There is a saying that goes, "Wherever you go, there you are" - meaning that people do not change just because their geographical location has. The essay demonstrates the truth in this saying only too well and shows that escaping from gangs, violence and daily dangers in Honduras changes nothing when the Hondurans who have moved with you are the same people who terrorized you in your hometown.
There are forty questions forming part of the legal questionnaire developed for Central American Children flooding into America in what became an immigration crisis in 2014 during Barrack Obama's presidency. More than one hundred and twenty thousand of these children were unaccompanied and as a result were detained at the border between America and Mexico. The book's author, Valeria Luiselli, acted as translator for many of these children, helping them to understand and answer these forty questions that determine whether they are given legal status or not.
The essay is divided into four main segments; Border, Court, Home and Community, which basically describe the children's four part journey towards safety and freedom. The author describes journeys across Central America that include dangerous train trips across the whole of Mexico, running from would-be kidnappers and rapists, and also the death threats issued to the families the children have left behind. The book also focuses on one young man in particular, who crosses the border, gets through his court appearance and is given assistance to find a home, only to find out that the Honduran community in New York is the same as the community he has been running from - rife with gang violence, drugs and bullying at school. Is his situation really any different now to the way that it always has been?
Although Luiselli begins the essay as its writer, walking a clearly-defined line between writer and subjects, she soon comes to question her own motivations and reasons for coming to America. What was she running from? Eventually she becomes a first person narrator, an immigrant who is still searching for answers, and a mother who cannot yet tell her daughter how their story is going to end. She also begins to wonder if her children are still made of the same stuff that she was, that the children journeying across the border are made of. If it came to it, would they be able to survive a hazardous journey like that on their own?
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican-born author who is better known for her fiction writing than her essays. Her debut novel Faces in the Crowd was awarded the Los Angeles Times Art Seiderbaum Award; In 2018 she received the American Book Award.
