For August’s Women of the World book, I specifically wanted to find a Latina author. Last month, I realized that though I’d done a pretty good job of finding female authors from far away places, I hadn’t found any from countries closer to home. Given the continuing immigrant crisis at the US southern border, I figured it was about time that I put more energy into finding an author that would represent the voices that our country seems so ready to reject.
As it turns out, this task would prove to be more difficult than I thought. Because I’ve tried to support local businesses and independent bookstores, I’ve found my choice of authors to be limited at times, but never completely devoid of diverse voices. However, this month, it took me seven stops to find a local bookstore in Birmingham that carried a book by ANY Latina author other than Sandra Cisneros. (By the way, I love Cisneros, but wanted to explore someone new, especially after cheating last month.) At one point, I even went to a giant big box bookstore (which will remain unnamed) to try and solve my problem, but still came up short. Though I was eventually successful at a wonderful local bookshop, I found that even there it took the store librarian a good 20 minutes to find a book that met my criteria.
Though this process was undeniably frustrating, it was also incredibly revealing. Despite the growing Latinx population, there are few published Latinx voices speaking into our cultural milieu. Why? I’ve heard many of my friends wonder how we can allow people to continue to suffer and die in our borderlands. How can we allow children to be separated from their parents and housed in deplorable conditions? How? Yet, we continue to do so with the same ambivalence that my local bookstores displayed toward Latina authors. Perhaps we do so because, somewhere deep down, we have decided that those voices do not deserve to be heard and therefore, they don’t exist.
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico City to pursue dance. She would ultimately earn a PhD from Columbia University and go on to publish two essay collections, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions and Sidewalks, as well as novels, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Lost Children Archive. Alongside her focus on the immigration crisis, Luiselli continues to pursue her love of dance through her writing, working as a librettist for the New York City Ballet.
The book I chose to read for August was Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. This book tells the captivating story of a family that drives from New York City to the southern border in search of information about two seemingly unrelated topics: the immigration crisis and the final surrender of the Apache Indians. However, as the journey continues, the characters discover that the lost voices of the Apaches are also leading them toward the lost voices of those suffering on the border. Throughout this larger narrative also exists the smaller narrative of the family, which falls further and further into dysfunction. These two narratives come together in a way that beautifully highlights the unheard voices of the “lost children,” as well as the feeling of lostness in the two main characters that narrate the story. Luiselli’s writing highlights the fact that though a crisis can seem enormous in its scope, the individual voices that live through the crises must always remain at the center, otherwise, we may succumb to the apathy and cynicism that allows those voices to disappear altogether.
As I read Lost Children Archive, I was struck by the main character’s desire to collect voices and stories. I felt that, in my own mediocre way, I was on a similar journey, trying to create a sampling of the voices my society had silenced and build my own archive of understanding. Luiselli’s novel is striking not only in its writing, but also in its structure, which adeptly weaves narratives in and out of one another, allowing the reader to make unconscious connections that later resurface in glorious significance. Perhaps if we begin digging deeper into our own stories, we will find the necessary details that will connect us to those we deem too unlike us. Perhaps then we will also find our own voices and speak out for those who are voiceless.
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