Fiction as Counter-Discourse: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and the Rewriting of the Central American Migration Crisis

Abstract

In a time of crisis, social distinctions arise not only on the basis of where we live, but how we move. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis — where one must remain at home and limit one’s movements in order to protect communities from the virus — demonstrates this fact. Mobility has become a resource that is disproportionately distributed: some people have access to it and some people don’t. Tim Cresswell, writing on this theme, argues that the way we experience mobility is informed by the narratives and meanings that surround it. Immigration, for instance, has become a polarized issue in contemporary political discourse, as those in power advance negative stereotypes about migrants in order to uphold specific political agendas. Maria C. Ledesma, likewise, posits the “[E]bolification of immigration reform,” a development which serves to perpetuate anti-immigrant sentiments and stereotypes. These political narratives come with specific uses of language, freighted with assumptions about the effects of migrant arrival in the receiving state. One such use of language is the term “illegal,” which in conservative political discourse is a noun rather than an adjective, as in the usual sense — naming the immigrant as a criminal, as if an inherently morally delinquent person. Commenting on such words as “illegal,” philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have argued that violence is embedded in language. This violence has the power to determine the public perception and fate of immigrants to the West from former colonies, and other diasporic subjects.