Migrants Anonymous: The State-Sanctioned Archive Before and Beyond Lost Children Archive

Held deep within the old prison walls of Mexico City's Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) are documents memorializing the names of migrants who traversed the US-Mexico border as emigrants, laborers, and deportees. 1 Amid hundreds of files sent between various officials of the Departamiento de Migración (an administrative unit within the Secretario de Gobernación, or, Ministry of the Interior) are dozens of memos that straightforwardly bring the recipient's attention to attached reports of "deportados voluntares." The deportees, usually numbering in the hundreds per biweekly memo, were alternately bound for Jiménez, traveling by bus from Brownsville to San Luis Potosi, or apprehended by the Mexican consulate in El Paso. In conjunction with the memos, the attached long lists of names both identify individual migrants and tally the total number of reported deportees in the hundreds of thousands (Fig. 1). The state archive thus preserves and enumerates the scope of border crossing in a way that embeds a struggle over naming practices. The documents present a textual conundrum: on the one hand, the memos reduce the multiplicity of migration in the mid-twentieth century to an anonymous count of deportees, and yet, the attached reports memorialize the names of thousands of migrants who might otherwise be lost to history.

The core theoretical apparatus of this paper operates at the fulcrum of anonymity, migrant futures, and the communities that state archives tend to obscure. In this essay, I compare multiple formulations of anonymity within two versions of the archive: the state archive's deployment of anonymity as euphemistic homogenization and Valeria Luiselli's formal use of anonymity as capacious migrant storytelling in her 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive.2 A consideration of the novel's archival logic alongside that of official state archives unravels — and subsequently weaves together — notions of subjectivity and citizenship as theorized within the archival turn and across migration studies, literary studies, and onomastics — the study of names and naming.3

The holdings at the AGN, located in the Distrito Federal — the cosmopolitan urban center of Luiselli's own life — hint at the histories of the state's border peripheries. In Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, the nonfictional precursor to Lost Children Archive, Luiselli advocates for a "hemispheric history," a project which this article takes seriously for its juxtaposition of state archives from the 1960s and 1970s and fictional "archives for lost children" from the 2010s.4 My visit to the AGN was rooted in my comparative approach to US-migrant literature, which considers the migrant's role in the American racial imaginary alongside that of their origin countries. Where the AGN archives suggest that "in Mexico, emigrants represented a troubling reminder of the country's dependency on its powerful neighbor," a hemispheric history accounts for "a transnational problem that includes the United States ... as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated the problem."5 The documents held at the AGN demonstrate how these historic migrants "confronted state boundaries that defined peoplehood and communal rights."6 In their "voluntary departure," the migrants become difficult to formally claim and legitimate in the confines of state-defined nationality.7 The memos simultaneously document the hemispheric history of the migrants in their deportation from the US and their return to Mexico.

Placing Luiselli's twenty-first century works in conversation with the archival documents of the AGN proves generatively complementary. Despite her seemingly mismatched positionality as a member of the Distrito Federal's urbanite intelligentsia (as documented in her previous works), Luiselli's involvement as a translator for US immigration courts (as seen in Tell Me How It Ends), and her own later auto-fictionalized transversal of the southern US border (as told in Lost Children Archive), puts her in a uniquely adjacent position to those migrants while simultaneously putting in stark relief the differences of their situations. That position originates in the same central site of state formation, but it is the state archive and its naming practices that engender and memorialize euphemistic misrepresentations of Latinx migrants. As Alicia Schmidt Camacho has made clear, "Transborder communities of Mexican nationals, migrants, and Mexican Americans have continually exposed the limits of state formation for both the United States and Mexico."8 In this context, a comparative scope is crucial for the study of migrant literature, and the historical situation represented by Lost Children Archive requires a further questioning of state formation given the inevitably porous nature of Central America's state boundaries, which Wendy A. Vogt calls the "arterial border."9 To this end, as the title suggests, Lost Children Archive is "self-conscious about its own status as a set of documents for posterity — an archive."10 Comprised of loose notes, clippings, and scraps of recordings, the novel archive's "intertextuality, intermediality, and polyphonic echoes" differs in its narrative function from the state archive, and yet both foster an encounter with the stories of nameless migrants.11 The tension demonstrated by the archive — between state power's documentary enumeration and the collective potential of anonymization — can be reinterpreted as a literary question: how does the novel inhabit, narrate, and remember Latinx migration?

Luiselli's aesthetic recreation of her characters' archives replicates the experience of sifting through annals and scraps of related histories, as I did at the AGN, so that the reader, too, can participate in the act of narrating an impossibly all-encompassing history.12 The archive and its related legal proceedings are similarly "disjointed and labyrinthine," but in this case, not because the state documents hope to be capacious and hemispheric, but in many ways, as a measure of obfuscation.13 Luiselli's use of the language and structure of archives — along with the call for a hemispheric history contra euphemistic naming — necessitates a juxtaposition of the official and the novelistic archival story.14 Accordingly, I also point to the unexpected possibility of community within the ledger by not relying on the state's apparatus of enumerative naming. I mean to show that these migrants are more than a name on a list, and there are memories behind the ledger: of the journey, the migration, the history, and the hopes of return, of trying again, of reuniting. Naming oneself and establishing the bounds of one's community — especially as distinct from normative US citizenship — is a process of self-fashioning and a process in which writers and their crafted characters "actively construct their own identities and histories in response to dominant political, cultural, and popular representations."15 This construction becomes all the more important in the face of a process of collective racialization that homogenizes the diversity inherent in Latinx migrant communities.

This article grapples with the narrative relationship between state archival documentation and a novel that explicitly names the construction of an archive as its creative project, all while acknowledging the impossibilities of its collected narratives as "redress" for what can be understood as the crime of deportation.16 To outline the forms of state naming that inform the homogenizing political rhetoric of migration, I first briefly consider the history captured in the archival memos and ledgers from the AGN in light of the archival turn. The context for state naming and the role of the archive in that process proves necessary because Luiselli attends to these kinds of naming as the context for and against which she posits alternative naming protocols. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli lays out the politics behind state naming practices, and then, in Lost Children Archive, she attempts to combat state-sanctioned name-calling in favor of community building and self-identification.17 The structural and aesthetic naming practices used in Lost Children Archive have the effect of imagining life-sustaining migrant communities even as they maintain difference from within those collectives. Luiselli establishes the formal archival networks of the novel through structures of naming, thereby "expos[ing] novel writing as a curatorial practice of research and imagination" and giving rise to collectivity in the form of community.18 The novel eschews collectivity premised on misguided ideas of sameness among many, and yet its political aesthetics prove comparable to the lists of names in the archive all while imagining a shared futurity attendant to difference.

Naming as used in Lost Children Archive reflects an attempt on the part of characters to formulate conceptions of migrant community in the context of a socio-political milieu often aimed at isolation, family separation, and homogenization. This naming practice coincides with the novel's explicit articulation of its contents and forms as engaged with and mimicking an archive. These naming practices further establish that "historical memory is a construct, one that we create by including (and not including) certain documents in the archive of an event" or, in other words, what we name, what remains anonymous, and the valences of those constructions.19 Alex Woloch's key study on character contends that people are contained within narrative not only as "the textual arrangement of multiple elements but also the social balancing and comprehension of multiple characters or persons."20 Names help to fulfill both of those elements as a textual or structural element and as symbolic of social orders and meanings. Names have the potential to work both as "representation and style (or form)," where the meaning behind a protagonist's name works at a representational register, but the names of various community members littered throughout create the structural form that gives the narrative its shape.21 Luiselli's portrayal of migrant stories resists any singular representation by aiming toward a cacophony of voices that nevertheless come together to create different formulations of migrant community. The characters in Lost Children Archive entwine into a communal structure of individuals looking out not just for themselves but for one another.

A Turn to the Migrant Archive

To enter the AGN, I provided my credentials, handed over identification, and sorted my personal items into transparent, surveil-able bins. After the printing of my research-specific ID, I was left standing all but empty-handed with the exception of a pencil and notebook. Gazing down a long hallway of abandoned prison cells, I saw a sign pointing to the searchable finding aid (Fig. 2). The penitentiary served as an oddly apt environment given Jacques Derrida's definition of archive from "the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded."22 The vulnerability of being in such a historically carceral space was compounded by my need for assistance, and the necessity of asking for help in a foreign language. I am, like many people, anxious and halting when I speak in my non-native and non-heritage languages; I am much more confident as a reader of Spanish, the skill more pertinent for interpreting documents. Asking for assistance, and the fear of failing to ask correctly caused me to ruminate on the difficulty of asking for help in the migrant documentation process, another zone of uneasy interpretation and identification, but one with far more dangerous outcomes.

There exists a tension between the archive's official purpose — "inextricable from the establishment of nation-states" as Rodrigo Lazo has argued — and the researcher's desire to create a story about these migrants.23 The feeling of being surveilled and inept inside an archive where I was looking for records of migrations highlighted Sarah Horton's point that "the struggle over whether to include unauthorized migrants in the national body plays out at different levels of the state in the form of contests over documentation."24 Migrant-held documents work in tandem with archival documents like the ledger to maintain the migrant's visibility to the powers of the state — those that deport and those to which one is deported. The documents and process of documentation betray the friction between "individuals' narratives of identity and state bureaucratic identifications."25 At the archival level, this visibility remains long after the contested time frame of attempted migration.

The ledgers and memos at the AGN record migrations from the 1960s and '70s, circa the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The Act had the unintended consequences of harshly inhibiting migrant flows from Latin America and the Caribbean, effectively ending what Ana Raquel Minian terms the "circular migration" of braceros and permanent residents.26 Mexican migrants became de facto illegal aliens, thus originating the now familiar pattern of enforcement, apprehension, detention, and deportation, and creating the euphemistic "perception that 'Mexican' is a synonym for migrant illegality."27 Ignorance of onomastic context thus leads to stigmatization and the weaponization of terminologies that stand in for damaging traits, which result in discriminatory practices.28 The memos — which recount the migrants merely as a number of deportees — overlay the ledger and serve as a cover page that obscures the names beneath. Even though the names are listed, they are rendered effectively anonymous via their presentation in one long list, wherein the sheer amount of nominal information in the ledger effectively blurs the names together en masse. In the ledger, the named individual analogously becomes one among many who are nevertheless assumed to all be one in the same, an effect shored up by the sum noted in each subsequent memo.

The purpose of the memos and their attached ledgers is to document the "deportados voluntares," or Mexican citizens who "voluntarily" departed the US. At minimum, these reports include the name, age, and state of Mexican origin of the deported migrants, and often include further information such as sex, residence in the US, and in rare instances, marital status and descriptions of money due for labor completed.29 Between 1965 and 1985, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) initiated thirteen million deportations, most of which were classified as "voluntary."30 The documents under consideration here are from before the 1987 Supreme Court Case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, in which the court's decision guaranteed all undocumented migrants the right to a deportation hearing and prohibited the now defunct INS from pressuring migrants to sign "voluntary departure" agreements before such hearings took place.31 Given the large number of migrants calculated and collected as "deportados voluntares," we can imagine that many may have been pressured into signing such agreements. The ledger's named individuals are archival remnants of voluntary departure practices, which remain an option for migrants with active immigration cases, meaning, ostensibly, that undocumented migrants can choose to leave the country of their own volition.32 If granted, this outcome prevents a deportation order from appearing on the migrant's record and allows "more ways for you to lawfully return to the US."33 The word departure cannot be separated from the more involuntary connotations behind the word "deported"; voluntary departure is another means to the same end. Similarly, prior to their departure, the migrants enumerated in the memo and named in the ledger could be read as voluntarily pursuing and arriving at a new home in the US. In the case of these archival migrants, they are sent "back" home to their national origin, or, as is common today, at least back over the most recently crossed border.

But such assumptions of voluntary departures — whether it be from one's birthplace or the country of migration — are specious at best: is the site of origin necessarily home, or do we take for granted Warsan Shire's claim that "no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark"?34 In an interview titled "On Working with Archives," Saidiya Hartman says that "so much of writing is about a way of trying to make home," which she often thinks about "in terms of national identity."35 While Hartman's seminal work is "a narrative of what might have been or could have been" for Black life in particular, the notion that writing — and by extension work with historical and official archives — is a negotiation of homelessness and placelessness leaves space for an analysis of what that means for the migrant archive.36 Given that "in the parlance of the nation-state, migrants are either failed citizens or belated arrivals to the national community," it might be more accurate to describe the lives depicted and documented in migrant archives as being in a state of suspension.37 Although situated in the nation-state's center, the ledgers and memos of the AGN document migrants who are between state subjectivities and caught in hemispheric history. Vogt's concept of the "arterial border" further advances such a theory of the migrant archive, as it "presents state power in terms of the more fluid, multidirectional, and contested regimes of mobility."38 Migrants' "legal liminality" makes the ledgers, as indicators of state naming practices, all the more symbolic for the anonymous memorializing function they perform.39 Any solutions must consider what it means not just to name an individual or even a population, but how we refer to — and name — the issue. Calling it a "hemispheric war" as Luiselli suggests means an "obligation to rethink the very language surrounding the problem."40

Presented as a list of names without context and without the stories of lives, the connectivity or community between and among the ledger's listed migrants might be lost until it meets with a scholar's critical desires. Even though names are provided, the state transforms that symbol of identity into non-identity via the tally and the numbered list, a form in which migrants are "flattened by statistical aggregation."41 From the state's point of view, even though the name exists on the ledger, it is associated with a mass sum of deportees, not the connections within and among them. The Departamiento de Migración is one of many interlocking "bureaus with nondescript names" which annotates the return of its subjects even as it records them vis-a-vis their attempt to migrate into subject-citizenship elsewhere.42 Names become a site for legibility, and legibility on official documents discloses the state's intention to govern via surveillance and control. As such, I must wrestle with the impulse to identify and create community out of documents that functions as quotas to fill or counts of those deported. In being deported — voluntarily or otherwise — these archival migrants were not granted citizenship or any approximation in the US, but they did return to be counted among the subject-citizens of Mexico. In fact, in researching for his book The Deportation Machine, Adam Goodman found "there were no records of voluntary departures" on the US side of the border, either with the National Archives or the Department of Homeland Security.43 This counters my experience at the AGN, where the memos naming "deportados voluntares" blended together in their number. Nevertheless, the ledger remains an account of the possible time the migrants spent together, riding a bus back over the border, forming a temporary and "accidental community."44

What something or someone becomes after you name it changes its essence in the eye of whomever is beholding the name.45 This process of official state naming may not be how those designated as voluntary departures see themselves — one of many migrants on a ledger, a portion of a digit in a memo. The rendering of all the migrants listed under a singular term of "deportados voluntares" or even the more common "migrantes" contains connotations often associated with the purported criminality of crossing the border. These terms stand in for names as identity markers that speak more clearly about the state's perception of these people as a single problem: migration as a crisis, not an action taken up by individuals for any number of reasons. These homogenizations and generalizations function as a sort of name calling in of the guise of anonymity. That is, name calling or derogatory meanings underlie certain racializing categories most prominently used by state naming systems. Despite the ledger's documentation of named differences — origin, gender, age — the migrants within the ledger are rendered via the memo as without any difference at all.

The names on the ledger remind us of other official documents that inscribe name, age, and location like the passport I presented to gain entry to the AGN. But as Amitava Kumar contends in Passport Photos, when taken together with the details of all the other people on the list, "the individual takes on the shape of a collective" and the "answers [presented on a passport] only beg more questions."46 The power of the archival ledger lies in its ability to surveil those individuals named while simultaneously obscuring them into a calculable demographic. By preserving their anonymity and putting these lives into conversation with literature, I experiment with what Jessica Ordaz calls an "emotive archive," an approach in migration studies that accesses alternative sources to gain a fuller picture of migrant lives, community, and the emotions behind those phenomena and beyond the official archival record.47 In her research, Ordaz notes that an ICE detention centers' self-defined function as purely "administrative" is a description that abuts the migrant experience of detention as a site of violence.48 This is an apt characterization of the archive itself: administrative, and also a vault for historical violence. Migrant identities are informed by this tension between state naming and the reparative naming of other narratives like Luiselli's novel, a tension that informs how we name this group and how that name gets mobilized.

Solving for X in the Name Latinx

Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive highlight a three-way battle among regimes of naming: authorial uses of naming, state uses of naming (and categorization), and migrant subjects' desires surrounding their names. Titles are themselves forms of naming that imbue meaning. For Luiselli's migrant texts, the subtitles "an essay" and "a novel," respectively, posit "an inquiry into genre," the ways genres name the conditions of the subjects they hope to represent, and an awareness of the different epistemological functions of different archives. 49 In particular, the book-length essay Tell Me How It Ends chronicles Luiselli's time as a volunteer interpreter for a New York City immigration court where her primary task was to ask newly arrived Central American child migrants the titular "forty questions" of the intake questionnaire. This questionnaire becomes the primary archive for Luiselli's work in the nonfiction "essay," which is then transformed in the subsequent novel, Lost Children Archive. As a Spanish-speaking Mexican national, Luiselli reflects on the historical structures that supported the creation of such an interrogation and the impossible task of recording the emotional truth of any one migrant's story. Both texts connect a flawed past — of shifting borders and migrant quotas, of colonization, and of racism — to the present, signaling, in turn, that a migrant ledger from the 1970s operates along the same historical continuum as our current migrant crisis.

As translator, Luiselli finds herself coming back to the same underlying question — why did you come to the United States? — the answers to which reveal that migrants seek the possibility of a new life that is not characterized by conditions of violence. Reliant on the terminology of the asylum narrative and Credible Fear Interview, Luiselli's essay is "invested in [the migrant's] journey through US immigration law." 50 She therefore responds to and comments on the homogenization that takes place in this process, a form of "violence ... encoded in legal language," wherein large swaths of migrant populations are categorized by what Susan Oboler calls "ethnic labels." 51 Such labels, "like all names, are by their very nature abstractions of a reality," and in this particular instance are "used to homogenize the group."52 Many of these categories were developed according — and in response — to presumed similarities across class, nationality, citizenship, race, and ethnicity, none of which ever applied to the entirety of a national group, let alone across the Spanish-speaking counties of the Caribbean and Central and South America.53

A version of ethnic labeling appears in Luiselli's accounts of the questionnaire. In particular, Manu Lopez, a sixteen year old Honduran boy interviewed by Luiselli, presents an exemplary case within the confines of that vocabulary.54 As with most of these kinds of bureaucratic processes, the questionnaire begins with the name: "First I fill in biographical information. Next to 'name,' 'age,' and 'nationality,' I write: Manu Lopez, sixteen years old, Honduras."55 While Luiselli supplies answers to the questions about his current guardian and residence, Manu shrugs in response to questions about the location of his parents, so Luiselli transcribes a "?"56 Picking up on the genealogical absence recorded by the questionnaire, Claudia Milian comments, "There are no family trees to reconstruct this 'floating' population: only blank lines resting ... anonymous X's 'filled' by a blank univocality unified by abandonment and unknowability."57 These floating lines mirror the ledger of "deportados voluntares" creating a narrative that records absence. Luiselli attempts to break through Manu's reticence and create a sense of knowing between them by mentioning their similarities, which also turn out to be differences. Luiselli is "not a gringa," she is "chilanga," from Mexico City where Manu is "catracho" from Honduras, which means, he reminds her, "we're enemies," to which she counters, "only in football."58 These, too, are names of sorts that act as ways of appraising another, with similarities and differences crossing like the "X" that fills the blank spots of Manu's application.

Eventually, Luiselli and Manu develop a working relationship, and in the coda of Tell Me, we learn that Manu still lives in the US under Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJ).59 An older Manu expresses to Luiselli that "he wanted his real name to be disclosed in this book, so he could send it to family and friends back in Honduras."60 Luiselli is unable to fulfil that request because of Manu's documentation status at the time of publication; without a green card, "the immigration lawyers [she] consulted thought it best to maintain his anonymity."61 What would it mean to reveal his true name? Manu wants to be recognized and acknowledged by his community in Honduras which the system of migration separates him from. Given the precarity of undocumentation, Manu's story (via Luiselli) reinforces Horton's point that illegibility via anonymity and pseudonymity "may serve as a shield" and as "migrants' only remaining source of power."62 Manu ultimately understands, saying "no pasa nada," or "no problem" in response to the required anonymity upon publication. In the Acknowledgments — a genre of writing distinctly built on the listing of names — Luiselli further recognizes all the children she interviewed, whose names "have been changed in order to protect them," thereby rendering them anonymous.63

The names that can be known are the categories assigned to these children and other migrants to the US. How these names are conferred, though, remains murky since their "political community escapes naming."64 The difference between certain kinds of "status" and different "alien" designations — Manu's SIJ but also, nonresident, resident, removable, legal, refugee, asylum seeker, migrant — rely in part on the narratives told by migrants and interpreted by translators like Luiselli. Although they "have no control over the type of legal assistance a child receives," translators must "find ways to distribute them into categories," and the details that illustrate these stories can make all the difference in that process of categorization.65 While lawyers use small details in the child's favor, Luiselli notes that interpreters often "look for more general categories for each story that may tip the legal scale." These categories are marked by certain atrocity, such as "'abandonment,' 'prostitution,' 'sex trafficking,' 'gang violence,' and 'death threats.'"66 (The effect of such broad narrative categorization functions analogously to the enumerated "deportados voluntares" of the memo and ledger: a homogenization of diverse stories for a state document that decides a migrant's fate.

It is easier, though, to "remove the illegal aliens" than it is to come to terms with a deluge of "war refugees" or the history of "imported colonialism."67 To do so would essentially mean accurately naming the border as a grave. What is a cemetery if not a commemorated list of names of the deceased? Beyond the "migrants who die in this portion of the continent," this grave would also include decades- and centuries-old casualties of the hemispheric war.68 The name lives after the body's death, effectively becoming the memorial; the "it" of Tell Me How It Ends (referring seemingly to any individual migration story) ends, but not the name. If the problem were to be accurately identified, such a naming would necessitate acknowledging the inaccuracy of a vision that names the US as a destination for the promise of the so-called American dream. The archival record negates the possibility of the "dream" outcome in its tracking of "voluntary departures." Luiselli's interviews reveal that the migrants come less in pursuit of a dream than "the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare."69 At one point, Luiselli's daughter asks her mother to tell her "how it ends" for the migrant children. Instead of a direct response, Luiselli offers her readers the words of one of her interviewees who came here "Because [she] wanted to arrive."70 This reply cements the fallacy of an "end" and disavows any notion that there could be accurate "answers" to the questionnaire and the "immigrant question" more broadly.

More recently, the ambivalence, ambiguity, and heterogeneity contained within any one term and the possibilities of community names have been explored via "the 'x' in Latinx [as] a placeholder for whatever you want it to mean." As Marisa Peñaloza notes, this "rhetorical gesture" embraces the unknown as "a range of possibilities, [a] myriad of pathways, and [a] wilting of conformity."71 The "indeterminacy" of the x marks the spot for potential imaginings of identity and collectivity. Reminiscent of the "x" historically used by the illiterate — Indigenous people signing suspicious (and later broken) treaties, for instance — the anonymity of Latinx offers avenues for "unaccompanied Central American minors thrown into urgency, migration, detention, crises, questionnaires: the X of our actual moment in history."72 For Carlos Alonso Nugent, Lost Children Archive "perceives the problem with x-ing out differences among Latinxs," and so, "the novel can leverage the limits of Latinx representation to open 'limitless possibilities.'"73 The x stands in for any number of onomastic imaginings, a usage that emphasizes the heterogeneity of migrant stories and experiences, one form of which is represented through the praxis of anonymity in Luiselli's creation of a novel archive.

Building Community and Literary Structures of Naming

Luiselli began writing Lost Children Archive, the fictional follow up to Tell Me How It Ends, the same year she became a court translator. Although she has this real-world experience, she is not herself a migrant in the same sense that her characters are "lost children." Luiselli's extended, cross-generic project acknowledges the limits of any one genre and any one narrative, as well as the "limits of representation," which Nugent sees as a "strand [of narrative] in which nonmigrants have stopped seeking to encapsulate the experience of migration and have started probing the problems inherent to such projects."74 As an interaction between manufactured fictional archives and historical archives, the novel hopes to enact a fictionalized version of hemispheric history. This type of novelistic engagement is necessary and specific to the current condition of transnational migration.75

In its simplest form, Lost Children Archive is a road trip story that follows a family of four on the brink of breaking apart. Somewhat symmetrically, the mother figure has a daughter from a previous relationship, and the father figure a son. While they had previously lived and worked together in New York City, both parents have different motives for the novel's inciting trip the Southwestern United States. Their family story cannot be told — like those of Tell Me's interviewees — without the reality of legal names and definitions, however absent they are from the narrative and archive itself. Before embarking on their trip, the family applies for green cards and jokes "somewhat frivolously" about how to refer to the change in the name of their status.76 Previously "nonresident aliens," are they now "'pending aliens,' or 'writers seeking status,' or 'alien writers,' or maybe 'pending Mexicans?'"77 They also fill the truck with "our boxes, five of them, with our archive ... plus the two empty boxes for the children's future archive."78 The novel places their named status and migrant categorization — seemingly ever-changing, an entirely unstable identity however official it is deemed by the state — in close proximity to the establishment of the familial archive. Both instances introduce the novel's collectivity — our archive, pending aliens — alongside a notion of the future. The archive is to be completed by the children, and the family awaits their "pending" status.

In content and in form, the novel trades in alternative types of naming — beyond the familiar form of individual first names and surnames — and explores how we catalogue various communities through the structural conceit of an archive. While Luiselli never reveals the family members' names, she fills the text with a litany of other kinds of names: place names, the names of books, an extensive naming structure for the sections and subsections of the novel itself, nicknames, name games, and euphemisms. Naming both buttresses the private family language and functions as a tool for misinformation, an effect that relies on the lack of protagonist names. That is, other kinds of naming gain traction because the expected names remain absent.

The family's private grammar shapes our understanding of the narrative's thrust. The primary narrator mainly goes by Ma, with her husband being Pa, and the children referred to as "our children," or individually as "boy" and "girl." As Luiselli writes, this "family lexicon defined the scope and limits of [their] shared world."79 Ma's and Pa's divergent aims for their trip are revealed in the novel's archival structure. Pa wants to end the trip in Arizona, the "heart of Apacheria," the homeland of the Apaches, where he hopes to record a documentary soundscape.80 Pa tells the children how "Apaches earned their war names," and the children decide that the family should adopt the ritual. Through the figure of Pa, who Nugent writes, "typifies the settler scholars who disrespect Native cultures," the novel calls attention to the idea of "war names" within a misspelled Apacheria (missing the accent mark of Apachería) and acknowledges the ways in which documentary or archival naming problematically aligns with the euphemisms of state naming.81 Luiselli occasionally uses these pseudonymic Apache war names as alternates for Ma, Pa, boy, and girl: respectively, Lucky Arrow, Papa Cochise, Swift Feather, and Memphis.82 Unlike Pa, Ma wants to go to Texas, "the state with the largest number of immigrant detention centers for children," where she hopes to investigate the phenomenon of "lost children."83

Without names, the lost migrant children and the road-tripping family occupy the same narrative importance. Anonymity, as Luiselli has noted, "works as a tool to put everyone in the novel on exactly the same plane."84 The novel's archive and its attendant naming structure are significant both as an organizing principle and as a preoccupation of plot. The archive further attempts to document and impose a semblance of order on a familial and hemispheric situation that resists easy categorization, and in so doing names that which feels so unwieldy as to be unnamable. The table of contents highlights this organization: the novel's four primary parts are each listed with titled subsections that contain further divisions not listed in the "Contents" header. The result is an exponential expansion of the naming structure, creating a novel "marked by the management of data, archives, and documents" (Fig. 3).85 As Claire Messud has noted, these "taxonomies, however apparently extraneous, are important to this text: they effect the imposition of order upon rampant disorder."86 Aside from Part III, each section contains at least one subsection dedicated to the 7 archival banker's boxes the family takes on their trip. Altogether, traveling in the trunk of the family car, the boxes function "like an appendix of us."87

In most cases, each archival box appears in the body of the text as a list of its contents, thereby demonstrating the family's personality differences and intentions for the trip. Ma's Box V provides a summation of her time spent attempting to create order out of the chaotic US immigration system and thus proves the most unorganized and expansive. One of her "loose notes" records a seeming dictionary definition of "euphemism" — "hide, erase, coat. / Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And eventually, to forget" — followed by several "terms" as examples of euphemisms alongside their more accurate counterparts:

Term: Our Peculiar Institution. Meaning: slavery. (Epitome of all euphemisms.)
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion and dispossession of people from their lands ...
Term: Relocation. Meaning: confining people in reservations.
Term: Reservation: Meaning: a wasteland, a sentence to perpetual poverty.
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion of people seeking refuge.
Term: Undocumented. Meaning: people who will be removed.88

Euphemisms are the name-calling of state power that, like the ordering of an archive, hopes to codify order, albeit of a different kind.89 This note "posits euphemisms as a means for distorting historical records and obscuring the histories of oppression."90 Demonstrated through a form that mimics a dictionary entry — the urtext for the names of things and their meanings — the inclusion of this note alongside the other material objects in the archives accentuates the multiple ways that naming and categorizing make meaning. Luiselli's characters attempt to demonstrate that the counter to such misnomers and misrepresentative, derisive, euphemistic naming is a diligent documentation, a methodology also written into the "loose note": "Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat."91 When not of the euphemistic variety, naming becomes a way to remember. Names inspired and situated in community serve as those reminders.

Archival Possibilities of Naming

The act of remembering becomes a guiding tenet for the family's own ethics, and it is borne out of the communal work of documentation. In line with Michel Foucault's foundational definition of the archive as neither documents nor institutions, but as "a whole set of relations," Luiselli's textual archive teases out the community element obscured by official archives.92 In fact, Ma and Pa met because they were both employed to record and document the languages of New York City. As the boy notes, "Pa was a documentarist and Ma was a documentarian," and although "very few people know the difference," the boy sees the family's collective engagement in the work of documentation as the righting of wrongs and as a corrective to inaccurate names.93 By rooting her novel in the work of an archive, Luiselli acknowledges the slippery lineage between the noun of "a document" and the verb "to document." In this context, the former can be deployed as a lack via the adjectival form (i.e., undocumented immigrant) or in reference to the holdings of an archive. The latter refers to the work of the documentarian parents as well as Luiselli's narrativization in the novel and Tell Me How It Ends.

The boy participates in these acts of remembrance based on his parents' example. While visiting Fort Sill, the burial site of Geronimo and other notable Apaches, the boy takes a polaroid photograph. He later realizes, however, "that the names on the tombstones hadn't come out at all."94 Accordingly:

Pa said they were perfect because I'd documented the cemetery the way that it exists in recorded history ... my camera had erased the names of Apache chiefs the way they are also erased in history ... and that's why it was important that we memorize all those names, because otherwise we would forget, like everyone else had already forgotten.95

Even though the flash erases the Apache names, various communities and institutions have alternately preserved and effaced them. Luiselli's novel thus "incorporate[s] concerns of power and the reproduction of quotidian and archival violence," and responds with "more complex accounts that offer a range of experiences, responses to domination, and articulations of humanity."96 One of these articulations might be the possibilities inherent within anonymity for migrant community. In the context of their disappearance, memorializing the Apache names becomes a family praxis — a way of honoring community names in the face of misnomers and state-sanctioned erasure.

But this work is not without its hazards. As they drive, Ma points out the euphemistic violence of newspaper articles that refer to the "illegal alien children mass" and both parents tell the children the history of US colonization and the Mexican-American War.97 They notice that the children create their own terminology for the difficult subjects at hand. Ma tends to refer to "child refugees," a term that her own children find hard to remember.98 Her daughter asks for clarification, and Ma searches for an appropriate explanation, musing internally that a refugee is:

someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived. Refugees wait ... in federal custody and under the gaze of armed officials. They wait in long lines ... They wait to be let out ... They wait for the court's notice to appear ... They wait for visas, documents, permission ... They wait for dignity to be restored.99

Ma cannot communicate all of this to her young children and foregoes even the abbreviated version that a "child refugee is someone who waits." Instead, she tells the girl that "a refugee is someone who has to find a new home."100 Ma's definition inadvertently prompts the children to imagine their own names and definitions. They take the idea that child refugees are children who have to find a new home and invert it, creating the ancillary term "lost children." If they have to find a home, they are searching, and one searches when one is lost. Ma concedes, "They are children who have lost the right to a childhood."101

Correcting category names becomes an important step in correcting and memorializing personal names and migrant narratives. The various forms and functions of naming coalesce in one of the fictional components of the family's travelling archive, Elegies for Lost Children. Appearing "as cutaways from the main narrative strands," "(The First Elegy)" appears as part of Box III, almost one third of the way into the book, and the last, "(The Sixteenth Elegy)" appears as the penultimate section of the novel's penultimate Part III.102 Elegies tells the story of a group of "six children; seven minus one," who are at once versions of the child refugees Ma explains to her children and part of a textual artifact that Ma reads and includes in her archival boxes.103 The children-subjects of Elegies remain, for the majority of Elegies for Lost Children and Lost Children Archive, unnamed. Glenda Carpio argues that "Through these elegies, Luiselli melds history, fiction, and myth to mourn the children who die as they try to cross the United States-Mexico border."104 Their anonymity, in large part, aids in this effort as they are represented both as discrete children and as any of the possible children attempting this crossing. The titular lost children are often counted instead of named — "Girl one, girl two, boy three, boy four, boy five, boy six, boy seven" — which individualizes them and marks them as a collective, and the repetition of this count throughout the numbered elegies further emphasizes when one of the children is "lost."105 Along with the other scraps in the family's archival boxes, this enumerated anonymity documents the traces left by migrants and offers a material means for mourning those who have otherwise died anonymously.

Luiselli further draws attention to the documentational purpose of Elegies by explicitly remarking on its nature as a text. Another report counting the children — "(The Fifth Elegy)" — is interrupted by the boy's narrating that, "Ma quit reading and said maybe she should read something different to us."106 Still within the portion of the text subtitled "(The Fifth Elegy)," but not an entirely different subsection, the boy's interjection marks the fluidity between the novel's archive and its primary narrative thrust, exemplified by Ma's reading aloud to her children, wherein "the experiences and voices of the lost children thus become a choral, haunting echo."107 Altogether, the echoes of the "lost children," the Apache names from Pa's storytelling, and the pervasive ethos of documentation in their parents' professions create an environment ripe for the onomastic imaginations of the boy/Swift Feather and the girl/Memphis. After the family tracks down and watches an airplane full of child refugees take off in New Mexico, the boy remarks: "It had disappeared, with the children. What happened that day is not called a departure or a removal. It's called deportation. And we documented it."108 The boy echoes the language imparted by his parents, adding himself to the collective "we" documenting the event. Readers hear the echo of his name for the children in his description of the event, and later, we see photographic evidence as a polaroid kept in the boy's archive, Box VII. The plane disappears, and so do the children, and then, they are lost.

Shortly after, Swift Feather and Memphis sneak out of the cabin they share with their sleeping parents to go on an adventure. Following a map that is "missing most names of places," they proceed to enter the desert with the dual aims of finding the "lost children" their mother is always talking about and reminding her "that even though those children were lost, we were not lost, we were there, right there next to her."109 Using their map, they set their sights on Echo Canyon, a place whose sonic capacity has taken on significance in family lore. Not long into their journey, the children realize they are themselves lost, and they seem to encounter actual lost migrant children whose experiences of heat, hunger, and migration they believe they share. This section, titled "Echo Canyon" comes right after the last portion of Elegies, creating an effect of continuation, or a merging of worlds formalized into a pages-long sentence, a dream-like epilogue. The narration takes on a fantastical quality as the boy and girl "are the ones who must tell the story of the lost children ... imaginatively inhabit[ing] the brutal hardships of others less fortunate."110 Notably, the novel marks the loss of these children in the Elegies narrative itself, even before the texts seemingly converge. In "(The Ninth Elegy)," the children must run and jump onto a moving train that would not stop or slow down. This elegy, toward the end of Part II, still narrates "the seventh boy,"111 but by Part III, in which the reader encounters the last five elegies altogether: "They are silent, the six children, more silent than usual. Locked up in their terrors, the six."112 In between "(The Ninth Elegy)" and "The Eleventh Elegy," both the seventh boy and the Tenth Elegy disappear. The boy, who we might imagine falls into the gaps between track and train, mimics the formal gap in this fabricated migrant narrative. The story is incomplete; this portion of the archive is missing, just like this lost child.

In The Deportation Machine, Goodman aptly asks, "How does one write a history of something designed to leave no paper trail?" After all, something designed to leave no paper trail is something designed not to be named.113 In "(The Eleventh Elegy)," after this gap and after acknowledging the loss of the seventh boy, we finally learn the names of the titular, elegized lost children. Luiselli lifts the veil of anonymity just once, when the six remaining children shout their names into the wind from the top the train: "Marcela! Camila! Janos! Dario! Nicanor! Manu!"114 By including this gaping gap of loss alongside the names of those who remain, Luiselli counteracts the obscuring effects of state euphemism through an effort to mark the lives of migrants, who, unlike Ma's and Pa's children, did not have a choice in walking in the desert and might not be saved.

Once the narratives blend in "Echo Canyon," the reader wonders which elements are real, invented, or merged together in the children's imagination. This stirring technique underscores fallacies of complete documentation and entirely accurate naming and "forces readers to recognize that narrative clarity is often impossible."115 In so doing, the novel seems to share Stephen Best's goal as described in None Like Us: "the goal of drawing less attention to what searching finds (to what can or cannot be held, has or has not been retrieved from the archive) than to what searching itself brings about, what is born of the understanding of the archive as a scene of injury."116 The boy and girl fail in their effort to find the lost children, and the novel routes through the failure of their original intention to retrieve and hold, which in turn, "shows the perils of overidentification."117 The truth of emancipatory politics will not be found in the archive, just as finding the lost children will not preserve the nature of Swift Feather and Memphis' relationship with their mother and father. Like Best, the novel instead suggests that we cultivate an artist/archivist practice as opposed to that of truth-seeker.118 The truth, whatever that may mean, will not be found there.

Even so, the novel does not disavow the enterprises of naming or documentation as a worthy goal. In fact, names end up being the family's saving grace, the key element that helps Ma and Pa find their lost children. After arriving at Echo Canyon, the children hope their parents will know to look for them there, and in the meantime, they "shouted [their] names at the same time so what came back was something muddled like etherphis, etherphis, phis, phis...", the echoing sounds of the combined syllables from their Apache names: Swift Feather and Memphis.119 While they argue about who will get to test the echo of their name first, they hear, "bouncing off every rock in the valley," the echoes of their parents' Apache names: Papa Cochise and Lucky Arrow. They continue shouting their names until they surmise that their parents are also shouting "we're coming, oming, oming, and probably something like stay where you are, are, are."120 An echo is, by nature, a repetitive fracture of "true" sound, an idea taken up by Best in his articulation that the supposed truth is based on rumor. What is a rumor if not echo upon echo? Best writes that "Once a rumor makes it into an archive, it evidences not the accuracy of its claims but the necessary and melancholy recognition of its own failure ... once a rumor makes it into the archive, it becomes hard to believe it was ever a rumor at all."121 Once the children are rescued, it becomes hard to believe they were ever lost because we have moved on temporally and narratively to their being found.

Although not explicit, the next and final section, aptly titled "Lost Children Archive," serves as vestigial evidence of the family reunion. Names and documentation, then, meet again, full circle at the end of the novel whose title appears as a section title, and in which the archives of two sets of lost children signify the ways that naming informs memory and archival practice. Lost Children Archive struggles to name and represent the migrants in question, in part because of the homogenizing legacies of state naming that make it difficult for migrant community and self-determination to thrive. Luiselli defines the migrants of this text as the refugees who wait, which is a condition premised on what has yet to come. The American dream is likewise defined by conditionality, of continuous aspiration toward citizenship and assimilation; however, the experience of waiting only to not be found, or to voluntarily depart, proves to be a much more nightmarish version of that conditionality. Waiting of the sort Luiselli describes — the desire to come to America merely to "arrive" — connotes a more drawn-out stagnation with a smaller portion of hope and a much larger dose of dread.

Nevertheless, Lost Children Archive reconfigures anonymity as a realm for conceiving of alternatives to account for the different kinds of names that immigrants go by, the different ways we can remember them, and the different forms their stories can take. In this form, anonymity can occupy what Hartman calls the "capacities of the subjunctive," aiming toward what Camacho terms "migrant imaginaries."122 In their anonymity, we cannot fully know the migrants narrativized by Luiselli just as we cannot know the lives of the migrants preserved in the ledger at the AGN. This reframing of anonymity as identitarian potential suggests migrant futurity as both an antidote to the homogenizing nature of state naming protocols and a door of temporal potential.

---

Diana Filar is Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Department Head of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Her research focuses on names and naming across 21st century transnational migrant texts. You can find her work on immigrant whiteness in The Polish Review and on Maggie Nelson and individualism in Contemporary Literature.

---

Banner Image by Raymundo Perera

---

References

I would like to extend a special thank you to Megan Finch for helping me think through the corollaries and deviations between my work and Black thought, archival studies, and racial difference. I would also like to express my gratitude to Carrie Hyde and Derrick Spires, whom I don't know personally, but whose constructive and productive feedback on an earlier version of this work helped shape its revision, alongside the later feedback provided by the anonymous peer reviewers for this publication.