Archival Narrative Justice in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

Abstract

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws.

1. Introduction

In an editorial for a special issue of Archival Science, Andrew Flinn and Ben Alexander identify archival material as “sources documenting and memorializing past struggles and violations of rights, as resources supporting ongoing claims for justice and healing, and as tools for understanding the past in order to influence the present and the future” (Flinn and Alexander 2015, 330). Throughout this paper, I draw on this justice-oriented understanding of the archive to argue that Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) is an archival novel that generates what I call “archival narrative justice”. Luiselli’s novel memorializes and documents the traumatic journey of undocumented children crossing the US-Mexico border, generating an empathetic narrative that lays bare the injustice embedded in arbitrary and settler-colonial border laws. Luiselli’s narrative draws from history to highlight the ways in which countries such as the USA have directly contributed to the global socio-political context that has produced an influx of child immigrants from Latin American countries. It also reminds the reader of the genocidal past that resulted in the decimation of Native Americans, and their lands being taken over by the USA. Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, along with her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), which is a precursor to the novel documenting Luiselli’s experience interviewing undocumented immigrant children, use literary narrative and the archive as a vehicle to understand the past that has generated the modern border regime. Such texts document the horrors experienced by children crossing multiple national boundaries to seek refuge in the USA, critique the takeover of land and resources from Native Americans, support claims for justice for undocumented children, and influence the ongoing discourse of immigration in which undocumented immigrants are frequently demonized and criminalized.

Lost Children Archive, thus, can be identified as a novel that engages in a form of archiving that Flinn and Alexander identify as “activist archiving”: “the processes in which those who self-identify primarily as activists engage in archival activity, not as a supplement to their activism but as an integral part of their social movement activism” (Flinn and Alexander 2015, 332). Luiselli’s novel can be understood as an act of “activist archiving” achieved through novelistic narrative, which helps to humanize and present empathetically the stories of undocumented children crossing the US-Mexico border. Mere numbers indicating the casualties at the border, dots on migrant mortality maps, abandoned personal items at the border, and echoes reverberating in the desert, all of which Luiselli refers to in the novel, become invested with personal histories that begin to reveal undocumented immigrants as not mere criminals breaking immigration law, but as fellow human beings who are trying to survive violence and pursue better life opportunities. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. Building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands, I use the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Luiselli treats the liminal space that straddles borders as a dynamic interstice coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, echoes, and resistance of the border crossers and border dwellers who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws. In Lost Children Archive, the borderland is itself an archive, sustaining the archival narrative of the novel.

2. The Novel as Archive

The Society of American Archivists (2016) defines the word “archive” as “permanently valuable records—such as letters, reports, accounts, minute books, draft and final manuscripts, and photographs—of people, businesses, and government.” Luiselli’s preoccupation with such an archive is evident in the title of the novel Lost Children Archive itself. At the outset, this novel can be understood as a form of archive, or a collection of “permanently valuable records” about “lost children”, a phrase that Luiselli uses to refer to undocumented immigrant children. The narrator of the novel defines such lost children as “someone who waits”, who waits “for their dignity to be restored”, (Luiselli 2019, 48) and as “children who have lost the right to a childhood” (Luiselli 2019, 75). Rather than adopt terms widely used in socio-legal discourse such as “undocumented immigrant”, “refugee”, “alien”, “asylum seeker”, “immigrant”, “migrant”, “foreigner”, and “illegal immigrant”, which are already heavily politized and in some instances criminalized, Luiselli uses a term that appropriately and succinctly captures the circumstances of these children who roam the desert borderlands in search of refuge. In addition to the narrative proper, which is itself archival, Luiselli incorporates a number of intertexts, illustrations, intake questionnaires used for court screenings, migrant mortality maps, polaroids, migrant mortality reports, newspaper clippings, posters, musical scores, and other content into the narrative, giving the novel multiple archival layers. Parallel to the author’s deliberate amalgamation of multiple sources in structuring the form of the novel as archive, the woman-narrator also collects and archives a multiplicity of material as described in the section titled “Archive” in the first part of the novel: “I collected loose notes, scraps, cutouts, quotes copied down on cards, letters, maps, photographs, lists of words, clippings, tape-recorded testimonies” (Luiselli 2019, 23). Luiselli’s and the woman-narrator’s sources that contribute to their respective archival projects become one and the same, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional. The woman-narrator fills her bankers box with “a reasonable amount of well-filtered material that would help me understand how to document the children’s crisis at the border” (Luiselli 2019, 24). It is important to note that the archive compiled by both the narrator and Luiselli is not merely documenting history, but creating a platform for marginalized voices to be heard such as that of undocumented children, which indicates the justice-oriented nature of Luiselli’s archival novel. The material she refers to in this section are all incorporated into the narrative, which play the dual role of being concrete “real” material of spatio-historical significance and being artefacts of a novelistic account, further contributing to conceptualizing the novel as archive:

I had a few photos, some legal papers, intake questionnaires used for court screenings, maps of migrant deaths in the southern deserts, and a folder with dozens of “Migrant Mortality Reports” printed from online search engines that locate the missing, which listed bodies found in those deserts, the possible cause of death, and their exact location. At the very top of the box, I placed a few books I’d read and thought could help me think about the whole project from a certain narrative distance: The Gates of Paradise, by Jersey Andrzejewski; The Children’s Crusade, by Marcel Schwob, Belladonna, by Daša Drndić; Le Goût de l’archive, by Arlette Farge; and a little red book I hadn’t read yet, called Elegies for Lost Children, by Ella Camposanto.

(Luiselli 2019, 24)

At the end of each chapter, the writer lists the contents of a box, which specifies all the sources that she used in generating that particular chapter. During their road trip, the family travels with seven bankers boxes in their car, four in which are material related to the father’s soundscape project that he calls “an inventory of echoes” of “the ghosts of Geronimo and the Apaches” (Luiselli 2019, 21). The fifth box contains the material for a sound project that the woman-narrator hopes to work on related to the immigration crisis, while the last two boxes are assigned to the five-year old girl and the ten-year old boy, the narrator’s children, and are recognized as “the children’s future archive” (Luiselli 2019, 42) that they can build during their cross-country travels. Although the narrator is hesitant to “call our collected mess an archive” (Luiselli 2019, 42), the collective family archive that they build with the boxes, the echoes the father collects, the polaroids the boy takes, their witnessing of child immigrants being boarded onto a deportation flight, and the children’s reenactment of the lost children’s journey (which echoes fictional writer Ella Camposanto’s Elegies of Lost Children, based on the historical Children’s Crusade of 1212)1, all contribute to the layered archival quality of the novel, which highlights the suppressed, marginalized, and untold aspects of History2 and the official Archive.

Lost Children Archive thus documents the experiences of immigrant children to highlight the injustices they experience, and, by doing so, brings to light the problematic nature of the laws that sustain arbitrary borders. As Valentina Montero Román argues, “the novel’s formal evocation of the archive is a tool for confronting the challenges of telling a knotty, unending story of racialized removals” (Román 2021, 170). Given the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, children or otherwise, and the indignity and loss of rights they experience as a result of being undocumented, these individuals and their histories/stories go unheeded. Several of those who succumb to death during the journey, by being killed by gangs, by being dehydrated in the desert, or by falling to their deaths from the freight train La Bestia, which more than half a million Central American immigrants use to reach the US-Mexico border (Luiselli 2017, 19), might not even be identified or recorded as dead. Traditional archives, therefore, fail to account for undocumented immigrants. Their undocumentedness in terms of not having official permission to cross international borders and their presumed criminality force them to the borderlands and strip them of the right to be part of humanity and the official Archive.

While archives (particularly as defined by the Society of American Archivists) traditionally would not have included creative content such as novels, Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive is a prominent example of how literary texts such as novels can contribute to and become part of an archive that embeds “permanently valuable records… of people, businesses, and government” (Society of American Archivists 2016). Luiselli also explicitly refers to “the archive that sustains this novel” in the “Works Cited” section at the end of Lost Children Archive:

Like my previous work, Lost Children Archive is in part the result of a dialogue with many different texts, as well as with other nontextual sources. The archive that sustains this novel is both an inherent and a visible part of the central narrative. In other words, references to sources—textual, musical, visual, and audio-visual—are not meant as side notes, or ornaments that decorate the story, but function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past.

(Luiselli 2019, 357)

Luiselli’s conception of the novel, which reveals itself to some extent through the novel’s narratorial voice, goes beyond the traditional idea of the novel as mere fictional narrative, and instead establishes the novel as drawing from history and archival material: “the value of the novel… is that it is not a novel. That it is fiction but also it is not” (Luiselli 2019, 85). In one instance, the narrator’s children are confused as to whether their father is “telling stories or if he was telling histories” (Luiselli 2019, 216). Luiselli fuses history with fictional narrative and uses the vehicle of the novel for the purpose of archiving minoritized histories or counterhistories, and to remind the reader that “History” with an uppercase “H” is merely one myopic version that is backed by the dominant ideology. Román highlights how women and people of color recognized the myopia of the Archive and Historiography and sought to address the misrepresentations and exclusions of minoritized communities through narrative to generate some form of justice:

In both fiction and nonfiction, women across racial and ethnic difference worked to address archival myopia through storytelling. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, authors as diverse as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Virginia Woolf, Edith Eaton, Dorothy Richardson, and Jovita González wrote fiction that unsettled the construction of cultural and historical memory about their various communities. They experimented with stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse, with historical fiction, the short story, and the autofictional essay in ways that pushed back against histories that sought to exclude them.

(Román 2021, 174–75)

For the many writers that Román cites, achieving justice and challenging “archival myopia” consists of acts of storytelling in the form of archival narrative. Justice in this context and as discussed in this article refers to the process of understanding, interpreting, and addressing archival absences and misrepresentations through individual and collective narratives that draw from archival material. Justice, and more specifically “archival narrative justice”, recognizes that individual and collective experiences, particularly those of marginalized, colonized, or oppressed groups, are often shaped by the stories that are told about them, regardless of the truth-value of these stories, and by the ways in which they are (under/mis)represented in History and in the Archive. Archival narrative justice is achieved when narratives draw from histories and archives of such marginalized groups and give voice to their lived realities, ensuring that they are heard, validated, and integrated into larger conversations about justice, fairness, and equity. Lost Children Archive, for instance, through its archival narrative, creates a broader understanding of the root causes of child migration and the complicity of the United States in giving rise to such migrations. It also creates a platform for the erased histories of Native Americans, revealing the arbitrary settler colonial violence that has given rise to the modern border regime, which has dispossessed Native Americans of their land. Luiselli’s novel demonstrates multiple features via which she articulates and achieves archival narrative justice, such as reclaiming the histories of marginalized groups in ways that challenge stereotypes, contesting hegemonic narratives that are embedded in History and the Archive, creating a platform for restorative justice through empowering and amplifying voices of marginalized groups, generating empathy and understanding through a humanizing interpretation of archival artefacts, and by influencing public discourse on what it means to deliver justice through archival narrative in the absence of adequate state/legal/institutional justice.

It is also important to understand the distinction between the historical novel and the archival novel. In his book The Historical Novel (1981), Georg Lukács identifies the historical novel as a distinct genre and argues that it can provide a substantial representation and understanding of socio-political contexts and the socio-historical processes of any given time. He also argues that while being grounded in what is historical, the historical novel delivers a powerful critique of such contexts. He explains how the historical novel depicts average, typical, or representative characters and socio-economic classes whose fates reflect the broader experiences of historical change at any given moment in history. Character development and their choices are shaped by historical conditions and contexts of the characters’ time. Referring to the novel Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1814, which Lukács considers as the founding text of the historical novel genre, he states that “Scott endeavours to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces” (Lukács 1981, 33). According to Lukács, the historical novel also embodies the epic form in its ability to portray the vastness and complexity of historical change.

This conception of the historical novel, however, does not engage with questions of justice, or grapple with ideological and political dynamics that ascertain how and what aspects of history get represented in historical novels. The archival novel, however, particularly in the case of Luiselli, is preoccupied with questions of justice, and engages with history in ways that serves this specific purpose. Archival fiction uses historical artefacts to highlight and give voice to histories that have been excluded and displaced by the Master Narrative of History, as does Lost Children Archive, which incorporates a multiplicity of historical records such as newspaper clippings, migrant mortality maps, polaroids, posters, illustrations, intake questionnaires used for court screenings, musical scores, and migrant mortality reports. The archival narrative draws on fictionalized reconstructions of lived realities of primarily the minoritized, the dispossessed, the colonized, the victimized, and of other similar communities whose histories are often not represented in historical narratives or historiography. To recall Flinn’s and Alexander’s conception of the archive quoted at the beginning of this article, archival materials are “sources documenting and memorializing past struggles and violations of rights” and “resources supporting ongoing claims for justice and healing” (Flinn and Alexander 2015, 330). Thus, narratives that draw on such archival material also embody a justice-oriented purpose that goes well beyond simply representing and using historical material in narrative.

Román also supports this distinction by identifying how “dominant archives produce the historical marginalization that they record”, noting that documentation “does not just record what was or is there”, but also “creates structures for knowing that which was previously unknown and provides frameworks for what can be imagined and produced” (Román 2021, 182). Similar to Salman Rushdie, who utilizes the words “faction” and “factional”3 to demarcate fiction that is established in fact and history, Luiselli’s fiction is deeply embedded in the realities and histories of the world, particularly those related to immigration in order to generate counterhistories that push back against the dominant Archive and the structures for knowing that it produces. During an interview with The New Yorker, Luiselli pointed out the role that narrative can play in engaging with issues of justice, specifically when the prevailing legal system fails to address questions of injustice: “Perhaps the only way to grant any 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” (quoted in Wood 2019). In Tell Me How It Ends, she writes “In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it 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” (Luiselli 2017, 96–97). This becomes evident in the way different narrative voices structure Lost Children Archive. Part I is narrated by the mother, while part II is narrated by the boy addressing the girl (the woman-narrator’s children). The three chapters of part III have three different narrative frameworks. The first chapter is narrated by the mother, the second chapter has a third-person narrator, and the third chapter introduces mixed narrative voices, including the boy addressing the girl. The constant shifts in narrative voice, the repeated narration of events presented through different perspectives that create narrative echoes, and the generation of narrative heteroglossia (the existence of multiple narrative voices and perspectives from across time and space), mimic the heterogeneity of the archive. The very presence of such narrative heteroglossia establishes the novelistic archive’s potential to generate justice through the inclusion of heterogenous records and stories.

This justice-oriented understanding of narrative aligns particularly well with how the Society of American Archivists approach archives: “These records are kept because they have continuing value to the creating agency and to other potential users. They are the documentary evidence of past events. They are the facts we use to interpret and understand history” (Society of American Archivists 2016). Luiselli’s novel is an attempt at documenting what was taking place at the US-Mexico border during 2017 when there was a surge of child immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border into the USA. During the first presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021), public discourse and media coverage pertaining to undocumented children crossing the US-Mexico border were primarily shaped by political rhetoric that framed such children as a threat, as part of an “immigrant invasion”, and as contributing to a “border crisis”. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli describes how “in varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground… they will bring their chaos, their sickness, their dirt, their brownness” (Luiselli 2017, 15). She points out how “In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” (Luiselli 2017, 44). The language used by media frequently criminalized and dehumanized asylum seekers, ignoring, trivializing, and veiling the life-threatening violence that they were fleeing from. A series of pejorative terms such as “foreign criminals”, “thugs”, “anchor babies”, “aliens”, “terrorists”, “illegal aliens”, “viruses”, and “illegals”, some of which are legal terminology, have been used to refer to undocumented immigrants, including children. In the article “Racialized Hostipitality and Narrative Resistance in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People”, I discuss in detail how such language, public discourse, and media coverage generate what I call “the “Master Refugee Narrative”, which is a negative and dehumanizing narrative that justifies the hostility with which the asylum seekers are treated” (Jayasinghe 2024b, 2). The creation of such a narrative legitimizes the execution of punitive laws and increased surveillance given that the asylum seeker/immigrant is labeled as a threat to public and national security.

Luiselli points out that this view of the child immigrant as a threat, which needs to be swiftly taken care of, goes back to 2014, when between April 2014 and April 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied undocumented children were detained at the US-Mexico border. This is also the time when Luiselli started to work as a volunteer interpreter at an immigration court in New York City. In Tell Me How It Ends, she points out how, before the immigration crisis was declared in the summer of 2014, minors seeking immigration relief in the USA were allowed roughly 12 months to find a lawyer to represent them before their first court hearing (Luiselli 2017, 39). However, as Luiselli highlights, this timeframe was reduced to 21 days when the Obama administration introduced the “priority juvenile docket”, which led to deportation proceedings against undocumented children from Central America being accelerated by 94%, given the drastically reduced timeframe available for undocumented children to find legal support and build a defense for an asylum claim. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli calls this policy “the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children” (Luiselli 2017, 41). She also highlights an amendment to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which facilitates the immediate deportation of children from countries that share borders with the United States such as Mexico and Canada (Luiselli 2017, 52–53).

The “Zero-Tolerance” and family separation policy introduced in 2017 exacerbated the situation of undocumented children. Trump administration officials had publicly suggested that the separation of families was a deterrent strategy. Writing for the Cable News Network (CNN) in March 2017, Daniella Diaz writes that the then Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly considered separating children from their parents at the border as part of a deterrent strategy. She quotes Kelly, who states that such a policy would be used “to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network” (Diaz 2017). She also cites Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson David Lapan, who considers the family separation policy as contributing to “options that may discourage those from even beginning the journey” (Diaz 2017). According to a joint report issued by Human Rights Watch, Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School on 16 December 2024, as many as 1360 children have never been reunited with their parents after being forcibly separated at the border during Trump’s first presidency. It is believed that the US government separated more than 4600 children from their parents between 2017 and 2021. The Human Rights Watch article “US: Lasting Harm from Family Separation at the Border” emphasizes that “the government refused, in many cases for days or weeks, to disclose the circumstances and whereabouts of separated children to their parents, which meets the definition of an enforced disappearance”, and that “Forcible family separations may also have constituted torture, the intentional infliction of severe suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent. Even a single instance of enforced disappearance or torture is a crime under international law” (Human Rights Watch 2024). It is in this context that Luiselli seeks to use the narrative form to achieve some form of justice for undocumented or “lost” children.

The Trump administration also expedited the deportation of undocumented children during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing public health concerns. Writing for NBC News in May 2020, Julia Ainsley states that the “DHS has said the deportations are justified under Title 42, which allows restrictions on immigration to slow the spread of disease” (Ainsley 2020). Title 42 stems from the 1944 Public Health Service Act, and is a provision that allows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to restrict the entry of individuals into the United States if there is a serious risk of disease introduction, which was invoked to address the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. However, investigative reporting by media outlets such as NBC News revealed how the DHS was seeking to expedite child deportations as early as 2017 as a deterrence strategy to discourage Central American asylum seekers. Ainsley writes how Kirstjen Nielsen, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, wrote to Congress in 2019, shortly before she was removed as secretary, seeking permission to change the law to allow DHS to remove undocumented children more quickly, although Congress did not authorize such a request.

Writing for The New York Times, also in May 2020, Caitlin Dickerson writes that hundreds of undocumented children were deported during the COVID-19 pandemic “without the opportunity to speak to a social worker or plea for asylum from the violence in their home countries—a reversal of years of established practice for dealing with young foreigners who arrive in the United States” (Dickerson 2018). She remarks that such deportations are symptomatic of “an extraordinary shift in policy that has been unfolding in recent weeks on the southwestern border” (Dickerson 2018). She points out how, historically, children who sought asylum in the United States were granted basic amenities such as shelter, education, and medical care as well as access to due process that gave them the opportunity to make a case for seeking immigration relief in the United States. Such a process underwent unprecedented disruption under President Trump’s policy changes, and children who crossed the US-Mexico border were sometimes deported within hours of entering the USA, or abruptly deported without due process and before families could be notified. Some children who were deported had asylum appeals pending in the court system, which highlights the administration’s determination to use policies arising out of temporary circumstances to indiscriminately deport as many minors as possible. Against this backdrop, Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive functions as a recuperative narrative and an inclusive history-archive that seeks to generate restorative justice.

In this context, popular right-wing discourses about these children represented them primarily as criminal, diseased, and illegal. Texts such as that of Luiselli’s are important to build a counternarrative, to document the past, and to understand history from the perspective of the minoritized and the victimized. Writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have pointed out the danger of a “single story”, which is usually that of the powerful, the victorious, and the prevailing ideological order (Adichie 2009). However, such histories tend to be uncritically lionized and celebrated as the single version of History, suppressing the equally valid histories and stories of non-majority members of society. As Jacques Derrida points out, “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995, 11).

Similar to Derrida, Saidiya Hartman, too, highlights the political potency of the archive: “every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (Hartman 2020, xiii). The archive legitimizes and propagates the stories and histories it holds and gives primacy to the logic embedded in such archives (be it colonial, Eurocentric, patriarchal, or capitalist logic). Flinn and Alexander point out that actors such as the state who maintain archives are engaged in “an intensely political project which seeks to perpetuate ‘‘the political and economic status quo’’” (Flinn and Alexander 2015, 331), which highlights how archives are created and maintained to serve specific geo-political and socio-cultural interests. Howard Zinn is explicit about the political stakes of the archive, rejecting the misinformed view that the archive is “objective”:

The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake. If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft. Scholarship in society is inescapably political. Our choice is not between being political or not. Our choice is to follow the politics of the going order, that is, to do our job within the priorities and directions set by the dominant forces of society, or else to promote those human values of peace, equality, and justice, which our present society denies.

(Zinn 1977, 20)

Similar to Zinn, Luiselli recognizes the political potency of the archive, and how “present society denies” justice to those who need it the most, such as immigrant children who are fleeing persecution in their countries. The first epigraph Luiselli uses to open the novel reveals her awareness of the politics of the archive: “An archive presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies—Arlette Farge” (Luiselli 2019, 3). Both Zinn and Luiselli imply that all archives, regardless of whether they represent hegemonic History or not, are “politicized”, “inescapably political”, and cannot claim to any objectivity. Luiselli’s alternative archive that she compiles via Lost Children Archive is neither objective nor apolitical. She has an openly stated and specific socio-political agenda, which is to espouse the rights and dignities of marginalized and disempowered communities through her writing, and her approach is explicitly political across all her creative work. In this light, Luiselli’s work aligns well with the definition of the archive established by both the Society of American Archivists as well as Flinn and Alexander, quoted in this article. To be an archivist, whether for the dominant group or for marginalized groups, is to be an activist who espouses specific political positions that are manifested in the way in which the archive is organized and presented.

As the narrative archivist, Luiselli works to archive the lived experiences and histories of immigrants as well as Native Americans through narrative, pushing back against the “single story” that has been generated about such groups to their detriment. For instance, Lost Children Archive refers to an article titled “Kids, a Biblical Plague”, which reports that “Tens of thousands of children streaming from chaotic Central American nations to the US… this 60,000 to 90,000 illegal alien children mass that has come to America… these children carry with them viruses that we are not familiar with in the United States” (Luiselli 2019, 124). In instances such as these, Luiselli is archiving, via the novelistic narrative, the ways in which the immigrant child was conceptualized in right wing media. The use of words such as “streaming”, “chaotic”, “illegal”, “alien”, and “viruses” generates a sense of crisis and threat that can negatively affect and threaten the American public. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli wonders whether the reaction would have been different had the children been non-colored and racially different: “We wonder if the reaction would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children?” (Luiselli 2017, 15). Luiselli counters one-sided and narrow readings of immigrant children early in the novel by providing the context to their migration:

All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systemic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, and usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.

(Luiselli 2019, 19)

In addition to pointing out the immediate circumstances that the children were fleeing from, Luiselli draws from global history to underline the economic and political causes, and the “consequences of a historical war that goes back decades” (Luiselli 2019, 51) that has created instability and violence in Latin American countries, which necessitate seeking refuge outside such countries:

The convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers.

(Luiselli 2019, 124)

In Tell Me How It Ends, the essay that preceded Lost Children Archive, and in which Luiselli writes about her experience as an interpreter helping undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Luiselli refers to the fragmented nature of the children’s stories: “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” (Luiselli 2017, 7). Yet, the very brokenness of the articulation of their stories is an aspect that is important to record. In Lost Children Archive, Luiselli draws directly from the stories she hears first-hand from immigrant children fleeing Latin American countries, archiving the novel with an “every-immigrant-child” story.

In addition to archiving the stories of undocumented children, Luiselli generates a parallel archiving process that records the histories of Native Americans, particularly in relation to settler colonialism, which critiques the creation of the US-Mexico border and questions the legitimacy of the Global North Border Episteme in general. The narrator’s children, introduced simply as “girl” and “boy”, “would ask Papa for more Apache stories” (Luiselli 2019, 203), which generates a narrative space for recuperating suppressed and marginalized histories of Native Americans. The children’s father would narrate “histories… about the old American southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. All of this was once Mexico” (Luiselli 2019, 203). In another instance, the narrator and her husband explain how Arizona, once part of Mexico, became American territory (Luiselli 2019, 125). The dominant history that most archives highlight and make easily accessible, which celebrate the Global North colonial border regime, is rearticulated as a “whirlpool of trash”, (Luiselli 2019, 215), and the United States’s presumed greatness is associated with “Genocide, exodus, diaspora, ethnic cleansing” (Luiselli 2019, 215). The father’s comment that “This whole country… is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history” (Luiselli 2019, 125) is an apt way to understand the ideological workings behind archives and the politics of archiving. Luiselli recognizes this archival bias and embeds what I call “story-histories” in her text, using the novel as archive. The section about the formation of the Chiricahuas, for example, is a good case in point:

He told us about how the different Apache bands, like Mangas, Coloradas and his son Mangus and Geronimo, who were all part of the Mimbreño Apache band, were fighting against the cruelest white-eyes and the worst come-and-goes, which is what they called the Mexicans. They joined up with Victorio and Nana and Lozen, who were part of the Ojo Caliente band and were fighting more with the Mexican army, and then also joined with another one of our favorite Apaches, Chief Cochise, who was invincible. The three bands became the Chiricahuas, and were all lead [sic.] by Cochise.

(Luiselli 2019, 216)

Another example is when the father explains to the children about the Indian Removal Act: “Geronimo and his band were the last men to surrender to the white-eyes and their Indian Removal Act, my husband tells the children. I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word “removal” is still used today as a euphemism for “deportation”” (Luiselli 2019, 133). As a consequence of these story-histories, the narrator’s children as well as the reader become exposed to Native American histories, specifically that of the Chiricahua Apaches. Similarly, in Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli provides comparable historical context related to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resulted in Mexico losing half of its territory to the USA, and the Indian Removal Act, which was approved by Congress in 1830 (Luiselli 2017, 17). These and numerous other examples from Luiselli’s work demonstrate the effective ways in which she uses the novel as archive and generates an archival narrative to give visibility to and create awareness of marginalized histories.

3. Archival Narrative Justice

Scholars of archival studies referred to in this paper such as Flinn, Alexander, and Zinn, among others, have underlined how archives support the attainment of justice. Archives engage in the process of “documenting and memorializing past struggles and violations of rights”, and “supporting ongoing claims for justice and healing” (Flinn and Alexander 2015, 330). The website of the Society of American Archivists states that “Archival records serve to strengthen collective memory and protect people’s rights, property, and identity” (Society of American Archivists 2016). By merging archival story-histories pertaining to minoritized and discriminated against communities such as undocumented immigrants and Native Americans with literary narrative in Lost Children Archive, Luiselli generates what I term an “archival narrative”. This archival narrative has a decidedly justice-oriented purpose. On the one hand, it challenges the dehumanized portrayals of child immigrants by shedding light on how and why immigration is a last resort for many of those who cross the US-Mexico border by presenting a humanized and realistic portrayal of such child immigrants. On the other hand, it resurfaces and highlights histories of Native Americans, which reveal how settler colonialism has contributed to the modern border regime and the arbitrariness of border laws. Lost Children Archive thus generates “archival narrative justice”, which is a term I introduce to discuss how narratives that draw from archival material and merge it with literary narrative address questions of justice. The novel is a concrete representation of Luiselli’s conviction that “Perhaps the only way to grant any 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” (quoted in Wood 2019). She is explicit about the connection between granting justice, the archival act of recording, and narrating stories, which she accomplishes through the form of the novel with Lost Children Archive and the form of the long essay with Tell Me How It Ends.

Several scholars have discussed how literature has the ability to engage questions of justice through empathetic portrayals and by challenging common assumptions about the world. David Babcock and Peter Leman, for instance, have specifically drawn attention to the ways in which literature critiques unjust legal systems and creates a space for “subversive and resistant subjectivities”:

They reveal the complex strategies artworks use to contest certain legal fictions, while at the same time acknowledging the force that those fictions carry. In addition, they show how literature can participate in the formation of subversive and resistant subjectivities around unjust legal systems, in the ways oppressed subjects fashion forms of life and communal identities in response to adverse laws.

(Babcock and Leman 2019, 5)

Other scholars have pointed out how literature is a powerful means to explore moral and ethical questions, such as the ones that are discussed in Lost Children Archive. Noël Carroll (2002) and David Davies (2007a, 2007b), for instance, consider literary narratives as generating “thought experiments” that can help readers to empathize and relate to the worldviews and struggles of the characters. In “A Nation of Madame Bovaries: On the Possibility and Desirability of Moral Improvement through Fiction”, Joshua Landy (2008) discusses how fiction can lead to moral improvement, while Daniel Jacobson has discussed what he calls the “ethical function of narrative art” (Jacobson 1996, 331). Both literary narrative and archive, therefore, by their very nature, are primed to explore questions of justice. When these two forms are fused together, as Luiselli does, such archival narratives become a potent means of challenging existing legal and socio-political frameworks that may engender injustice and inequity. In “Reclaiming the Border Narrative: Refugee Children as Victim, Witness, and Agent in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive”, for instance, I introduce the concept of “tripartite subjectivity” of refugee children to demonstrate how Luiselli’s novel challenges and reinterprets legal yet inhumane borders, and how the novel transforms the static border into a site of epistemic rupture, challenging both the Anglo-American legal episteme as well as settler-colonial History in its pursuance of literary justice in the absence of other forms of justice (Jayasinghe 2024a).

While challenging such biased frameworks, through its ability to generate “thought experiments”, archival narrative is able to evoke empathy and relationality. In Lost Children Archive, in one instance, the father points out that “Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua were all beautiful names, but also names to name a past of injustice, genocide, exodus, war, and blood” (Luiselli 2019, 233). He “wanted us to remember this land as a land of resilience and forgiveness, also as a land where the earth and sky knew no division. He didn’t tell us what the real name of the land was, but I suppose it was Apacheria” (Luiselli 2019, 232). The relationship between the father and the children is often used in this fashion to generate archival narrative justice through the narration of history-stories, which are then remembered, re-narrated, and transmitted to future generations through the children. Given that most official archives and records fail to adequately address settler colonial border violence and its consequences on immigrant children and Native American communities, Luiselli uses the form of the archival narrative to generate justice through narrative visibility, memorializing, documenting, and drawing the reader’s attention to such stories and histories. In a context where Anglo-American legal frameworks have failed to recognize the land rights of Native Americans and have dehumanized/demonized children seeking refuge from violence in their home countries, Luiselli achieves justice for these marginalized groups via the archival narrative by defying stereotypes, revealing histories and archives that challenge the hegemonic colonial History and the Archive, and by creating alternative platforms that can generate restorative justice through public and open engagement with past injustices.

In “Telling Stories That Never End: Valeria Luiselli, the Refugee Crisis at the US-Mexico Border, and the Big, Ambitious Archival Novel”, Román recognizes that Luiselli references the archive as an alternative organizing principle for the novel:

I suggest that Luiselli’s novel offers us an opportunity to consider the archival as an alternative organizational principle for the BAN [Big Ambitious Novel], one that offers a different historiography and an alternative epistemological orientation for the genre. A focus on the archival instead of the encyclopedic shifts attention from a pursuit of totality (and the inevitable limitations of such a project) to an exploration of the fragmented and recursive processes of constructing personal and historical memory. In this essay, I contend that Luiselli references the archive, instead of the encyclopedia, to represent the pervasive problems created by US racial construction—the subtle and not so subtle violences that resonate across time and space. More specifically, I argue that the novel evokes the archive in its fragmentation, recombinant and recursive organization, and narrative multiplicity as a way to demonstrate the complexity and irreducibility of the refugee crisis and the constructions of Latinx difference that develop alongside it.

(Román 2021, 168)

I build on Román’s concept of the archival novel, with its role in “constructing personal and historical memory” (Román 2021, 168), by lodging the archival novel firmly within a justice-oriented understanding of the archive. I do not necessarily maintain, however, that Luiselli’s work “evokes the archive in its fragmentation” (Román 2021, 168). While it is true that archives can be fragmented, Lost Children Archive is a remarkably cohesive and organized novel, and Luiselli’s brilliant skill in knitting together different perspectives, texts, histories, and memories across time and space reaches a climax in the chapter titled Echo Canyon. This chapter consists of a single sentence that continues for 20 pages without a single paragraph break, simulating the lengthy and inexhaustible journey undocumented immigrants undertake to enter the USA (and other Global North host countries). The first-person narrative voice of the brother, known simply as boy or “Swift Feather”, addresses his sister, and records the journey so that the sister will have access to what happened during their journey later, even if she is unable to remember anything by herself because she is too young. Parallel to this first-person narrative voice is the third-person narrative voice, which reports on the details of the journey and the challenges of the “lost children”, undocumented children who survive the journey on La Bestia, the shooting at the border, and the wanderings in the desert.

Luiselli develops a bewilderingly complex metaphorical, historical, literary, and material web of connections between the children (both the narrator’s children and the undocumented children) and the eagles that fly above the children as they walk in the desert. The children survive only because the eagles lead them to shelter and sustenance. The eagles are understood as a manifestation of the Eagle Warriors, who seek to protect the children: “the eagles won’t eat us, no way, I said, they’re taking care of us, don’t you remember the Eagle Warriors Pa always told us about... let’s follow them” (Luiselli 2019, 328). The boy states that he “knew in my heart though not my head that the Eagle Warriors had been there with us all this time… and we were safe thanks to them, I knew, they have been protecting us from everything” (Luiselli 2019, 335). The last chapter thus brings together the story-histories of undocumented children and Native Americans, which are then archived through the boy’s narration and documentation. The adoption of the Apache names Memphis and Swift Feather by the boy and girl, their encounter with undocumented children and the eagles, and the potential survival of the undocumented children after the girl gives them her binoculars and a compass, pull together the different narrative threads that Luiselli has been weaving in and out of the story throughout the novel. In this sense, the children become active agents of generating archival narrative justice. On the one hand, they trigger story-histories narrated by the parents, which contribute to the archival principle in the novel. On the other hand, they themselves contribute to the process of generating archival justice by documenting their journeys and by re-narrating the story-histories.

4. The Borderland as Archive

Luiselli opens the chapter “Missing” in Part I of Lost Children Archive by quoting Gloria Anzaldúa: “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (quoted in Luiselli 2019, 111). In the Preface to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (from which Luiselli borrows the previous quotation), Anzaldúa provides a longer explanation of what she considers as the borderlands:

The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S Southwest/Mexican border… the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. (no pagination is available for the Preface)

(Anzaldúa 1987)

While Anzaldúa focuses on the borderland as a physical space in a specific location in this instance, she also acknowledges elsewhere that to be “mestiza” and to be part of a borderland is to also embody a certain borderland cultural experience that persists irrespective of geo-physical location. Anzaldúa understands the borderlands as a place that produces “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country” (Anzaldúa 1987, 11), indicating how these interstitial spaces generate a “third” space, which houses the “mestiza” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79, italics in the original) and preserve the culture of “los atravesados”, (Anzaldúa 1987, 3, italics in the original) who are “those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal”” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). Anzaldúa defines the mestiza as someone who “copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79). She has the ability to function in the third country/third culture of the borderlands because “She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79). While living in the borderlands, “Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79).

The borderlands, thus, house a community of people who embody a range of qualities such as resistance, perseverance, plurality, ambiguity, hybridity, and adaptation, who, by their mere presence, challenge the dominant Archive, History, and settler colonial ideology, which seek to erase their presence and suppress their legitimate land rights. In conceptualizing the borderland as archive, I establish that the mestiza and the atravesados, who Anzaldúa considers as the inhabitants of the borderlands, as constituent of the archive. I do so in the spirit of Luiselli, whose protagonists collect echoes of Native American ghosts and reverberations in the desert as part of the archive, an approach that destabilizes the Western rational and rationalizing scientific subject of the majority of Global North literature, Archive, and History. The fact that the border dwellers persist, despite violent attempts to exterminate them by the border regime as well as corresponding legal frameworks, and the fact that they embody and record such violence, references to which are deliberately missing from official History and the Archive, make them record keepers and witnesses of their histories. It is in this light that the “mestiza” and the “atravesados” are considered as constituting the archive.

I consider the borderland and those who inhabit the borderland as archives unto themselves. However, I also make a distinction between archive and narrative. An archive in itself would not “narrate” itself in the same way a narrative narrates itself, while an archivist is not equated with a narrator or a storyteller (though there may be overlaps in their craft and method). The archival narrative, however, simultaneously builds the archive while generating an explicit narrative based on that archive. The borderlands and the border dwellers that feature in Lost Children Archive are archives in themselves, as they embody archival elements that represent minoritized histories of Native Americans and undocumented children. In the case of the borderland, its archives consist of artefacts such as echoes of ghosts, sounds of cadavers disintegrating, bones of dead or murdered border crossers, objects left by border dwellers, and magical realist elements such as the eagles who are the Apache children protecting both the narrator’s children and the lost children. The border dwellers and the border crossers have been dispossessed of their voices within the dominant discourse due to their “illegality”. Yet, they embody the lived experiences of what it means to be a border crosser from a minoritized community, which has suffered the dispossession of rights, dignity, and lands due to the colonial-capitalistic Anglo-American Border Regime, which I discuss in detail elsewhere (Jayasinghe 2025).4 Their “mestiza” and “atravesado” nature, as well as their in-between sense of being, can be read as a manifestation of the disparate yet manifold ways in which they continue to challenge the Archive and History, and preserve the archive and history of their communities. However, given that they are illegalized and criminalized, similar to how the borderland is conceptualized as a criminal and othered space, neither the borderland nor the border dwellers are given a platform to make their archival nature visible. This is where an archival narrative such as Lost Children Archive that adheres to Anglo-American narrative form rendered in English (and therefore has legitimacy and wider reach outside the borderlands and the illegalized discourse of the border dwellers) makes an intervention by creating a space for the borderland and the border dwellers to manifest and articulate themselves. Given Luiselli’s explicit justice-oriented objective in writing Lost Children Archive by drawing on both the narrative and the archive, the archival novel, in itself an archive, thus becomes the formal articulatory vehicle via which the border dwellers and the borderland “speak” (Armstrong 1997) as archive.

Adding to what Luiselli considers as archival material that can be categorized as sonic and visual content, such as echoes, winds, ghosts, eagles, the desert soundscape, and objects in the desert, I therefore contend that those who inhabit the borderlands also embody the archive while functioning as the purveyors and proliferators of that archive. In the case of Lost Children Archive, the undocumented children whose path crosses that of the woman-narrator’s children are the mestiza and the atravesados who, through both surviving and falling victim to the desert and the border imperial regime, embody the archives of the undocumented, the missing, the lost, and the disappeared. Their encounter with the eagles, representing the Apache Eagle Warriors, generates a link between the present and the past, connecting the two distinct archives of undocumented immigrants and Native Americans across time and space through the borderlands. The narrator’s children, who become active participants and witnesses of the survival of the lost children and the presence of the Eagle Warriors, become inhabitants of the borderlands in passing, and thereby also become part of the archive. The boy and the girl, however, through their own archival practices, such as narrating stories repeatedly that highlight different perspectives, taking polaroid photographs, absorbing the history-stories narrated by the father, and by enacting the journey of the lost children, become the next generation of archivists and storytellers.

The borderland functions as an archive given its ability to sustain such story-histories that have been excluded from mainstream archives because they originate in the ambivalent periphery of and between borders. The “boundary” that creates a “third country” is “unnatural”, as Anzaldúa points out, because it is a direct consequence of settler colonialism, which Luiselli expands upon throughout Lost Children Archive. For instance, the father in Lost Children Archive makes it a point to narrate “histories… about the old American southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. All of this was once Mexico” (Luiselli 2019, 203), unveiling the historical dynamics that led to large swathes of land that were inhabited by indigenous communities being taken over by the United States. Anzaldúa expresses a similar sentiment in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “This land was Mexican once, /was Indian always/and is./And will be again.” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). She also explains how those who inhabit the borderlands are dehumanized, violated, and exploited by “Gringos” (a word commonly used to refer to English-speaking Anglo-Americans), the evidence of which are archived in the borderland:

Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens—whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only “legitimate” inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger.

(Anzaldúa 1987, 3–4)

The formation of the “unnatural” US-Mexico border is viewed within the larger context of “Genocide, exodus, diaspora, ethnic cleansing” (Luiselli 2019, 215), and the father in Lost Children Archive highlights how “This whole country… is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history” (Luiselli 2019, 215). In Luiselli’s novel, the borderland is thus identified as a shifting and transitional space in which the “emotional residue” of such a history of genocide still lingers and is preserved and transmitted by the “prohibited and the forbidden”. These “prohibited and the forbidden”, however, embody the suppressed and marginalized counterhistories of the land and the indigenous peoples, representing resistance to ideologies of settler colonialism and capitalism, which is precisely that what makes these inhabitants of the borderlands “prohibited and forbidden”. In “Borderlands as a Site of Resistance in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought”, Anna Nasser expresses a similar idea, pointing out how “Being in a nepantla5 state allows one to recast the relationship between the center and the margins, and to reverse it completely by making the border—the most marginal place—the center of political action. This position permits a return to forgotten histories and a questioning of dominant narratives of oppression” (Nasser 2021, 31).

In this context, I introduce the concept of “borderland as archive” to theorize how the borderland constitutes the archive while generating resistance and agency, and to articulate how the borderland functions as a dynamic and functional archive that records and registers the moves of its inhabitants and epistemologies. The fact that both the father and the mother characters of Lost Children Archive are engaged in projects that require them to research and archive echoes, ghosts, voices, and stories that primarily inhabit the borderlands connects the archive with the borderland. As the chapter Echo Canyon demonstrates, the story-histories of the Apaches, the accounts of the undocumented children, and the stories of the woman-narrator’s children intersect and enmesh in the borderlands, making the borderlands a dynamic progenitor, incubator, and purveyor of archival material, whether in the form of echoes, manifestations of the Apaches in the presence of eagles, skeletal remains, or items left by immigrants in the desert.

One of the ways in which the borderland becomes archive is through the stories and histories that the father tells his children (and thereby the reader). Luiselli blurs the distinction between “stories”, which are traditionally “fictional” and therefore not “real”, and “history”, which is supposed to be based on irrefutable facts, and is representative of the Truth in a particular moment in time. The father’s accounts, however, are neither mere “stories” nor an irrefutable “History”, but “story-histories”. They fuse together the traditional narrative structure of a story with alternative histories/counterhistories and facts, highlighting the multiplicity of histories, and unveiling the hegemonic nature of Truth and History that are controlled by colonizing capitalists and their Archive. The father’s stories (examples of which were provided earlier in this paper) narrated within Luiselli’s novel reinforce the idea that History is merely the single story of the victor and/or the colonizer.

Story-histories that sustain and are sustained by the borderland embody the epistemologies of indigenous peoples who are the original inhabitants of the land and who are now pushed into the borderlands. The borderlands that archive such stories and epistemologies function as a challenge to the Anglo-American legal concept of “the Doctrine of Discovery” and the principle of “terra nullius” (which means “null and void”). On their website, the American Indian Law Alliance (AILA) explains how Papal Bulls issued in the fifteenth century conferred Christian explorers the right to claim lands that they “discovered” and treat them as under the authority of the Christian Monarchs of Europe. The logic for such an arbitrary takeover was that any land that was not inhabited by Christians can be “discovered” and exploited by Christians. The only way that the locals, commonly labeled “pagans” or “saracens”, would avoid murder or enslavement during such colonial takeovers was by “voluntarily” converting to Christianity. The Doctrine of Discovery and the principle of terra nullius are, according to AILA, “theological and legal fictions” that were weaponized against Indigenous peoples “to deny them their land, rights, and resources” (American Indian Law Alliance 2020). Although the Vatican repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius on 30 March 2023, the centuries-old impact of such colonial practices will take years to upend. In the context of colonialism, however, the borderland, which neither fully adheres to colonial compulsion nor is fully liberated, becomes an in-between space of resistance, housing, as Anzaldúa states, “the prohibited and forbidden”, their memories, lived histories, and future potential. In her essay “Land Speaking”, Jeannette Armstrong discusses how land is more than a mere material object to be exploited for profit, and how “land speaks”, functioning as an “archive of memory” (Armstrong 1997). To conceive the borderland as archive is to acknowledge the importance of the story-histories embedded in the borderland’s echoes and eagles, to identify the borderland as an interstice that nurtures and protects the othered Native Americans and undocumented immigrants, and to recognize the ways in which the borderland challenges dominant narratives and History that justify and proliferate the colonial-capitalist border regime.

There are many examples that demonstrate how land, specifically the borderland, “speaks” and functions as an “archive of memory” in Lost Children Archive. The section titled Echo Canyon, for instance, portrays the slow death of an undocumented child in the desert, whose memory becomes archived in the skeletal remains:

…months later, two men who patrol the borderlands will find the bones that were his bones and the rags that were his clothes, each item of his collected in transparent plastic bags by one of the two men who found him, while the other man takes out a pen and a map, and marks a spot on the map with the pen, one more spot among a few other spots on the paper map…

(Luiselli 2019, 322)

The same chapter provides a description of the soundscape of the borderland, which is archived in the form of echoes that documentarists such as the father and the mother in Lost Children Archive collect and re-archive:

…the hot, relentless wind drags the last notes of all the desert worldsounds disseminated across the barrenlands outside, sounds of twigs snapping, birds crying, rocks shifting, footsteps trudging, people imploring, voices begging for water before fading into silence with a final whimper, then darker sounds, like cadavers diminishing into skeletons, skeletons snapping into bones, bones eroding and disappearing into the sand…

(Luiselli 2019, 323–24)

The soundscape of the borderland archives the lost story-histories of undocumented children and the Eagle Warriors, generating an alternative archive that resists the absences and marginalization of the dominant archive, which criminalizes both Native Americans and undocumented children. The borderland’s sonic and visual archives provide context to understand the facts, lists and dots provided in reports or maps. The Migrant Mortality Reports in Box V, for instance, provide basic details of lost children. Their ages are listed as 9, 0, 14, 15, 8, and 11, while their causes of death are listed as rhabdomyolysis, hyperthermia, stillbirth, dehydration, exposure, and multiple blunt force injuries. Such facts are humanized, dots on maps are contextualized, and the skeletal remains are fleshed out when the borderland archive is articulated through the archival narrative, generating a narrative form of archival justice through the storytelling process.

Archival novels such as Lost Children Archive challenge dominant History, the majoritarian Archive, and the narrative logic of the “single story”, highlighting how such discourses embed, naturalize, and proliferate settler-colonial and authoritarian ideology. Luiselli’s novel, in particular, demonstrates how such discourses feed into the demonization and the othering of undocumented immigrants, particularly visa-less children crossing the US-Mexico border, and Native Americans who are relegated to the peripheral borderlands and, as Anzaldúa states, are treated as “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). Luiselli recognizes the power of both the narrative and the archive, particularly of the borderlands, in rupturing the dominant Epistemology of settler colonial border imperialism, and generates what I have called “archival narrative justice” to address situations in which legal institutions have failed to deliver justice or have refused to recognize the violations perpetrated on vulnerable and minoritized groups.