In the second part of the essay, she uses specific interviews-particularly her interview with a boy named Manu who is traveling with a Salvadoran police report as proof of what he’s been through-to demonstrate that the children are refugees fleeing gang violence, domestic and sexual violence, and persecution.

When she returns to New York at the end of her vacation, Luiselli’s green card is still missing, and it’s through navigating the legal system that she’s put in contact with the agency that is trying to help these children she and her college-age niece decide to volunteer. The children she works with have almost uniformly had harrowing journeys, traveling across Central America and Mexico on the tops of trains under the custody of coyotes before surrendering to border patrol agents in America in an attempt to reunite with their families or fleeing horrific violence. The essay cross-cuts between her experience taking in the biased, sometimes racist depiction of the migrant children on the radio during their vacation and the beginning of her volunteer work helping them navigate the court system during the existence of a special juvenile docket that rapidly speeds up the deportation process. At the time, she is waiting on news of her own green card, and she sees the parallels between her family and the children on the news. In the opening section, Luiselli recalls the trip across the American Southwest that she took with her family in 2014, which is the first time she hears of the undocumented children arriving at the Southern border. The essay is broken up into four parts and a coda. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions loosely follows the questionnaire Luiselli used to help interview undocumented children to determine if their experience warranted asylum or special immigrant status in the United States upon their arrival.

Tell me how it ends book