Extinction, Rememory and the Deadly Work of Capitalism in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

The essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 Novel, "Lost Children Archive" in light of its engagement with the contemporary migrant refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexico borders. It argues that the novel depicts such a crisis as the long term effect of settlers colonialism at home and imperialist politics abroad, framing this double-faced course in relation to the nation building process by connecting present and past detentions and deportations of native populations from the national archive. While, in the present, the novel incorporates official and fictional accounts of the removal of unaccompanied “alien” children who enter the United States through the Arizona-Mexico border by crossing the Sonora Desert, its focus on the past is directed to the 19th century removal of native populations from their land by the U.S. Government. In this connection, the narrative centrality of the story of the deportation of Chiricahuas does not only powerfully work to discount and dismantle the myth of freedom as foundational to the ideology of the American experience; it also mirrors the pattern of incarceration, deportation, and death to which – centuries apart –Indigenous populations on the American continent and in the U.S. are still subjected.