Using Children’s Voices to Represent Border Losses – The Construction of Childhood in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

Abstract

Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive reveals the challenge of telling the stories of immigrant children who get lost in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands without appropriating their trauma or forcing the narrative into a coherent shape that is easily accessible to a supposedly empathetic reader. Published in 2019, following a period of intense media coverage caused by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and in response to the 2014 childhood immigration crisis during the Obama presidency, the text forms an emotionally complex critique of the cultural construction of childhood in legal framings and media representations of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border. I argue that Luiselli’s exceptional way of incorporating children into her narrative and the way she creates a strong resemblance between the depicted children in the narrator’s family and immigrant children who get lost in the Sonoran Desert, forms a compelling critique of binary constructions of childhood in the social imaginary, especially through common media representations. Informed by the field of childhood study, I contend that Luiselli carefully constructs a delicate narrative of childhood between infantilization and adultification. By using the narrator’s own children and the negotiation of their roles and status within the family as a point of reference and resemblance to the lost children at the border, Luiselli acknowledges the tension between treating children as innocent, dependent and helpless and the danger of adultifying them, thereby forming distinct implications on immigrant children’s political and social status as well as a critical commentary on their depiction in mainstream media representations.