and on the other hand, Third World nations, such as Mexico, which belong to the poorer periphery of the global economy. Neoliberal capitalism constantly promotes and advertises their logic of production, wealth accumulation, and the desires for consumption, self-affirmation, and empowerment.

Nonetheless, subjects of the Third World struggle to adhere to these demands, their earnings aren’t sufficient enough to participate in the world market of consumption and production (Valencia Triana, ch.2). This inability excludes them from modern society and “leads to constant frustration, and, in turn, to outright aggressiveness and further violence” (Valencia Triana, ch.2). When a marginalized subaltern subject turns to gore practices to accumulate

7 In Mexico, cachucho is a derogatory term for Central Americans and roughly translates to “dirty pig” (Vogt 764).

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wealth for self-affirmation and self-empowerment, he/she becomes an “endriago subject” (Valencia Triana, ch. 4).

For the endriago subject, bodies or the destruction of bodies are conceived “as products of exchange, commodity-made-flesh in the body and human life, through predatory techniques of extreme violence” like kidnapping, dismembering, disembowelment, contract killing, labor exploitation, harvesting human organs, prostitution, etc. (Valencia Triana n.p.). If their victim’s body isn’t valuable to them, it will be disposed of. The power exercised by the endriago subject over his victims’ bodies and their deaths, is defined as “necropolitics” (Valencia Triana, ch. 4). Necropolitics, coined by Achille Mbembe, is a form of sovereign power which has “[the] capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”, through “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 11, 29). In contemporary Mexico, the epitome of the endriago subject is the Mexican criminals and members of the drug cartels who specifically target the most vulnerable in Mexican society, namely undocumented Central American migrants.

1.1.3 Symbolic Violence

The direct and systemic violence suffered by Central American migrants and the state’s failure or reluctance to protect them corroborates Gabriel Giorgio’s proposition that societies make a distinction between lives to protect and lives to abandon (15). For Mexican society, Central American migrants are “lives to abandon”, which means that they are left vulnerable for exploitation, commodification, abandonment, or elimination (Giorgi 15). Such dichotomy divides people in “us vs. them”, those that belong to society and those that are excluded for being “unfit”, “out of place” or “undesirable” (Bauman 5).

Within ideological discourse, the migrant is the epitome of the radically excluded racial Other, which is perceived as a threat to society and its values. Jane Zavisca found evidence of such bias. Her research revealed that borderlands newspapers often use dehumanizing metaphors to portray migrants. For instance, migrants who are heading to U.S. territory are portrayed as an “undifferentiated mass” that poses a security threat to the nation (Zavisca 182). In such

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metaphors, they are portrayed as “an invading army” or as a “dangerous waters threatening the nation […] the metaphorical home” (182). Another subcategory of dehumanizing metaphors depicts migrants as “animals” hunted by smugglers, law enforcement agents, and militant vigilantes or as “the prey” of smugglers, bandits, and other criminals (181). Lastly, these borderland newspapers naturalize migrants’ deaths as acceptable or inevitable. The portrayal of these migrants' deaths in U.S. media discourse highlights that a migrant’s life is not considered valuable, and therefore the loss of this life is not mourned. In her Frames of War (2008), Judith Butler defines this as a “ungrievable” life, which is a life “that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.” (38).

1.2 Literary Genre and the Narrative Representation of Violence

1.2.1 Testimonio

In his Imaginación y violencia en América Latina (1970), Ariel Dorfman famously stated that Latin American literature and its collective imagination is fundamentally shaped by the continent’s history of violence (9). Indeed, Latin America’s long-standing history of violence has significantly influenced the Latin American literary tradition. From the political violence in Latin America of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s emerged the testimonio. Until recently, the testimonio was associated with a form of historical or judicial discourse and also with a form of political denunciation (Peris Blanes 160). After the horrors of World War II, i.e. the Holocaust, it has emerged in the literary field as a literary genre and is more commonly known as “testimonial literature” (Peris Blanes 160; Blair Trujillo 89). As it refers to the incorporation of testimonial elements in literature, this thesis will use these two notions, testimonio and testimonial literature interchangeably, without any difference in meaning. According to John Beverly, the testimonio can be defined as follows: […] a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience. (Beverley 30-31)

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It is a type of text that represents a real-life violent experience or process (political or not) of which the narrator wants to give an account of, and in most cases, wants to denounce, make visible or construct its memory (Peris Blanes 160-161). Moreover, it attempts to construct a version that is different, if not opposite (i.e. counternarrative), from the hegemonic, institutional, and official narrative of the recent past (160-161).

The testimonio is a first-person narration in which a subjective voice from a marginalized subaltern position demands to be recognized and heard (Beverley 34-35). The narrator is a real person that links the narration to an extradiegetic reality, guarantees its veracity, and links it with his/her circumstances and point of view (Peris Blanes 160-161; Beverley 34). The narrative voice assumes a metonymic identity, which means that the narrator’s identity cannot be separated from the subaltern group, class, or community they represent (Beverley 34). Thus, the narrator of the testimonio is a representative for her or his community as a whole and evokes an absent polyphony of other voices (Beverley 34). Moreover, the testimonio implies an erasure of the authorial presence to create the illusion that the text is an eyewitness authentic testimony and not a constructed piece of literature (Beverley 34-35; Polit Dueñas 13).

In most cases, the testimonio is characterized by a dual-authorship between an informant, who is a subaltern subject, and a professional writer or intellectual. The subaltern subject can be described as someone whose socio-cultural position excludes him or her from direct, literary expression (Beverley 35; Peris Blanes 160-161). By being “represented” by a professional writer or intellectual, the subaltern voice is allowed access to the circuits of cultural and literary production and diffusion to be “heard” in the public sphere (Beverley 35; Peris Blanes 160- 161). Thus, the subaltern narrator “[…] requires an interlocutor with a different ethnic and class background in order first to elicit the oral account, then to give it textual form as a testimonio, and finally to see its publication and distribution.” (Beverley 36). The subaltern narrator gives an oral account to an interlocutor who transcribes, compiles, reorganizes, publishes, and distributes the testimony to bring the injustice suffered by the narrator to the attention of the public sphere (Beverley 36; Amar Sánchez 35).

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In such testimonies, there is a narrative asymmetry between the subaltern subject, i.e. the victim who gives an oral account of a violent experience, the author, i.e. the professional writer who transforms it to a testimonio, and the reader who reads the testimonio. While the subaltern subject occupies a socio-cultural marginalized position for being, in general, indigenous, black, poor, or possibly illiterate, the author and reader (almost) always belong to the white, western, cultured first-world (Amar Sánchez 35-36). Moreover, the author and the reader have not witnessed the violent experience and can only try to imagine the experience of the subaltern subject.

From this asymmetry between author and direct narrator emerges a paradox of representation which asks the question if the privileged writer can “hear” and “represent” those voices silenced by the hegemonic epistemic discourse. In her influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak”, postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak draws attention to the epistemic violence of the privileged, first-world intellectual who claims to let the subaltern subject speak but continues to do so from a (neo)colonial context. She concludes that the subalterns cannot speak, because they cannot represent themselves in the hegemonic epistemic discourse. Moreover, the intellectuals who claim to speak for the subalterns are complicit in silencing them. Hence, the testimonio cannot be representative of a subaltern community as a whole, because the act of writing excludes the narrator of the testimonio from this marginalized community.

In recent decades, violence in Latin America is predominantly economic and criminal which is also evident from the nature of violence represented in contemporary Latin American literature. Interestingly, one of the strategies used by some of the contemporary writers to represent this type of violence is to incorporate characteristics of the testimonio in their fiction work. Both Emiliano Monge and Valeria Luiselli incorporate real testimonies of Central American migrants in their works to represent the contemporary violence against Central American migrants. Monge brings the testimonio together with epic poetry, the tragedy, and the noir novel, whereas Luiselli combines the testimonio with the essay, the chronicle, and autofiction. By creating a hybrid genre that uses formal, moral, and discursive elements of both fiction and the testimonio, these authors blur the categorical distinction between fiction and non-fiction in their work (Peris Blanes 167).

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1.2.2 Fiction, Truth and the Representation of Extreme Violence

Although fiction has a more prominent role in Monge’s novel, Luiselli also relies on fiction in her work by incorporating narrative techniques from autofiction. Thus, both literary works employ fiction to represent extreme violence. Nevertheless, there has been some debate about the question of whether fiction can adequately represent violent experiences and processes. Some historians and intellectuals condemn the use of fiction to approach the subject of extreme violence (Pabón 30). They argue that by fictionalizing the experience of extreme violence, such as the Holocaust, the narrated experience is a deviation or distortion of the true event and robs its essence by trivializing its memory (Pabón 30). Nevertheless, this is dismissed by most literary critics who argue that “fiction can tell the ‘truth’ more effectively than a direct narration of the facts” (Pabón 25). Fiction is not necessarily the opposite of truth, instead, it intertwines in a critical way truthful and fictional elements to enrich our understanding of a certain reality (Pabón 27). While non-fiction favors to reduce our understanding of a certain situation to only the verifiable, fiction lays bare its complexity (Pabón 27). Likewise, Jorge Semprún introduces the issue of the role of fiction in the representation of extreme violence in his work L’écriture ou la vie (1995) in which he concludes that only through fiction the essential truth of an experience can be transmitted (Pabón 22-24). Furthermore, Dominick LaCapra argues that: […] narratives in fiction may also involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive through restricted documentary methods. (13)

The documentary methods, as used in journalism, narrates at a communal level; it tells the story of a group of people, but cannot convey the complexity of a story at an individual level. On the contrary, fiction often focuses on the individual experience, which allows it to delve into its complexity. Literature brings to light the darkest and hidden aspects of the present reality, it renders visible all that society and governments forcefully seeks to keep invisible (de La Puente n.p.; Foro del Tejedor 2015). Moreover, in its approach to violence, fiction gives a voice and a discursive space to the experience of the Others, which allows the reader to feel empathy for them.

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Another question within the debate of the representation of extreme violence is to which extent it is acceptable to fictionalize experiences of extreme violence. More specifically, one can question who has the authority to narrate these events. Some writers argue that only those who have witnessed and survived extreme violence can write about this experience, others argue that it doesn’t matter who is the writer, nor does his motives matter: “What is crucial […] is the literary efficacy of the texts. That is to say, how fiction ‘produces the reality’, how it is put in perspective to create the image of the unimaginable” (Pabón 26-27; my translation).

1.2.3 Hybridization of Literary Genres

As mentioned in the introduction, there is a recent emergence of a literary mini-genre that thematizes the Central American migrant crisis and its violence. A noticing development within this genre is to approach this theme from the hybridization of literary genres. As this thesis will analyze the hybridization of genres in the selected corpus, it is important to define these genres and its most important conventions and/or techniques. As the essay, the novel, the epic, and the Greek tragedy are well-established genres in the literary landscape, this study will not further elaborate on their characteristics. Instead, it will briefly explore genres that might be used more infrequently and might be less known, such as the chronicle, autofiction, the contemporary Mexican noir novel.

1.2.3.1 The Chronicle

According to Juan Villoro, the chronicle is “the platypus of prose” by which he underscores its hybrid nature and its ability to combine convention and/or techniques from a multitude of genres, such as, for example, the dialogues from the interview, the first-person narrator from the autobiography, the polyphony of witnesses from the Graeco-Latin theatre, the unmodifiable date from the reportage, etc. (n.p.).

In the prologue of his work Mejor que ficción: crónicas ejemplares (2012), Jorge Carrión defines the chronicle not as a genre, but rather as a debate between a multitude of genres which brings techniques from both journalism as literature and both fiction as non-fiction together (26, 29-31). According to Carrión, there are a few aspects that characterize the chronicle. First,

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he believes that the chronicle should exceed the reality it wants to represent (15). The chronicle’s task is to represent reality in such a way that even an opaque reality is comprehensible and transparent for the reader (15-17). To achieve this, it’s is essential that the chronicler uses literary language to represent the present conflict (21). Moreover, another fundamental element is the relation between the chronicler and the informant. On the one hand, the chronicle should provide the reader with a vital understanding of the other’s suffering and should denounce it explicitly (17). To understand the other’s suffering, they should get as close to the other’s psyche so that they are not merely an outside observer, but rather an inner witness of the events (16-17). On the other hand, to do justice to the story, they can only partially identify, so they should keep some emotional distance between themselves and the other (18). Thus, they remain an individual person whose testimony becomes a counternarrative to the more dominant institutionalized or official version (18-19).

Although the testimonio is a genre distinct from the chronicle, it shares some of the aspects defined by Carrión. They both have an explanatory and informative nature which is achieved by referring to prior documentation. Likewise, the dynamic between the writer and the witness is also a fundamental element of the genre. The chronicler and the writer of the testimonio also share the same purpose, to understand and denounce the other’s suffering and to provide a counternarrative to the hegemonic, institutionalized, or official discourse.

Although they share these similarities, they also are significantly different. Whereas in the chronicle gives prominence to the author’s presence and his expression of individuality, the testimonio conceals the presence of the author and creates the illusion that it is the very witness who ‘speaks’ (Polit Dueñas 13). The identity of the witness-narrator is metonymic, and therefore, inseparable from the marginalized community they represent. Moreover, because the narrator represents a marginalized community, the dynamic between the author-narrator-reader also receives more criticism. Lastly, the testimonio emerges from a judicial discourse and is a form of political denunciation of contexts of violence.

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1.2.3.2 Autofiction

“Autofiction” is a term coined by French writer Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 to refer to a hybrid genre “that exhibits elements of both fiction and autobiography” (Worthington 2; Dix 1). Unlike Phillipe Lejeune, Doubrovsky demonstrates with his autofiction that the ‘identity of name’ between author, narrator, and protagonist is not only appropriate for the autobiographical pact, but also for the fictional pact (Casas 7; Worthington 8-9). Though autofiction presents itself as a novel, that is, as a fictional narrative, it is characterized by an autobiographical appearance confirmed by the “identity of name” between author, narrator, and protagonist (Alberca 115). Authors rely on autofiction as an instrument for self-exploration and self-experimentation (Dix 4). Autofiction allows the author to represent themselves truthfully, while also “taking fictional liberties with the reconstruction of events” (Worthington 10). As mentioned in the introduction, Luiselli engages both with the autobiographical narrative and with fiction. Therefore, her work could be considered a contemporary form of autofiction.

1.2.3.3 The Contemporary Mexican Noir Novel

The noir novel is a genre characterized by intrigue, realism, a degree of social determinism, and a stark, brutal language (Giardinelli 17). It is a genre that represents the dark side of society, those aspects of society that are concealed from the public eye (17). Therefore, it is a genre that lends itself to the themes of violence and crime in contemporary society. The classical noir novel is a genre popularized in Europe and the United States as the British-style detective novel and the North American hard-boiled novel.

According to Gustavo Forero Quintero, the contemporary noir novels in Latin America has changed drastically from its predecessors (38). Therefore, he proposed to the notion of “crime novel”, as opposed to “noir novel” to refer to the contemporary Latin American noir novels (28). He argues that the classical noir novel is characterized by a society governed by the law, a dichotomy of good and evil, and the presence of a detective who embodies ratio (causal logic) and seeks a resolution for a crime grounded in penalization (35). In other words, it has a formulaic character, there is a criminal act, that leads to an investigation by a detective that

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seeks “the logical resolution of the crime, which takes the form of a final punishment” (28). On the contrary, the contemporary noir novel in Latin America, that is, the crime novel, the relation of cause-and-effect is ruptured. Hence, in most of these novels, the crime is not punished by a detective nor by the State which reveals their lack of confidence in the legal and penal system of these Latin American nations (38). Thus, Forero Quintero argues that it is characterized by a situation of anomie understood as the degradation of social order and generalized impunity, that is to say, the absence of the law and its sanctioning, and the absence of the State and the figure of the detective as agents of justice (Casa de América 2015).

Marta Sanz shares Forero Quintero’s vision, but she argues that this change in the genre is caused by the intellectual who after the dramatic and terrible events of the 20th century becomes aware that the smooth functioning of modern societies is merely an illusion and that in reality its rotten to the core (Casa de América 2015). In essence, there is the emergence of a conscience that realizes that modern society is inherently defined by both subjective and systemic violence, such as impunity, corruption, and inequality (Casa de América 2015). According to Sanz, this violence “prompts certain individuals to commit criminal acts, either because they assume narrowminded values often associated with capitalism, or because their way of life inevitably forces them to kill in order to survive.” (Casa de América 2015; my translation). Therefore, the detective in these novels tries to understand and empathize with the criminal to the extent that the restricted boundaries between the victim and perpetrator become blurred (Casa de América 2015).

The contemporary Latin American noir novel also distinguishes itself from its predecessors by other means, such as hybridization. Its hybrid nature is established either by combining the noir genre with other genres or by relying on more sophisticated narrative techniques, such as intertextuality (Schlicker 418).

From the description of the contemporary noir novel in Latin America, we will now specifically discuss the contemporary noir literature in Mexico. Contemporary Mexican noir literature deals with crime, violence, and the darkness of humankind (Haghenbeck 41-42). It reveals to the reader what society wants to keep hidden from sight, namely society in its most sordid and

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brutal conditions (42). Hence, Mexican noir literature has contemporary Mexican society as its setting and is, therefore, influenced by drug trafficking and its violence (43). Nevertheless, unlike the more sensationalists narcoliterature, drug trafficking is not its main theme (43). Instead, it deals with themes like corruption, paternity, migration, and the human trafficking of women to sell them for sexual exploitation (43). This is also substantiated by Emiliano Monge, who argues that the narcoliterature can be divided into two types: the detective or crime novel and the literary novel (Prado n.p.). Monge argues that, in the latter, the phenomenon of drug trafficking and its related violence is addressed by its setting, which means that the narrative leaves room for other types of stories as well, such as stories of love or migration (Prado n.p.). Thus, the degradation of Mexican society in the contemporary Mexican noir novel is revealed in its background setting, but it is not its main plot (Haghenbeck 43-44). Common themes that appear in this type of literature are the border, death, and betrayal (42). Haghenbeck names Antonio Ortuño’s La fila india (2013) and Yuri Herrera’s Los trabajos de reino (2004) as the two best pieces of Mexican noir literature (43). The article of Fuentes Kraffcyk also adds Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas to the list of contemporary Mexican noir novels (49).

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2 ANALYSIS OF TELL ME HOW IT ENDS

2.1 Non-fiction With her extended essay8 Tell Me How It Ends (2017), Luiselli writes about the Central American migrant crisis through non-fiction. It is important to mention that before writing her essay, Luiselli intended to approach the subject through fiction, namely with the novel Lost Children Archive (2019). Nevertheless, she realized that her attempt to combine the testimonies with a historical reflection of the crisis within a fictional framework wouldn’t do justice to the novel nor its subject. She decided to stop writing the novel and could only continue writing it after she published her essay. In an interview, Luiselli explained that she wanted her essay to reflect the political urgency she felt to make a statement about the subject (Passa Porta 2019). Through non-fiction, she could deal with the subject more directly by providing an analysis of the immigration law in the U.S. and by giving a wider understanding of the migration crisis and its deeper historical origins (Passa Porta 2019). In her Lost Children Archive, she didn’t want her characters to be instruments for a political message, but rather she wanted them to be as human as they can be (Passa Porta 2019). She adopts an aesthetic stance in her fiction, while she adopts a political one in her essay (Passa Porta 2019).

8 In this first section, the term “essay” will be used to describe Luiselli’s book Tell Me How It Ends, as she present it as such with the subtitle of her work “An Essay in Forty Question”. Thus, she enters into a pact with her readers that her book will fulfill their expectations in regards to the genre. However, this dissertation will challenge the notion of her work as defined by a single, unambiguous genre. The second chapter of this dissertation will argue that her work is a hybridization of four literary genres, namely the essay, the chronicle, the testimonio, and autofiction.

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2.2 Genre and the Representation of Violence

2.2.1 The Essay

The subtitle of her work “An Essay in Forty Questions” is the first indication of Luiselli’s chosen literary genre. As mentioned before, Luiselli stopped writing a novel about the subject so she could write her essay. Thus, her choice for the essay genre was a conscious one. It is the genre par excellence to develop her ideas and arguments about the injustice and inherent racism in U.S. society, its judicial system, and its media discourse in a lucid and sober style.

In traditional essays, these arguments and ideas are also substantiated with documentation. Such documentation is evident in Luiselli’s work by the extensive archive of sources she added at the end of the essay. Aside from the interviews she conducted as a translator, Luiselli acquired information from policy reports, fact sheets, documentaries, newspaper articles, and e-mail exchanges. She frequently disrupts the discourse of her essay to appeal to these sources and sometimes she even elaborates on them. For example, she delves into the statistics on the number of rapes, abductions, deaths, and disappearances happening on the U.S. border (Luiselli 2017: 24-26). She also discusses the media coverage about the crisis, such as a web publication of Reuters about a protest in Michigan against the arrival of undocumented migrant children (Luiselli 2017: 14). Luiselli’s engagement with the sources differs from readers’ expectations regarding the essay genre.

Moreover, traditional essays explore a theme in a subjective manner, their main emphasis is however on the informational value of the text. On the contrary, Luiselli’s essay puts more emphasis on her own subjective, personal experience as an interpreter and a Mexican non- resident alien.

Thus, certain elements in Luiselli’s work do not fulfill the readers’ expectations about the genre. Therefore, the following sections of this dissertation will challenge the presumption that her work could be unambiguously defined as an essay. Instead, this dissertation will propose that her work has a hybrid nature and that she draws from techniques and/or conventions of other literary genres, mainly the chronicle, the testimonio, and autofiction.

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2.2.2 The Chronicle

First of all, the hybrid nature of her literary work is representative of the contemporary chronicle. She combines the essay form with the autobiographical narrative, fiction, and the documentary narrative. Thus, it enables her to employ techniques from both journalism and literature and both fiction and non-fiction. To give a few examples, she employs the first-person autodiegetic narrator from the autobiographical narrative, the detailed investigation from documentary practices, and the oral testimonies from the testimonio.

She also shares the chronicler’s purpose, she wants to provide a wider understanding of the migration crisis, its historical context, and the U.S. immigration system. The explanatory and informative nature of her text is visible in her engagement with objective sources. Therefore, it is obvious to the reader that Luiselli conducted an exhaustive investigation of the subject matter prior to writing the novel. The investigative nature of her work demonstrates how Luiselli uses documentary practices to write her literary works (The MacArthur Foundation 2019).

Another fundamental element of the chronicle represented in her work is the relationship between the writer and the informant. As a chronicler, she has to maintain a degree of emotional distance so that she can write about the crisis in a straightforward manner and to restrain her political rage from dominating the text. She does this by relying on documentary practices, such as the extensive use of other sources ranging from factsheets, documentaries, legal documents, to news reports. In certain excerpts, she invokes a textual source to provide the reader with an oblique representation of the violence inflicted on the undocumented children (Logie 9). For example, instead of describing the children’s testimony of the subjective violence they experienced in Mexico, she offers the reader an extensive catalog of abuses against Central American migrants in their transit through Mexico (25-26). In this excerpt, Luiselli made the careful decision to rely on a textual source to describe such violence instead of an oral one. As mentioned by Logie, the absence of oral accounts of the subjective violence has to do with the age of the children and partly with the nature of traumatic memory (9).

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Moreover, her choice is also reasoned by the code of ethics for legal interpreters, such as the guarantee of confidentiality of the testimonies (Logie 9). Hence, she doesn’t represent the violence explicitly, but she provides the reader with textual sources to stir their imagination.

Whereas the documentary practices serve to maintain her emotional distance, the autobiographical narrative establishes a more empathic narration of the children’s suffering. Hence, she acts as an inner witness of the narrated events and tries to articulate their feelings and thoughts. Luiselli doesn’t only provide the reader with a description of the children’s suffering, she also adopts a critical stance and denounces the conditions of these children on both sides of the border. She explicitly states the purpose of her work, namely to raise awareness of the violence against Central American migrants and to move her readers to act: Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. And perhaps the only way to grant justice – were that even possible – is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look. (30)

In the previous excerpt, Luiselli criticizes the lack of accountability and the inaction of both the U.S. and the Mexican society for the Central American migrant crisis. Moreover, the discourse about the crisis renders the systemic violence against Central American migrants invisible. She makes the reader aware that these horror stories covered by U.S. media are not isolated incidents, but happen on a massive scale. Using the terminology of Žižek, the U.S. media covers the visible subjective violence but neglects the systemic violence that sustains these practices. Thus, the children’s testimonies may differ on an individual level, on a whole they share a collective experience of violence and trauma: “Each child comes from a different place, a separate life, a distinct set of experiences, but their stories usually follow the same predictable, fucked-up plot.” (51).

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For Luiselli, raising awareness about these conditions is not enough, what is needed is a sense of shared inter-American responsibility. She argues that the migrant crisis is not a problem rooted solely in Central America, but is deeply connected to “the drug wars, gangs in Central America and the United States, the trafficking of arms from the United States, and the consumption of drugs” (86). She voices her critique on the violence against these migrants, from systemic racism concealed in migration policies to systemic violence perpetuated both on Mexican as U.S. territory.

As mentioned in the discussion of Žižek’s theory (§1.1), systemic violence is the violence perpetuated by social structures that hinder migrants from equal access to opportunities, goods, and services that enable their basic human rights. In her work, Luiselli criticizes the laws and policies in the U.S. immigration system that enforce the marginalization of Central American migrants. For example, she criticized the procedure of “voluntary return” which permits Border Patrol to deport detained Mexican children immediately without granting them a formal hearing nor having to sustain their decision on any evidence (52-53). Therefore, the procedure of “voluntary return” violates their human right to due process, which includes a fair trial, qualified legal representation, and the ability to appeal. Likewise, she criticizes the procedure of the “U visa”, which grants a visa to migrants who are victims of a crime if they have suffered substantial mental and physical abuse and are willing to cooperate with law enforcement and government officials in the investigation and persecution of the crime (47-48). She also remarks how, contrary to those accused of crimes, child aliens are not entitled to free legal counsel (68), which violates the children’s human right to qualified legal representation. Without the assistance of legal representation, it may be practically impossible for these unaccompanied undocumented children to obtain relief. Most certainly when one considers the age of some of these children. They not only have to tell their story “in a second language, translated to a third”, they also have to produce “a round and convincing story that successfully inserts them into legal proceedings workings up to their defense” (66).

Her strongest critique is on the political response of both Obama and Trump to the crisis, which “has always centered on one question: […] How do we get rid of [these children] or dissuade

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them from coming?” (44). In political discourse, the arrival of these undocumented children is seen as an institutional hindrance that needs to be solved quickly. To deal with the deportation proceedings of these children, the Obama administration created the priority juvenile docket in immigration court (32). Luiselli describes it as “the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of the refugee children.”(41). Aside from it being “ethically questionable”, legally “it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front door.” (41). Whereas before minors seeking relief were given approximately twelve months to find a lawyer to represent their case before their first court hearing, it was now reduced to twenty-one days (39). This meant that deportation proceedings against these undocumented children in immigration court were accelerated by 94 percent, leaving less time for these children and their legal representatives to build a defense (39-40).

She also gives a critique on the Mexican government’s anti-immigration plan, the Programa Frontera Sur, which introduced severe migration policies to halt immigration of Central Americans through Mexico (77-80). They justified the program under the guise of protecting the “safety and rights” of migrants, while since its implementation “their safety has been compromised to a greater extent, their lives put in a much more vulnerable situation.” (77). She describes the program as “the Mexican government’s new augmented-reality videogame” for its use of ethically questionable strategies such as the surveillance by drones, security cameras, fences and floodlights, and the notorious “Grupos Beta”, a so-called humanitarian aid organization that locates and reports migrants to immigration officials so that they can capture and deport them (77-78). Luiselli also makes a critical observation about the amount of Central American migrants that have been deported since the launch of the program (78-79). According to her, many of those migrants would have had the legal right to request asylum in either Mexico or the United States, so she questions if the migrant’s human right to due process is being honored (78-79).

Aside from the formal structures that sustain the migrant’s marginalization of access to their human rights, she also gives a critique of the culturally functional structures that restricts undocumented migrants' equal access to education. These discriminatory practices become

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evident in Manu’s story. While United States law guarantees free public education for all children, no matter their nationality or immigration status, schools have denied entrance to undocumented children by creating more obstacles in the form of eligibility criteria, such as the necessity to have a certain document, a certain level of English proficiency, etc. (92-93).

The immigration laws and policies on both sides of the border fail to recognize these migrants as war refugees because it would require them to admit their accountability in the root causes of the migrant crisis (85-87). Unfortunately, the marginalization of the migrant as an “illegal alien” makes them more vulnerable for all sorts of crimes during their journey to and their arrival on U.S. territory. Luiselli goes into detail about the subjective violence the undocumented children experience throughout their journey to the U.S. border. Apart from the threat of derailment or falling on the tracks, those riding La Bestia run the risk of being threatened, blackmailed or attacked by rapists, corrupt policemen, murderous soldiers, or drug gangs (51). If they can escape from the dangers of La Bestia, they are confronted with other threats, such as being hunted by Border Patrol or civilian vigilantes, and the subtropical climate of the Sonora desert.

Lastly, like the chronicle, her work functions as a counternarrative to the more dominant institutionalized or official discourse. She provides a counternarrative to the ideological dominance of the anti-immigration discourse in U.S. law, politics, and media by narrating from a humanizing, empathic language (Sagi-Vela González 720-721). Moreover, she directly addresses the symbolic violence against undocumented children in the U.S. by engaging with news publications. With great detail, she examines the U.S. media discourse about the Central American migrant crisis. Similarly to the findings of Zavisca, Giorgio, and Bauman introduced in the theoretical chapter of this thesis (§1.1.3), she concludes that U.S. media discourse dehumanizes migrants by portraying them as the abjected, racialized Other. For instance, she describes how some news publications, albeit in varying degrees, announce the arrival of undocumented children as a “biblical plague” that threatens U.S. society, its values, and its prosperity (15).9 They dehumanize the children by portraying them as if they were a locust plague, an invasion of “coffee-colored boys and girls” who are carriers of disease (15). To her dismay, this racially biased language is also reproduced in more liberal newspapers like The

9 In her novel Lost Children Archive she discusses an article published in a local newspaper called The Daily Gazette “Kids, a Biblical Plague” (Luiselli 2019: 124)

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New York Times. In her essay, she analyzes a New York Times article titled “Children at The Border” in which the author of the article asks questions about the child migrants from Central America and replies to them (83-84). She remarks on how the article reproduced racially biased and anti-migrant discourse: Why aren’t child migrants immediately deported?” […] Under a statute adopted with bipartisan support, … minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately … [but] a United States law allows Mexican minors caught crossing the border to be sent back quickly. (Luiselli 2017: 83-84)

The discourse used by this reporter is a form of symbolic violence because it amplifies prominent belief that these undocumented migrant do not have the right to asylum in the U.S. Moreover, his use of the verb “allow” in combination with the phrase “sent back quickly” seems to imply some sort of relief. Thus, his choice of words echoes anti-migration discourse which conceives the arrival of these children as an institutional hindrance which they want to remove as quickly as possible. She is bothered by the fact that he hasn’t revised his language nor the facts, because “these children are not sent illegally, they have a legal right to asylum according to international laws.” (Bausells: n.p.). The stories of these children, both in court as in U.S. media, are incomplete and oversimplified and prove their misunderstanding or voluntary ignorance of the crisis because these children are not “illegal aliens” but “war refugees” (Luiselli 2017: 86-87).

The narrative presented in U.S. media, politics, and public opinion portrays the United States as morally and culturally superior to the Central American nations (Luiselli 2019: 124). These nations, on the other hand, are portrayed as “a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace” (Luiselli 2019: 124). It reinforces Euro- American colonial and capitalist ideologies that sustain a Manichean representation of the world, namely the civilized first-world (we, the north) versus the barbaric third-world (they, the south) (Luiselli 2017: 83).

Luiselli’s work provides a strong critique against the prevailing U.S. discourse about the crisis that justifies relations of dominance between the U.S. and Central American nations, e.g. U.S.

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interventionism, and naturalizes anti-migrant and racial ideologies. Luiselli wants to oblige her reader to rethink the very language surrounding the crisis and raise awareness of the symbolic violence against Central American migrants in the United States. By doing so, she provides a counternarrative to the hegemonic anti-migration discourse that dehumanizes Central American migrants (Sagi-Vela Gonzáles 720-721).

To sum up, the analysis of this section demonstrates how Luiselli’s book could be considered a contemporary chronicle as defined by Carrión (§1.2.3.1). It represents the tendency of the contemporary chronicle for genre hybridization, which situates her work in-between journalism and literature. As a chronicler, her purpose is to provide the reader with a vital understanding of the reality of Central American migrants both in Mexico and in the U.S. Likewise, her work reflects the chronicler’s vocation to thoroughly and critically investigate the reality they want to represent. Most importantly, her work serves a vehicle for her social commitment and the denunciation of the violence against Central American migrants on both sides of the border.

2.2.3 Testimonio

This subsection will not analyze those characteristics of the testimonio which are shared with the chronicle as those are already discussed in the previous section. Instead, it will focus on those elements that distinguish the testimonio from the chronicle, namely the author-narrator as a representative for the marginalized community, the paradox of representation, and the asymmetrical relation between author-narrator-reader.

Following Beverley’s definition, Luiselli’s work incorporates some of the formal elements of the testimonio. It is a novella-length narrative told by a first-person narrator who could be identified as the author herself. The subject of her essay is her experiences as a translator- interpreter for New York City’s federal immigration court. Hence, as proper to the genre itself, it emerges from a judicial context. Moreover, these experiences have significantly influenced her to not only denounce the violence against Central American migrants in her writing but

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also to take social action which resulted in the creation of Teenage Immigrant Integration Association (TIIA).

As the author-narrator of the essay, Luiselli functions as an extradiegetic translator-interpreter who mediates between the undocumented children’s testimonies and the first-world, English- speaking reader. Luiselli transformed the fragmented oral testimonies of these children in Spanish (or an indigenous language) to a written essay in English. While narrating the testimonies in her book, she maintains their oral and/or dialogical nature by sometimes abstaining her narrative voice from intervening. Thus, at times she uses direct speech to imitate what the undocumented child said aloud in the interviews, leaving the testimony intact. Who did you live with in your home country? With my grandmother and my two cousins. How old are they Nineteen and thirteen. No, wait, nineteen and fourteen. Names? Patricia and Marta – why do you need their names? […] (Luiselli 2017: 72)

In the more elaborate testimonies, Luiselli has to paraphrase some parts as a narrative strategy to maintain reader engagement. For example, she does this for the testimony of Manu (70-76) and for that of the two young girls from Guatemala (56-58). Another element that influences her narration is the asymmetrical relation between the English-speaking reader and the children. The reader doesn’t share the children’s traumatic experience, but can only try to imagine “the unthinkable”. She also translates and explains a few Spanish realia for the English-speaking reader such as the hielera (icebox) and La Bestia (the Beast).

By bearing witness to these traumatic events for these children, Luiselli acts as a “delegated witness” (Logie 11). On page 62 to 63, Luiselli list the answers the children gave to the questions of the questionnaire in an “incantatory” manner. By doing so, she renders these individual testimonies to a collective experience of a marginalized community.

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Luiselli’s role and her locus of enunciation also raise ethical concerns, such as “the paradox of representation” inherent to the testimonio genre (Logie 10-12). As mentioned in the theoretical framework of this thesis (§1.2.1), Spivak’s paradox of representation argues that the subaltern subject cannot speak, but is silenced by those scholars or writers who claim to speak for the subaltern subject. Luiselli attempts to give a voice to these undocumented children and their stories by providing an alternative discourse about the migrant crisis to the prevalent dehumanizing discourse in the U.S. Although she shared their experience of being a non- resident alien in the U.S and having to deal with racism and a complex migration system, it does not come close to the brutal reality of the undocumented children (Logie 11). As an erudite, bilingual, metropolitan writer living in the U.S., Luiselli occupies a privileged position. On the contrary, the undocumented children she interviews are marginalized because of their age, their lack of English fluency, and their lack of immigration papers. Even if they were mature enough and could speak English fluently, being undocumented obliges them to remain anonymous. In other words, they occupy a subaltern position which means that these undocumented children as a community are socially, politically, and geographically outside the hierarchy of power. On the contrary, Luiselli’s position as a successful writer allows her to participate in the public debate about the crisis and she feels that she is ethically obliged to do so. The privileges of her position, however, alienates her from the community these undocumented children belong to and she wants to represent. Luiselli also acknowledges these concerns which are raised by her locus of enunciation both in her essay and more explicitly in her recent novel Lost Children Archive: Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? […] Constant concern: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, …] (Luiselli 2019: 79)

Thus, Luiselli cannot be considered a representative for the undocumented migrants, nor does she conceal her presence as an author. On the contrary, she interweaves the narrative of the testimonies of these children with an autobiographical plot, a mise en scène of the semi- autobiographical self whose own experiences and perspective prevail. In the following section,

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the autobiographical plot will be further elaborated on as one of the autofictional elements incorporated in her work. With the use of autofictional techniques, Luiselli distances her work from the testimonio genre and its inherent claim of truth and veracity.

2.2.4 Autofiction

In Luiselli’s work the autobiographical pact, i.e. “the identity of name” between author, narrator, and protagonist, is established through the first-person autodiegetic narrator. Although the narrator remained unnamed through extradiegetic references it is suggested to the reader that the narrator’s experiences are inspired by those of the author Luiselli. The story of the family road trip seems to be based on a road trip Luiselli’ took with Álvaro Enrigue, her then-husband, his son, and her daughter (Felsenthal n.p.).

Through the first-person autodiegetic narration, the reader is provided with the narrator’s personal, subjective experiences and thoughts. This type of narration allows her to not only recount the experiences of the undocumented children but to also draw parallels to her own experience as an interpreter and Mexican non-resident alien living in the United States. By comparing the experience of the children with her personal experiences, she evokes empathy for these children.

Moreover, she foregrounds the role of the interpreter as “the fragile and slippery bridge” between the children’s testimonies and the judicial system (Luiselli 2017:67). Luiselli’s role as an interpreter for the children on an extradiegetic level was already touched upon (§2.2.3). On an intradiegetic level, the narrator also acts as a “border agent of languages” who mediates between the children and their lawyers (Sagi-Vela González 723-726; Logie 4-6). The translation of the children’s testimonies entails more than simply translating from Spanish or an indigenous language to English (Luiselli 2017: 7-8). If the children are very young, she also has to shift between different language registers from the language of adults with its legal vocabulary to the language of children and vice versa (61-63). As pointed out by Sagi-Vela González, translating between languages also implicates a cultural translation, for example when she had to explain a lawyer the meaning of the phrase “de Guatemala a Guatepeor – from

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Guatebad to Guataworse” (725; Luiselli 2017: 88). Furthermore, the testimonies by the children, which is an oral discourse, have to be transcribed to a written report (Luiselli 2017: 7-8)

More importantly, the translator has to reconstruct the testimonies of these children to a coherent, chronological narrative by reading in-between the lines, by reformulating questions or by asking questions again (Logie 4). While English is reduced to a pragmatic language, Spanish becomes the language of emotional connection in which the children can tell their painful stories (Logie 4; Sagi-Vela González 725). The complex, traumatic and painful stories have to be simplified and structured to a coherent story that fits the necessary legal categories that are understandable and useful for their lawyers. As a result, their stories become “generalized, distorted, appear out of focus” (Luiselli 2017:11) Thus, the interpreter has to cross boundaries between the cold, pragmatic and bureaucratic discourse of the judicial system and the fragmentary, confusing and painful discourse of the children’s testimonies (Logie 4; Sagi-Vela González 723). […] I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end. (Luiselli 2017: 7)

One of the ways she voices her critique of the U.S. immigration system is by comparing the interview process, officially known as “screening”, to a movie projection. In this metaphor, the child is as “a reel of footage” and the legal system as “a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail” (Luiselli 2017: 11). Thus, the interpreter is nothing more than “an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage” (11). As an interpreter, she listens to the children’s testimonies and translates them, but she cannot control what the children tell her, nor has she control over the type of legal assistance they receive (61-62). Her feeling of powerlessness is reiterated throughout the essay when her daughter asks “So, how does the story of those children end?” (55; Logie 7). The narrator struggles to provide her daughter with a satisfying answer. Most of the time she just doesn’t

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know yet because the children have to wait for a lawyer who can make a case (69, 90). At the same time, the question also reveals the narrator’s motivation to tell their stories, namely to find an ending for them, to mobilize the readers to tend for the ending of their tragic stories (O'Connell Whittet n.p.). The narrator foregrounds the importance of storytelling to open the door to empathy: “And [the stories] 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” (96-97)

Lastly, her professional experience as both a bilingual writer and translator heightens her awareness of the discourse about migration in U.S. politics, immigration law, and media. In the first chapter, the narrator immediately addresses “the slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law” which describes anyone from outside the United States as “alien” (8). The term at first was a source of laughter for the family, but it received a more grim connotation in the context of the removal of “alien” children (15-16). She deals with other biased words, such as the prevalence of the term “migrants” to designate the Central American minors crossing the border, instead of the more contextually accurate word “war refugees”. She claims that the word “war refugee” is not used, because it would oblige the U.S. and Mexican governments to admit their responsibility and deal with it the crisis instead of simply “removing the illegal aliens” (86-87). Moreover, she examines the sinister connotation of the word “removal” used both for the deportation of undocumented migrants and for the systematic genocide of the southern Native American tribes under Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act (17). Such discourse is an example of symbolic violence, it amplifies anti-migration sentiments by portraying the undocumented children as the excluded racial Other. The use of the terms “removal” and “illegal” sustains the perception of Central American migrants as a threat to U.S. society, whereas the word “alien” reinforces the idea of migrants being “unfit”, “out of place” or “undesirable” in U.S. society. The discourse about the Central American migrant crisis in the U.S. illustrates the inculcated belief in U.S. society that these migrants should be denied U.S. citizenship. Their discourse conceives these migrants as “lives to abandon” to justify the denial of their asylum and the absence of U.S. accountability.

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The autobiographical narration comes with certain limitations, Luiselli bridges those limitations by relying on fictional techniques.

The first fictional technique she employs is temporal experimentation by which she departs from the linear, sequential, chronological order of the autobiographical narrative. Luiselli’s essay alternates between two experiences that have catalyzed her social activism for Central American migrants, namely the road trip with her family in the summer of 2014 and her experience as an interpreter in March 2015. She starts the essay in media res, where she describes her job as an interpreter for the New York immigration court. Then the narrator takes us to the summer of 2014, when she and her family went on a road trip from Harlem to Arizona, near the U.S. southern border. Throughout the first chapter “Border”, the narrator constantly shifts between the plot of the road trip and the questions of the questionnaire which brings the reader back to the testimonies of the undocumented children. While Luiselli and her family during their road trip are driving nearer to the U.S. southern border, i.e. the heart of the Central American migrant crisis, the text becomes more centered around the plot of the interpreter and the undocumented children.

Secondly, she insists on rendering the victims of the Central American migrant crisis visible by reclaiming the individual stories of these undocumented children (Logie 10). While media and political representations of migrants commonly portray them as an undifferentiated mass, Luiselli carefully elaborates on a selected number of powerful testimonies for the reader to empathize with. There is the testimony of the boy whose little brother was shot by gangs (68- 69), the testimony of the teenage boy who felt lucky to encounter Border Patrol (21), and the testimony of another teenager about the hielera (22). Luiselli chose these stories deliberately because they represent the different obstacles the children encounter during their journey, but there are two testimonies that she gives more attention to, namely the testimony of Manu Lopez and the testimony of two young girls from Honduras.

One of those powerful testimonies is the story of Manu, a sixteen years old boy who left Honduras after a confrontation with gang members of Barrio 18. After they killed his best friend before his own eyes, he decided to leave the country and to live with his aunt in New

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York. Manu’s adolescent age allows him to narrate his experience in a more detailed manner than younger children (Morales Muñoz 65). Moreover, his testimony is also burdened by the ultimate form of violence, the murder of his best friend by members of Barrio 18. His story is heavily impacted by the turf wars between the powerful gangs, Barrio 18 and its rival Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13). The recurrence of those names in all of the children’s testimonies demonstrates how gang violence in Central-America is both endemic and systemic. Lastly, the story also “haunts” the author because of a very specific detail, a copy of the police report Manu filed against the gang months before his friend was killed (75). Since the police never acted upon Manu’s police complaint it becomes a symbol for the systemic impunity of those gangs in Central-America (75). The purpose of the document changed from being a symbol of hope for change and justice to a symbol of the perpetual cycle of violence and impunity in Honduras: Originally, it had been a legal document, a complaint filed by a boy hoping to produce a change in his life. Now it was more of a historical document that disclosed the failure of the document’s original purpose but also explained the boy’s decision to leave that life. (43)

Another testimony Luiselli gives special attention to is the testimony of the two young girls of five and seven years old from Guatemala (55-58; 63-66). It throws into sharp relief the innocence of their age with the dangerous journey they undertook. Moreover, it represents the difficulty of these young children to give testimony as they don’t understand the legal, adult language of the questionnaire (66).

Although these two testimonies seem to have nothing in common, it is striking how they are on opposite ends of a continuum: whereas Manu’s testimony is apt for legal representation, the testimony of the two girls is not. Manu can provide evidence for the dangers of his home country and his age enables him to tell a round and convincing story. On the contrary, the two girls cannot provide sufficient evidence for their case. Moreover, because of their young age telling a coherent and convincing narrative is practically impossible for them.

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Lastly, Luiselli’s work also uses intertextuality, with its references to song lyrics and poems. For instance, she refers to the lyrics of the song “Straight to Hell” by the Clash. She describes how the song is “partly about the post-Vietnam War ‘Amerasian’ children and their exclusion from the American dream” and how it echoes the nightmarish experiences of Central American children in the U.S. (24-25). On the one hand, the reference to the song and its lyrics serves to make the transition between the narrator’s private life, that is the plot of the family road trip, to the narrator’s public life as an interpreter for undocumented children. It makes it possible for the narrator to intertwine the autobiographical plot with the testimonies of the children. On the other hand, it serves as a way to emphasize the hollowness of the American Dream. Even though the children have escaped “the nightmare in which they were born”, they wake up in a different one when they arrive in the U.S. (Luiselli 2017: 13). In the preceding pages Luiselli builds up to what the song’s lyrics symbolically represents, the harsh reality of these children’s arrival at the border, namely the systemic racism in the U.S. which demonstrates itself in the biased language in news reports, the threat of patriotic, vigilante men, and the inhumane treatment by Border Patrol (12-24). Moreover, she refers to America’s colonial history, such as the Indian Removal Act, to remind the reader how systemic racism is ingrained in U.S. history. The link between the Indian removal and that of the undocumented children is reinforced through the metaphor of Border Patrol cars as ominous white stallions racing toward the horizon (23). The song connects these two events with the Vietnam War, which proves how U.S. history repeats itself. Once again, North-America justified its colonization of foreign territory and its inhabitants by the rationale that “those bronzed barbarians” form a threat to “the white peace and superior values of the ‘Land of the Free’” (17).

Intertextuality also serves to fill the gaps in the children’s testimony, that is, to elliptically represent the unthinkable horrors experienced by the undocumented children. For example, the narrator represents the sense of irremediable loss, trauma, and incomplete mourning that is triggered by the death of Manu’s friend by engaging with the poem “Elegy” by Miguel Hernández. The mourning of the tragic death of a childhood friend cannot be described in words, hence why she invokes the lines of a poem about the death of a childhood friend and the lyrical speaker’s “obsessive conjuring of his friend’s buried corpse” (75).

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After analyzing the conventions of autofiction in Tell Me How It Ends, this dissertation concludes that Luiselli’s work could also be considered a piece of autofiction. She engages with the autobiographical pact with her first-person, autodiegetic narrator. The subjective and personal autodiegetic narration acts as a counternarrative against the cold, pragmatic, and bureaucratic discourse of the judicial system. Whereas the discourse of U.S. law, media, and politics dehumanizes the undocumented children, the narrator represents them as tangible, real human beings. Moreover, the narrator’s voice is apt for voicing a critique on the U.S. immigration system and the symbolic violence against Central American migrants in U.S. politics, immigration law, and media discourse. Aside from the autobiographical pact, Luiselli also employs some fictional techniques. She reclaims the individual stories of these undocumented children to humanize them. She carefully elaborates on the powerful testimonies of Manu and the two young girls to make her reader empathize with the children. Lastly, she uses intertextuality to give an oblique representation of the subjective and systemic violence against the undocumented children.

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3 ANALYSIS OF LAS TIERRAS ARRASADAS

3.1 Fiction10 It is interesting to note that while Emiliano Monge has a journalistic background as a reporter, he chooses the fictional mode, i.e. that of the novel, to write about the Central American migrant crisis and its violence. Monge has defended his decision by arguing that non-fiction, more specifically journalism, engages with the idea of truth as an everyday, non-philosophical fact, while fiction, on the contrary, engages with verisimilitude, meaning the appearance or semblance of truth (Iglesia n.p.; Velasco Oliaga n.p.). He states that it is the task of the writer to narrate and construct the fictional events in such a way that it is believable and plausible. (Iglesia n.p.). Moreover, Monge emphasizes that fiction and non-fiction have a different engagement when narrating an event. In non-fiction, the event is narrated as something that happened in the past, while in fiction it is narrated as something that belongs to the eternal present. (Para Leer en Libertad 2016). This is why fiction can bring the reader closer to the lives of others, which therefore enables us to feel empathy for them (Para Leer en Libertad 2016). By putting the reader in someone else’s position, we gain perspective on their thoughts, feelings, circumstances, and worldviews. In Las tierras arrasadas (2015), Emiliano Monge wanted his readers to not only feel empathy for the Central American migrants who are the victims of violence, but also for the perpetrators of violence (Para Leer en Libertad 2016).

10 This chapter will analyze the original novel in Spanish, Las tierras arrasadas. Barcelona: Literatura Random House, 2015. The footnotes will provide translations of the Spanish quotes, these translations are based on the published translation of the novel Among the Lost. Translated by Frank Wynne. London: Scribe, 2018.

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3.2 Genre and the Representation of Violence

3.2.1 The Contemporary Noir Novel

As mentioned in the introduction, Emiliano Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas (2015) is often described as a noir novel. Monge’s choice of genre is already evident for the reader by its book cover, a photograph of a desolate scene on a pitch-dark night. The protagonists of the novel are Epitafio and Estela, two human traffickers who kidnap, torture, kill, sell, and enslave migrants who are passing through an infernal landscape. With his novel, Monge addresses the violence against Central American migrants in Mexico, namely the systemic kidnapping of Central American migrants, the discovery of clandestine mass graves, and the dehumanization and commodification of Central American migrant bodies to products of exchange. In the novel, these phenomena become the setting or background of the story, however the main plot centers around the love story between Estela and Epitafio. The two lovers are separated from each other and are desperately trying to communicate and to reunite. Unfortunately, their obsession with one another renders them blind for the betrayal that will tragically end their relationship.

In Monge’s literary noir novel the theme of violence is not addressed through the characters, nor the story. Violence belongs to the everyday life of the characters which is why it is the setting of the story (Velasco Oliago n.p.). Although violence is not part of the main plot, it surrounds the atmosphere of the novel and it affects the characters’ loss of identity (Velasco Oliaga n.p). From the moment the migrants are captured by the kidnappers, they lose their individuality and are converted into a nameless mass (Monge: 13) Likewise, the act of violence also denies the kidnappers their individuality (Casasús n.p.). They are also stripped of their identity and their proper names and are re-named by the malevolent priest, (padre) Nicho (“Father Nicho”). The sobriquets of the members of the kidnapping gang descent from funeral rites. For instance, “epitafio” is the Spanish word for “epitaph”, which refers to the words written on a gravestone. Likewise, “estela” translates in English to “a gravestone”, “sepelio” translates to “a burial”, and lastly “nicho” translated to “a burial niche”. On the one hand, these sobriquets function as a reference to Mexico’s cult of death (Favaro 69). On the other hand, their names are representative of their way of life and their function in the necro-business of Nicho, namely to transport, sell and exploit the bodies of migrants. Moreover, like the figure

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of Death, they also exercise what Mbembe called “necropolitics”, i.e. the sovereign power over who may live and who must die. Thus, the kidnappers are allegorical figures for necropolitics (Velázquez Soto 7).

Monge’s novel is an archetypal Mexican noir novel in the sense that it tries to represent the dark side of humanity and Mexican society. It deals with the tragedy of Central American migrants that cross the southern border of Mexico. For Monge, the violence against Central American migrants in Mexico is the Holocaust of the twenty-first century (Monge 341). With his novel, Monge wants to shed a light on the violence and crimes against Central American migrants in Mexico. He opted for a fictional narrative because it allows him to reveal the darkest and hidden aspects of Mexican society, such as the systemic kidnapping of Central American migrants, the clandestine mass graves, the impunity and corruption among Mexican state actors (Foro del Tejedor 2015) Moreover, he wants to raise awareness of Mexican society’s silence and inaction on the subject (RFI Español 2017). For Monge, Mexico’s silence on the subject reminds him of the Germans’ denial of knowledge about the concentration camps in Germany (RFI Español 2017).

Thus, his novel represents what Forero Quintero has called “a situation of anomie”, a society in which the State as an agent of justice is absent which leads to generalized impunity. This impunity is represented in the novel by the corruption of state agents. For example, the henchmen of the priest are police officers and soldiers. Moreover, in the opening scene of the novel a helicopter of Border Patrol witnesses the kidnapping of the migrants, but they abandon them to their fate (Monge 25). The impunity of these kidnappers is also symbolized by the circular narrative of the novel, which will be analyzed further in our discussion of the novel.

Although the geographical space in which the story is set remains unnamed, certain place names featured in the novel can be situated in Mexico, near its southern border (Guatemala- Mexico border). For example, Media Aguas, a place mentioned in the Greek chorus, is a town in Veracruz, Mexico. It is known to be a transit point for Central American migrants who are trying to reach the U.S.-Mexico border due to its location near the railroad tracks of La Bestia. Unfortunately, this also transcended in several massive kidnappings of Central American

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migrants in this area (Castillo García n.p.). Moreover, the descriptions of the arid plateaus, the rocky sierra, the impenetrable jungle in which there is a lost border invoke the natural landscape of the Guatemalan department of El Petén (Vázquez-Enríquez 5).

By choosing the perpetrators as his protagonists, Monge also follows the tendency in contemporary noir fiction to understand and empathize with the perpetrator. Monge wants his reader to feel empathy for the perpetrator because he believes that what makes someone resort to violence is determined by their social circumstances. Monge argues that capitalism, poverty, and lack of education victimize both those who are kidnapped and the kidnappers (Paul n.p.). According to him, many of the kidnappers used to be migrants themselves but were kidnapped and agreed to cooperate with their kidnappers as a strategy to survive (Paul n.p.). By humanizing the perpetrators of violence, Monge wants to show there is a fine line between victim and victimizer (Washington n.p.). Through internal focalization, Monge confronts the reader with Epitafio and Estela’s traumatic past and reveals how they once were victims themselves. The story of Mausoleo represents how a migrant can go from victim to victimizer as a strategy to survive. Likewise, los chicos de la selva, two brothers who are only just fourteen and sixteen years old, cooperate with the kidnappers as a way to sustain a living.

Concerning theme, his novel is an exemplary of the Mexican noir. It deals with the themes of the border, migration, death, betrayal, corruption, crime, and the darkness of humankind. Nevertheless, to represent these themes Monge deviates from the boundaries of the noir novel. Thus, his novel has a hybrid nature as it relies on more sophisticated narrative techniques and stylistic conventions of other genres, namely that of epic poetry, tragedy, and the testimonio.

3.2.2 Epic Poetry

Before we analyze the conventions of epic poetry in Monge’s novel, we will briefly define the genre. The epic poem, or the epic, can be defined as “[a] long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through their relation to a central heroic figure” (Holman and Harmon 201). Some of the conventions of the epic which are featured in Monge’s novel are the journey through the Underworld, the

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descriptions of daybreak and nightfall, repeated formulaic epithets, etc. This section will focus on those conventions that Monge employs to allegorize and universalize the tragedy of the Central American migrants in his novel.

Firstly, Monge employs the narrative mode of the epic, namely a third-person narration by an omniscient narrator. In Las tierras arrasadas, the story is told by an unnamed extra- heterodiegetic omniscient narrator who shifts between zero focalization and internal focalization. The narrator’s speech also varies between direct and free indirect speech. One of the advantages of an extra-heterodiegetic omniscient narrator is that it is a type of narration that creates some distance between the narrator and the narrative. The narrator remains objective and is not emotionally involved in the story. This objectivity is especially important for a story in which the perpetrators are the protagonists. The narrator doesn’t cast judgment on the actions of the protagonists, which makes it easier for the reader to sympathize with them. In certain passages, the narrator shifts to internal focalization which allows the reader to get insights into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the perpetrators. Through internal focalization, he humanizes the ones that are most often portrayed as monsters. By doing so, he wants to avoid that his novel adheres to a black-and-white dualism, i.e. a moral dichotomy of good and evil. The reader is confronted with the brutality of Estela’s and Epitafio’s actions, whilst also reading about their dreams, their fears, and their love for one another. Lastly, there is a discrepancy between the information provided by the omniscient narrator and the knowledge of the characters represented by the internal focalization. While the omniscient narrator informs the reader about the betrayal of Sepelio and padre Nicho, Epitafio and Estela are oblivious to their betrayal. It is from this conflict from which the intrigue of the story arises.

A second element that Monge draws from epic poetry is its circular narrative structure. The story begins in medias res in a clearing called “El Ojo de Hierba” (i.e. The Eye of Grass). The narrative begins in the darkness of the night, when a group of migrants, guided by los chicos de la selva, are suddenly ambushed by a gang of human traffickers led by Epitafio (13). The migrants discover that their guides, the two brothers, were aware of the scheme and betrayed them for profit. The opening scene is mimicked by the ending scene. Once again, los chicos de la selva, accompanied by a group of migrants, are ambushed in the clearing by the gang of

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human traffickers. Only this time, the gang follows the orders of the new leader, Sepelio, and the brothers are now also the target of the gang. The boys realize that the only way they can keep their dignity and their spirit, is by accepting their death: “los dos chicos […] reciben la tormenta de metralla que los tumba sobre el suelo, donde sus cuerpos destrozados caen abriendo un solo hoyo en la hierba.”11 (341; my italics). This scene reveals the macabre, meaning of the name “El Ojo de Hierba”, it refers to the burial pit in the grass. The clearing is also known by another sinister name, “El Tiradero”, which has a double connotation. In Castilian Spanish, it refers to a shooting range, i.e. the place where the hunter shoots its prey, while in Mexican Spanish, it designates a site where garbage is dumped and piled up. Thus, the names of the clearing are allegorical for the action taking place in the opening and the ending scene: the migrants who fall prey to the human-trafficking gang and the place where the gang discards the dead bodies of their victims. Thus, while the story begins with the boys and Epitafio as victimizers for the kidnapping gang of padre Nicho, it ends with their demise as they themselves become the victims of the very same gang. On a textual level, this circularity is demonstrated by the mirroring of the first and the last line of the novel: “También sucede por el día, pero esta vez es por la noche.” (13), and, “[…] también sucede por la noche pero esta vez es por el dia.” (341; my italics).12 Monge uses the circular narrative structure as an allegory for the perpetual cycle of violence. The mirroring between the opening and ending scene illustrates how the violence doesn’t end by removing certain individuals from the equation, because they will be replaced by others. Instead, the novel forces us to consider the circumstances that drive these people, who might have been migrants themselves, to commit these heinous acts of violence.

Another characteristic of epic poetry that features in Monge’s novel is the use of epithets. Frequently in the story, the narrator invokes characters by using epithets instead of names. An epithet is “a characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing” (Merriam-Webster n.p.). In the novel, the migrants are never addressed by their names, instead, they are only identified by epithets, such as “los hombres y mujeres que

11 “ […] a hail of shots and shrapnel knocks them to the ground where their mangled bodies form one single hole in the grass” (345)

12 “It also happens by day, but now it is night.” (3), “[…] it often takes place by night; this time it takes place by day.” (Wynne: 345)

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cruzaron las fronteras” (Monge: 25)13. One the one hand, the epithet allows Monge to universalize the novel. He dislocates the tragedy of the novel from the Mexican context by conceiving the victims as a nameless mass without nationalities. On the other hand, he employs the epithet as an allegory for the migrants’ gradual dehumanization, namely the loss of their identity. They do not only lose their name, but also other aspects of their identity: their voice, their personality, their language, and their religion. The loss of these individual aspects of their identity is represented through the epithets (Sperling 194-195). Before the migrants are kidnapped, they include the adverb “aún” to inform the reader that the migrants still have their name (“Elquetieneaúnnombre”), their soul (“Quienaúnsumedealma”), their voice (“Quientieneaúnsuvoz”), their language (“Elquetodavíausasulengua”) their faith in God (“LaquecuentaaúnDios”), and their body (“Elquetodaviatienecuerpo”) (300; 339; emphasis mine).14 After the migrants are kidnapped, and thus become victims of violence, the narrator informs the reader of the loss of these aspects by including the adverb “sin” (“without”), then they become “los sincuerpo” (195), “los sinDios” (249), “los sinvoz” (119), …15 Before their victimization, the migrants are represented as individuals, whereas afterward, they are treated as a mass.

In that respect, Hanaï observes that their loss of individuality is also represented by the presence of their voice in the narration of the extra-heterodiegetic narrator (106). This is visible in the representation of the voice of the migrants who travel with los chicos de la selva. At the beginning of their journey, they are represented through free indirect speech (Monge 200) and direct speech (200, 307, 339). Nevertheless, after they are ambushed their individual voices become a single lament (340). Hanaï argues that this is the result of the eldest boy of los chicos de la selva who forces them to silence by saying: “¡Que se callen… es en serio… o se callan o verán lo que les hago!”16 (340). However, a close reading of the passage seems to contradict Hanaï’s statement. Hanaï only has taken into account the second time the eldest brother tries to silence them in this passage. After his first attempt, the voices of the migrants are still

13 “the men and women who crossed the borders” (16)

14 “Hewhostillbearsaname”, “Hewhostillboastsasoul” “Hewhostillhashisvoice” “Hewhocanstillusehistongue” “ShewhostillcallsonGod” “Hewhostillhasabody” (343)

15 “the soulless creatures” (200), “the godless” (254) “the voiceless” (116)

16 “Shut up … I’m serious … If you don’t shut up, you’ll see what happens,” (343-344)

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represented through direct speech (339). Instead, what seems to impose their silence is the beginning of their victimization by the kidnappers. After the oldest brother shouts for the second time that the migrants should be quiet, a Dantesque scene unfolds: “El Tiradero” is invaded by a swarm of horseflies, blowflies, and locusts and the older brother urinates himself (340). This scene mirrors the opening scene, however, it subverts the linear order of events. In the opening scene, it is after the kidnapping of the migrants (13) that Epitafio urinates himself (19) and this is followed by the attack of the swarm on the brothers (32). In the ending scene, the order is subverted to foreshadow the kidnapping of the migrants by the human trafficking gang. Thus, I would argue that it is only after the apocalyptic scene which foreshadows their kidnapping that the migrants become voiceless. Moreover, the loss of their voice is only the beginning of their gradual dehumanization. The narrator foreshadows their further dehumanization by the epithet “los que van muy pronto a renegar de su creador, de su historia y de su nombre”17, soon after they will gradually lose all aspects of their individuality, they will forsake their God, their history and their name (340).

It also important to emphasize that not only the migrants lose their individuality, but also the kidnappers themselves. As said before, the moment they are “baptized” as victimizers by padre Nicho, their proper names are erased for names related to funeral rites. Only two characters are an exception, Epitafio and Estela, who are also invoked by epithets. Contrary to the migrants, the epithets separate Epitafio and Estela from the group of other kidnappers. These epithets foreground the intense relationship between the two and present them as a unity (Hanaï 111). Whereas Epitafio is referred to as “ElquequiertantoaEstela” (“HewhosolovesEstela”), Estela is referred to as “LaqueadoraaEpitafio” (“ShewoadoresEpitafio”) (Monge 111). Secondly, Epitafio is also referred by an epithet that is more comical, namely, he is called “Lacarota” (“Thunderhead”)18 for his bad-tempered face (17). Epitafio and Estela also have parallel epithets that refer to their shortcomings related to the senses which makes them oblivious for their surroundings (Hanaï 111). Estela, or “Oigosoloquequiero” (“IhearonlywhatIwant”), is characterized by her deafness which obliges her to use hearing aids (Monge 29). Moreover, it also is a subtle reference to the moment she removes her hearing aids to silence her surroundings. In this passage, Estella is in two minds about her suspicions of the priest, in a

17 “those who will soon forsake their creator, their history and their name” (344)

18 “La carota” is a idiomatic word from Mexican-Spanish, it means someone who has a bad-tempered face, or is “sour-faced.”. In English, one would say “someone who has a face like thunder” which is why the translation provided by Frank Wynne used the name “Thunderhead”.

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moment of frustration she removes her hearing aids (216-217). This turns out to be a tragic mistake; without her hearing aids she doesn’t hear the bullets being fired by the priest’s henchmen and she barely managed to escape the attack (230). Epitafio, or “Elsordodelamente” (“Hewhoisdeafinmind”) (268), is characterized for thinking only about Estela and the state of their relationships which makes him unaware of what is happening in his surroundings. It is interesting to note that he is called by this epithet after his car collides with a calf. It is from this moment that Epitafio’s obsessive thinking about Estela becomes destructive to the extent that he kills himself. Lastly, Estela’s epithet “Laciegadeldesierto” (“Theblindwomanofthedesert”) (286) foreshadows the tragic moment when Estela stabs her own eyes upon hearing the news of Epitafio’s death (Monge 333-334).

Another fundamental characteristic of epic poetry is its use of a high, elevated style. To achieve such style, Monge draws from quotes or rewordings of lines of Dante’s canonical epic poem The Divine Comedy (1308-21). Most of these quotations are from “Inferno”, which is the first part of the three-part epic poem. Through the use of italics, these quotations are blended seamlessly into the text. Moreover, they are used to describe the suffering of the Central American migrants which corresponds to that of the damned souls in Dante’s novel. The high- elevated diction is in sharp contrast with the slang and vulgar language used by the perpetrators. The language of the perpetrators is characterized by an abundance of swear words and exclamations, such as “Pinche […]” (31) and “el pendejo” (54). The oral language is also represented in the syntax and spelling of the text messages between Epitafio and Estela. For example, in the following excerpt the spelling of the words “iba” “hasta” and “medalla” and the syntax of the sentence are incorrect: “te lo dije que iva a mi a servirme. Fue boxeador en olimpiada mi gigante asta ganó el una medaja!!!”19 (65; emphasis mine).

The quotations are only one of the many echoes of Dante’s canonical epic poem in Monge’s novel. The prominence of explicit intertextual references to Dante’s epic poem presents the migrant’s journey through Mexico as a descent into the underworld (Washington n.p.; Sperling 188-189). By referring to Dante’s allegorical world, the novel can represent the horrors that go beyond any form of representation. Moreover, the intertextuality with Dante delocalizes the novel from the Mexican context and instead universalizes it.

19 “TOLD YOU HED B VALUABAL. EX-BOXER, OLYMPIC TEAM, MY GIANT. EVEN 1 A MEDELL!!!” (58)

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One of the intertextual references to The Divine Comedy is the mythical landscape of the novel. Some of the places in the novel, such as “El Paraíso” (Heaven), “El Infierno” (Hell), and “El Purgatorio” (Purgatory) are directly inspired from Dante’s epic poem. The mythical landscape of the novel is an allegory of Mexican society and the marginalization of Central American migrants.

Similar to Dante, the journey of the migrants through the underworld begins in the “selva oscura”, i.e. the dark jungle. The border is situated amid the natural environment of the jungle. While Dante was guided through the infernal landscape by Virgil, the migrants are guided by two teenage boys, los chicos de la selva. While traveling through the jungle, they set up camp for the night in the four immense subterranean caves also known as “El Purgatorio” (Monge 300). These caves are also called “Cuatro Bocas” (Four Mouths) (301) and are often described as “the earth’s gullet” (307). The narrator describes how the water that falls from the sierra is channeled through the caves and cleanses the jungle (300, 307-308). As pointed out by Sperling, these descriptions also are an echo of Dante’s epic poem (188). Moreover, the river that runs through the caves is described as “[…] [el] río que consigo arrastra los olores de todo eso que está vivo y de todo eso que está muerto”20 (308). Thus, the caves, and by extension the jungle, is represented as a twilight zone between life and death.

In that respect, it also significant to mention that it is in these caves that the oldest brother kills a pregnant woman who traveled with them (Monge 309). Sperling argues that the crime is an allegory for “the destruction of the cycle of life” (188; my translation). From the moment the migrants enter the system of human trafficking, they enter a cycle of death (Sperling 188). From a different angle, one could argue that this scene emphasizes the symbolism of the jungle and the border zone, namely a space that represents the dark side of human nature and in which lawlessness reigns. From the moment the migrants enter the jungle, they enter a violent world in which they either are the prey or the predator. The jungle, and thus the border area, is represented as a hostile environment which only rules by one law, that of survival, it is “to kill or to be killed.” In the passage of the murder of the pregnant woman, the oldest boy is the hunter and the pregnant woman is the vulnerable prey. Moreover, this is also evidenced by the foreshadowing of the murder in an earlier passage (Vázquez-Enríquez 10). In the earlier

20 “[…] the river that sweeps along the odours of all things living and all things dead” (312)

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passage, the brothers are terrified by a distant howling, until they realize it is a howler monkey whose legs have been severed and who has a gaping in its belly (Monge 263). The oldest brother kills the monkey with his machete, for the creature scared him and made him look like a fool (263-264). Thus, he doesn’t kill the creature as an act of mercy, on the contrary, he kills the creature out of pure hate (Vázquez-Enríquez 11). This scene is mimicked when he kills the pregnant woman with his machete (309).

The natural environment of the jungle is represented as a locus horribilis, a space that is the embodiment of hell. The desolate, dark and hostile jungle acts as a protagonist, it gives rise to feelings of fear and horror and devours all those who enter it: “[…] oyen entonces los sonidos que la selva exhala en su hora negra: suenan los gritos de los monos aulladores, en el arroyo cantan los anuros, chillan en el aire los murciélagos y zumban las chicharras escondidas en la hierba.”21 (16; italics mine).

The second Dantesque space featured in Monge's novel is “El Paraíso”. It is the name of the orphanage situated in the sierra and run by the priest Nicho. It is also the location where he runs his human trafficking business. From the moment the children arrive at “El Paraíso”, they are marked by the branding iron of the priest. While the girls are tattooed with tiny squares (91), the boys are tattooed with three black dots that form a triangle (38). The mark of ownership shows the children that their lives are not theirs anymore but owned by the priest. It is he who chooses who is sold, who lives, and who dies. When he wants to get rid of his henchmen, he either kills them or drives them to suicide (90; 134-135). In the end, the priest doesn’t succeed in killing Estela. He does succeed in driving Epitafio mad to the point of suicide (134-135).

The last Dantesque space is the breaker’s yard owned by two triplets, Encanecido and Teñido, named “El Infierno”. Aside from breaking apart cars and burning them, the brothers also take apart and burn bodies for a living (Monge 246). The kidnapping gang brings their truck with dead bodies to the triplets and they remove the evidence of the massacre for them.

21 “[…] take in the sounds that emanate from the dark jungle: the screeching of the howler monkeys, the singing of the frogs on the riverbed, the shriek of bats in the air, the drone of cicadas in the grass. (5-6).

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These three infernal spaces don’t seem to be only inspired by Dante’s infernal landscape, but also by the memory of the Holocaust. “El Purgatorio” and the jungle in general, represents what Agamben has referred to as “the camp”, the camp is the space in which the state of exception, i.e. the suspension of law, becomes the rule. In “the camp”, the authority can reduce humans to “homo sacer”, i.e. those who can be killed without it being perceived as murder. For Agamben, the concentration camps of World War II constitute the state of exception par excellence. Under Hitler’s regime, the Jews were conceived as disposable and killable lives. Likewise, the practice of the branding of his victims by his priest in “El Paraíso” evokes the tattoos branded on the Jews by the Nazis. Lastly, the business of the two brothers who founded “El Infierno” also seems to be inspired by the practices of the Nazis. Like the Nazi’s crematoria, the brothers take apart dead bodies and burn them to remove the evidence of the massacre perpetrated by the kidnappers. Thus, the diegetic space of the novel is also an allegory of the Holocaust.

Thus, Monge relies on the collective Western imagination of unbearable suffering influenced by Dante’s “Inferno” and by the memory of the Holocaust to represent the unspeakable and unthinkable horrors experienced by Central American migrants. By doing so, he universalizes and allegorizes the suffering of Central American migrants. This is a strategy to bridge the experiences of Central American migrants and the reader.

3.2.3 Tragedy

Initially, Monge meant to write Las tierras arrasadas as a play in the style of a classic tragedy (Washington n.p.) Hence, the novel has been heavily influenced by the genre. The tragedy is a particular kind of play or literary work of a serious or sorrowful character with a fatal or catastrophic ending. The fatal ending of the tragedy emerges from the protagonist’s tragic flaw (hamartia), which leads to poor decision-making and brings about their tragic downfall.

Las tierras arrasadas is a tragedy in the sense that both Epitafio and Estela have a tragic flaw, which is their fear to be vulnerable. Their fear of vulnerability hinders their romantic relationship because they cannot communicate their feelings and thoughts. Moreover, similar

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to the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, they are also flawed in the sense that their intense love for each other drives them to madness. Their desire to be together and their inability to communicate with each other bring about their tragic end. The protagonists are so preoccupied with the state of their relationship, that they are blind for the betrayal of padre Nicho and Sepelio. Contrary to the protagonists, the reader is informed by the omniscient narrator of Sepelio and Nicho’s scheme (Monge 129). Sepelio and the priest have hired two corrupt policemen, El Topo and El Tampón, to kill Estela and the men loyal to her. The priest and Sepelio believe that the death of Estela, Epitafio’s greatest love, will drive him to suicide. Although they fail to kill Estela, Sepelio succeeds in deceiving Epitafio to believe that his love is death. Like Romeo, his overwhelming grief drives him to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of a moving truck (323-324). On the contrary, Estela, who is pregnant with Epitafio’s child, cannot bring herself to commit suicide. Instead, she follows the tragic fate of Oedipus, the protagonist of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and blinds herself with a machete. (Monge 333; Ramos González 5; Fuentes Kraffcyk 47)

The plot of the novel is not only inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but also by other Shakespearean tragedies. The theme of forbidden love and betrayal are featured in many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but the character of Sepelio seems to be inspired by Iago, the antagonist in Shakespeare’s Othello (Ramos González 5; Battersby n.p.). Like Iago, Sepelio is a master manipulator and has a deep hatred for Epitafio. Hence, Sepelio plots against Epitafio to replace him as the leader of the gang. Whereas Iago uses a handkerchief to deceive Othello, Sepelio uses a picture of a pile of bodies. Thus, Monge uses Shakespearean characters as models for his protagonists as a strategy to universalize his novel.

Following the style of the Shakespearean tragedy, premonition plays a significant role in his novel. One of the ways the narrator foreshadows the future of certain characters is with the murder of animals. As mentioned before, the violent death of the pregnant woman by the eldest of los chicos de la selva is foreshadowed by the brutal death of the howler monkey. In a similar manner, the narrator foreshadows Epitafio’s suicide. Before Epitafio throws himself in front of a moving truck (323-324), he and Sepelio hit a stray calf in the middle of the road with their truck as part of a bet (269-270). Similar to the eldest of los chicos de la selva who kills the

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howler monkey for making him look like a fool, Sepelio kills a parrot for insulting him (183- 186). His killing of the parrot with a rock foreshadows the clubbing of the migrants in the trailer in a later scene (193-196). This use of animals as premonitions of the fate of the characters represent how the perpetrators dehumanize their victims. They do not make a distinction between a human and a non-human. The kidnappers become desensitized to violence to the extent that even the most gruesome scenes, leave them unbothered.

Aside from the Renaissance tragedies, Monge also draws from conventions of the Greek tragedy. Similar to Greek tragedy, Monge’s novel has a tripartite structure. The text consists of three books dedicated to the three protagonists, the book of Epitafio, the book of Estela, and the book of los chicos de la selva (de sons of the jungle). Moreover, these three books are interspersed by two brief interludes named “Así se derrumbó el horizonte” (i.e. “so crumbled the horizon”) and “volverán la luz y el fuego” (i.e. “light and fire will return”). In the Greek tragedy, the interludes serve as a transition between two acts and explain or comment on the situation that is developing. In Las tierras arrasadas, these interludes represent the transition from Mausoleo and Merolico from victims to victimizers.

The first interlude takes place in a former slaughterhouse in “El Teronaque” were the migrants are imprisoned in several rooms. The interlude is centered around Mausoleo, a tall man and ex- boxing champion who was separated from the group of hostages by Epitafio to work for the gang. To Epitafio’s disappointment, the giant cannot stand to hear nor watch the torture of his companions by Epitafio’s men. Therefore, Epitafio orders Mausoleo to guard the migrants, to prove his value for the gang. Although he was initially overcome with fear, his new identity gives Mausoleo a sense of pride. After he kills one of the hostages, Mausoleo realizes that he cannot go back to his past life and thus, he accepts his new fate as a means for survival. The character embodies Valencia Triana’s concept of “the endriago subject”, i.e. those who turn to gore practices as a means of self-empowerment. Through the victimization of the hostages, Mausoleo transitions from a marginalized position to a position of power.

The second interlude takes place in “El Infierno”, the breaker’s yard owned by two triplets, Encanecido and Teñido. This interlude is centered around Merolico, a former soldier and the

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eldest of the migrant group. While they are held in a blood-red pickup truck driven by Estela’s men to “La Cañada”, Merolico soothes the migrants by promising them good fortune. What Merolico couldn’t predict was that Estela’s men would be ambushed (Monge 236) and that he would be the sole survivor of the carnage (243). The tragic ending of the migrants to whom he promised a better life, explains why he is named Merolico, a Mexican word for a charlatan or a quack doctor. After surviving the attack, Merolico is sold by El Tampón and El Topo to the triplets who founded “El Infierno” (237). They buy Merolico as forced labor to hack up the bodies and burn them. While hacking up the bodies, Merolico relives his past as a soldier and the years afterward in which he had joined a paramilitary organization. The memories of his violent past drive him mad with guilt to the point of suicide. Whereas Mausoleo decides to work for the kidnapping gang, Merolico decides to end his life. His fate demonstrates how he and Mausoleo never really were presented with a choice. Once they are trapped in the cycle of violence, there is only one way out and that is death.

Moreover, the interludes also serve to represent the dehumanization of the migrants. The interludes demonstrate how the perpetrators conceive the migrants as mere products of exchange that can be bought, exchanged, or collected. The bodies can become more valuable to them or their value can expire, such is the case for a man who refused to tell the perpetrators his name (Monge 2015: 121).

From the very first scene, Mausoleo is seen as more valuable than the other migrants to Epitafio. Mausoleo’s height and strength make him an asset to the gang. Epitafio doesn’t care about the lives of the migrants, their near suffocation is a laughing matter for him (59). Only after he realizes that “his giant” also risks suffocation, he becomes concerned (59). Mausoleo’s life only matters to him as forced labor to exploit for his necro-business (57, 59). The fact that Mausoleo is a skilled boxer and even won a medal increases his value for Epitafio (65). On multiple occasions, Mausoleo has to prove his value for the gang by killing other people. In the second interlude, Mausoleo proves his authority over the migrants and his value as an executioner by killing one of the migrants (97-104). In another instance, he has to fight for Epitafio against a gang member of Señor Hoyo, Macizo (124-126). The one whose gang member can kill the other wins the bet.

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The commodification of migrants is also represented in the second interlude. The triplets of “El Infierno” have converted the burning of bodies to a business, a business that is as valuable to them as their breaker’s yard (Monge 246). Their commodification of these dead bodies goes as far as creating a commercial slogan for their business: if you leave the vehicle with them, you get the bodies burned for free (246). If their customers want to keep the car, they pay for each body (246). Thus, the triplets make a profit on the burning of dead bodies. The brothers do not perceive migrants as humans, they only think of the logic of supply and demand. For them, the migrants, dead or alive, are merely products of exchange. This is also evidenced by the scene when Merolico throws himself into the fire (252). The brothers’ distress doesn’t arise from the death of a human being, but rather from the loss of their investment (252).

Lastly, the logic of supply and demand are also upheld by los chicos de la selva. They convince the migrants to hire them as smugglers, but then betray them by handing them over the gang of Nicho (18). After the migrants are put into the trailer, the boys collect the items the migrants left behind and sell them to their new victims (32-33). For them, the migrants are both customers and products of exchange. Moreover, they profit from their kidnapping by selling the items they left behind. They also distinguish between migrants who are valuable for them and those who are not. According to the older boy, they have a rule that they do not accept old, pregnant, nor disabled migrants as their customers because they will delay their transport to the gang (305).

The aforementioned predominately discussed the story narrated by the omniscient narrator which is centered on the kidnappers and in which the migrants are dehumanized and silenced. Nevertheless, Monge also represents, to a smaller extent, the voices and the perspectives of the migrants through the Greek chorus. In Greek tragedy, the chorus is a non-individualized group of performers who function as a collective voice and comment on the dramatic action. Traditionally, the Greek chorus is not involved in the dramatic action (i.e. the plot) but merely comments on it. They provide the audience with background information and narrate the feelings and thoughts of the protagonists. In an interview with John Washington, Monge mentions that his Greek chorus is in dialogue with the tragedies of Euripides, namely The

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Suppliants and The Bacchae (n.p.). Similar to the tragedies of Euripides, the Greek chorus in his novel does not comment on the dramatic action nor explain the thoughts and feelings of the tragic hero. They are involved in the dramatic action and thus, they are on itself an explicit theme (Murnaghan 421). Monge uses the Greek chorus to integrate real testimonies of Central American migrants in his fictional novel (Monge 342). The chorus doesn’t comment on Estella and Epitafio’s feelings and thoughts, it voices the concerns of their victims instead. It narrates their motivations for and expectations of their journey, but also expresses their fear, desperation, and disorientation when confronted with the brutal reality of their journey (Sperling 190-191): Cuando volvió todo a empezar, la verdad, sí me puse a llorar… yo tengo dos hijos, estaba haciendo el viaje porque no tengo dinero… porque no tengo oportunidades… por eso estaba haciendo el viaje… y Dios me estaba haciendo a mí esto… lo odié y odié a mis padres y a la tierra. (59)22

3.2.4 Testimonio

By using excerpts of real testimonies of Central American migrants in the chorus, Monge’s novel enters into a dialogue with the testimonio genre. Some of the testimonies are quoted verbatim from a report published by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission (CNDH 2011). The Greek chorus allows him to represent the violence experienced by Central American migrants without the interference of a narrator who speaks for them. The extra- heterodiegetic narrator can speak for the actions, feelings, and thoughts of the perpetrators, but doesn’t do so for the migrants. As mentioned above, it is only through the chorus that the reader is aware of the motivations and feelings of the migrants. Therefore, it functions as a communal voice of the migrants and emphasizes their shared identity as victims of violence. This is also evidenced by Monge’s selection of testimonies. He didn’t integrate all of the testimonies he read but selected certain phrases and moments that were repeated throughout the testimonies (Foro del Tejedor 2015). The repetition of certain phrases or experiences in the novel is a strategy to represent the violence against Central American migrants as a systemic phenomenon. Thus, he raises awareness of the cachucho industry, the systematization of the kidnapping, smuggling, and extortion of Central American migrants in Mexico.

22 When everything started again, I have to admit I cried… I have two children, I made this journey because I have no money… no future… This is why I was making the journey… and this was what God had done to me … I hated Him, I hated my parents and my homeland (52).

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While the narrative of the perpetrators dehumanizes the migrants to commodities, the Greek chorus serves as a counternarrative to their dehumanizing discourse (Sperling 191; Fuentes Kraffcyk 48). As mentioned before, the chorus humanizes the migrants by giving insight into their psyche. While the narration by the extra-heterodiegetic narrator allows the reader to sympathize with the perpetrators, the chorus serves to confront the reader with the victims of these perpetrators. Thus, Monge wants the reader to sympathize with both sides, as they both are victims of exploitation and social marginalization. He shows the reader that although those two seem to be on opposite sides, they bear a lot of similarities. According to him, what separated the victim of the victimizer is mostly luck: they each grew up in the same places, in similar circumstances, “and yet one migrates and the other exploits the migrant” (Washington n.p.). Characters like Mausoleo and Merolico demonstrate how one can switch sides as a strategy to survive (Washington n.p.)

On a final note, one can conclude that the Greek chorus allows Monge to integrate the representative aspect inherent to the testimonio in the novel while avoiding the paradox of representation inherent to the genre. He doesn’t create the illusion that the text is an eyewitness testimony. On the contrary, Monge’s authorial presence is evidenced by his use of intertextuality, allegory, and symbolism. By these rhetorical techniques, the reader can identify the text as a constructed piece of literature. Moreover, it allows the reader to separate the identity of Monge from the omniscient extra-heterodiegetic narrator by which he maintains the fictional pact.

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CONCLUSION

This dissertation provided an analysis of Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) and Emiliano Monge’s Las tierras arrasadas (2015) and their representation of the contemporary violence against Central American migrants. The central question of the analysis is how do these authors employ genre hybridization to represent contemporary violence against Central American migrants.

Although both Luiselli and Monge write about the violence against Central American migrants, they do so from a different approach. Luiselli predominantly relies on non-fiction, because it allows her to address the crisis, its historical origins, and the U.S. immigration system more directly. She wants to provide her reader with a wider understanding of the crisis, while also directly denounce the violence against Central American migrants. On the contrary, Monge reasserts the importance of the fictional approach to achieve empathy for the lives of others. For him, the reader should not only feel empathy for the Central American migrants who become victims of violence, but also for those who become victimizers. His novel avoids a black-and-white dualism, which is why he also doesn’t moralize or offer a value judgment. Therefore, his novel doesn’t have such a direct denunciation of the violence as Luiselli.

Even though non-fiction is more prevalent in Luiselli’s work and fiction in Monge’s work, they rely on both. Whereas Luiselli combines the conventions of the essay, the chronicle, and the testimonio with autofiction, Monge combines the conventions of the noir novel, epic poetry, and the tragedy with the testimonio. Their difference in genre hybridization also influences their literary representation of subjective, systemic, and symbolic violence.

With the chronicle genre, Luiselli thematizes the violence against Central American migrants. Violence must be the central theme because she wants to provide her reader with a vital understanding of the undocumented children’s suffering. Her direct confrontation with the theme of violence allows her to denounce it. Her critique is focused on the systemic and symbolic violence against Central American migrants. She criticizes the migration practices

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and policies both in Mexico and in the U.S which violate the children’s’ human rights. Another form of systemic violence on which she gives a critique is the policies implemented by schools that restrict the migrant’s access to education. Moreover, her work provides a strong critique of the dehumanizing discourse in U.S. law, politics, and media. Their discourse is a form of symbolic violence because they justify relations of dominance and naturalize anti-migrant and racial ideologies.

The fictional approach gives Monge more freedom to experiment, it allows him to use intertextuality and to allegorize the suffering of the Central American migrants. The use of allegories and intertextuality delocalizes his novel from the Mexican context and allows him to universalize his novel. The tragedy, Dante’s “Inferno” and the memory of the Holocaust have significantly influenced the Western imagination of unbearable suffering and extreme violence. In his novel, the tragedy, the intertextuality of Dante’s “Inferno”, and the allegory of the Holocaust allow him to represent the unspeakable and unthinkable horrors experienced by Central American migrants. Contrary to Luiselli, his novel doesn’t directly denounce the systemic and symbolic violence against Central American migrants. He addresses systemic and symbol violence through allegories, intertextuality, and spatial symbolism. For him, violence is the social circumstances that affect his characters, their actions, and their identity. Therefore, the violence is not represented through the characters, but through their social circumstances.

The interludes of the tragedy allow him to focus on two subaltern characters, Mausoleo and Merolico, and their transition from victims to victimizers. They represent Triana Valencia’s concept of the “endriago subject”, those who turn to gore practices as a means of self- empowerment. Mausoleo is the epitome of the endriago subject, he has fully embraced his new identity. His social mobility from a marginalized position to a position of power gives him a sense of pride. Moreover, his character demonstrates how social marginalization can force someone to use violence as a strategy to survive. On the contrary, Merolico guilt drives him mad to the point of suicide. Merolico’s death demonstrates how these two characters never had a real choice, either they kill or they will be killed. Moreover, the interludes also demonstrate the commodification of the migrants by the perpetrators. The discourse used by the triplets of “El Infierno” and by los chicos de la selva evidenced how endriago subjects perceive the

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migrants' bodies or the destruction of their bodies as products of exchange. Moreover, it also demonstrates how migrants may both gain or lose value during their journey.

Luiselli opts for an oblique representation of subjective violence, the violence occurs “outside of the narration” and is obliquely represented through intertextuality and the use of objective sources. Monge does quite the opposite, he addresses the subjective violence explicitly in its hyperbolic representation of Dante’s “Inferno”. Both the omniscient narrator and the Greek chorus describes how the protagonists kidnap, torture, extort, exploit, rape, and murder the migrants. The explicit representation of violence is also evidenced by the mythological space of the novel, namely “El Paraíso” and “El Infierno”, which serve as an allegory of the Holocaust.

Whereas Monge employs the omniscient third-person narrator from the epic genre to distance himself from the narrative, Luiselli uses the autodiegetic narrator of autofiction which filters the narration through a more subjective and personal perspective. Thus, Luiselli engages with the autobiographical pact which implies the veracity of the events, while Monge maintains the fictional pact of verisimilitude. Their choice of narrator also influences their engagement with the testimonies. Both works use real testimonies of Central American migrants. In Luiselli’s work, the testimonies are narrated by an autodiegetic narrator. Thus, she speaks for the undocumented children, because the age of the children and the trauma of their experiences make them unable to narrate their stories in a coherent and comprehensible way. Although she attempts to give a voice to these children, her privileged position as an erudite, metropolitan writer excludes her from the community she wants to represent. Thus, her literary work is also characterized by Spivak’s paradox of representation. Monge avoids the paradox of representation by integrating the testimonies of the migrants in the Greek chorus. This allows him to represent the suffering of the migrants without the need to speak for them.

Luiselli reclaims the individual stories of Central American migrants. Whereas they are dehumanized in the media discourse as an undifferentiated mass, she gives visibility to the individuality of the migrants. Moreover, she elaborates on the story of Manu and the two young girls from Honduras to create empathy for the undocumented children. Monge does quite the

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opposite, through the epithets and the Greek chorus he represents the migrants as an undifferentiated mass. The migrants in his novel undergo a gradual process of dehumanization which is also reflected by the gradual disappearance of their voices in the third-person omniscient narration. It is only through the Greek chorus that the migrants are allowed to speak. Thus, the epithets and the chorus are an allegory of the silencing and dehumanization of the Central American migrants by means of violence.

In comparing these two literary works, this dissertation has broadened the knowledge of the relationship between genre hybridization and the representation of contemporary violence. This study demonstrated how genre hybridization between fictional and non-fictional modes of storytelling allow these authors to approach the different facets of the migrant crisis and its violence. Moreover, this research has established how these two authors provide an alternative discourse about the Central American migrant crisis which brings awareness to the violence against Central American migrants and which compels and instigates empathy in their readers for their suffering.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Luiselli, Valeria. Los niños perdidos (Un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas). Madrid: Sexto Piso, 2016.

---. Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

---. Lost Children Archive. London: 4th Estate, 2019.

Monge, Emiliano. Las tierras arrasadas. Barcelona: Literatura Random House, 2015.

Wynne, Frank, translator. Among the Lost. By Emiliano Monge, London: Scribe, 2018.

Secondary sources

Literary corpus that deals with the Central American migrant crisis Hernández, Alejandro. Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas. Mexico City.: Tusquets, 2013.

Herrera, Yuri. Señales que precederán al fin del mundo. Cáceres (España): Editorial Periférica, 2010.

Martínez, Óscar. Los migrantes que no importan: en el camino con los centroamericanos indocumentados en México. Barcelona: Edición Icaria, 2010.

Ortuño, Antonio. La fila india. Mexico City: Océano, 2013.

Villalobos, Juan Pablo. Yo tuve un sueño: el viaje de los niños centroamericanos a Estados Unidos. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2018.

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Sources about the context of the Central American migration crisis Amnesty International. “Invisible Victims: Migrants on the move in Mexico.” Amnesty International. April 2010. [Consulted on 16 November 2019]

Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos. “Informe especial sobre los casos de secuestros de migrantes.” CDNH. 15 June 2009. [Consulted on 14 December 2019]

---. “Informe especial sobre secuestro de migrantes en México.” CNDH. 22 February 2011. [Consulted on 14 December 2019]

Médecins Sans Frontières. “Kidnappings and extreme violence against migrants are spiking” Médecins Sans Frontières. 30 October 2019. [Consulted on 16 November 2019]

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Children on the run: unaccompanied children leaving Central America and Mexico and the need for international protection. Washington D.C.: UNHCR, 2014. . [Consulted on 12 December 2019]

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Sources about Valeria Luiselli and her work Tell Me How It Ends Bausells, Marta. “Valeria Luiselli's New Book Tackles the Cruelty of Immigration Court” Vice, 18 October 2017. [Consulted on 10 June 2020]

Embry, Marcus. “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 73.2 (2019): 219-220.

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Compromiso político, empatía y realismo neoliberal en Carne y arena de Alejandro González Iñárritu y en Tell Me How it Ends de Valeria Luiselli.” Campo de relámpogos, 5 November 2017. [Consulted on 4 February 2020]

Felsenthal, Julia. “Married Mexican Writers Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli on Their Buzzy New Novels and New York Life.” Vogue, 3 March 2016. [Consulted on 8 July 2020]

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Logie, Ilse. “Los niños perdidos de Valeria Luiselli: el intérprete ante las vidas ‘dignas de duelo’.” Iberoamericana, 75 (2020): 1-13.

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Muñoz, Brenda Morales. “Reflexiones sobre la migración a partir de ‘Los niños perdidos’ de Valeria Luiselli.” Diseminaciones. Revista de Investigación y Crítica en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales 2.3 (2019): 53-70.

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Epic Poetry

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