52 pages • 1 hour read
Valeria LuiselliLost Children Archive
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Apacheria”
Chapter 15 Summary: “Dust Valleys”
“Dust Valleys” returns to the mother narrator’s perspective. She explains that she feels odd the morning her children disappear, but she assumes they’re outside playing and attempts to dispel her odd feelings by reading in bed (as she taught herself to do from an early age). When her husband wakes up, however, he immediately looks for the children and realizes they are gone.
They drive around back roads in the desert looking for them. After a few hours of fruitless searching, they go to the police and give them descriptions of the children that ominously mirror the descriptions in the migrant mortality reports from Box V. They go to a nearby motel, but they can’t sleep, wondering where the boy will go once he realizes they’re lost.
The next day, the mother finds the boy’s note, which reads, “Went out, will look for lost girls, meet you later at Echo Canyon” (301). They notify the police and tell them to look in the area of Echo Canyon and drive toward Echo Canyon themselves.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Heart of Light”
This chapter returns to the boy’s perspective and blends Elegies for Lost Children with the boy’s narration. Instead of addressing his sister in this chapter, however, he addresses the mother: “We’re on our way, Mama, don’t worry. We’ll be there soon” (306); “Mama, I haven’t been sucking my thumb at all, Mama, you’d be so proud to know we’ve rode on the backs of many beasts for many days and weeks now” (307).
In these chapters, the boy and girl meet the lost children in the desert—Marcela, Camila, Janos, Dario, Nicanor, and Manu—and travel with them. The “man in charge” calls out to the children as bullets begin to fly. The children run in different directions. Some appear to be hit by the bullets, and they fall down in the dust. The objects they were carrying scatter all around them. The remaining living children follow the “man in charge” away from the darkness of death and into “the heart of light” (316).
Chapter 17 Summary: “Echo Canyon”
“Echo Canyon” is narrated by the boy in a single, unbroken sentence. Again, he addresses his sister, telling the story of their long journey by foot to Echo Canyon with the lost children.
The chapter details the vegetation they see in the desert alongside the horrors they imagine the lost children endure. These details commingle with meta details the boy couldn’t possibly be aware of. These meta details include, for example, a description of the lady at the Border Patrol station their materials are given to, who looks at a screen and:
listens on her earphones to an only mildly pornographic but rotundly moralistic lesbian romance written by author Lynne Cheney, titled Sisters, not at all oblivious to the fact that the author of the novel is the wife of the ex-vice president Dick Cheney, who, under President George W. Bush, directed “Operation Jump Start,” during which the National Guard was deployed along the border […] (323).
To urge his sister onward, the boy recalls his father’s stories of Geronimo, and they play at being Eagle Warriors.
The boy asks one of the “lost children” if she has seen Manuela’s daughters. He describes the phone numbers sewn inside their dress collars. The “lost girl” laughs and tells the boy that almost all of the lost children have numbers sewn in their collars. The boy shouts the name “Geronimo” over and over into the distance, continually testing its echo. Eventually, the name echoes back, and he realizes they’ve made it to Echo Canyon.
Part 3 Analysis
In this part, the layers of thematic echoes and reenactment become deliberately difficult to decipher and impossible to separate from one another. The mother’s descriptions of her children to the police mirror the migrant mortality reports from her archive box, suggesting that their images have blended in her traumatized imagination. The boy’s wandering perspective—as he recounts their journey through the desert—blends with moments he didn’t directly experience (such as details of the woman at Border Patrol), and the fictive “lost children” of the Lost Children Elegies blend with the real “lost children” the boy and his sister are looking for. In these chapters (framed as fragmented “elegies,” much like Elegies for Lost Children), it is unclear how much of this narrative is actually happening and how much of it is the boy’s internal processing of Elegies for Lost Children as he wanders through the desert. The Italian names of the children suggest that these are the lost children from Camposanto’s text (though they could also be interpreted as hallucinations projected onto actual “lost children” from Mexico). The “lost children” themselves blend together when the girl reports that they all have numbers sewn into their collars (just like Manuela’s daughters).
All of these performative echoes “bounce off” one another to the point where the original metaphorical sound source—the “truth”—is impossible to locate. Thus, Echo Canyon can be read as the symbolic valley wherein this ontological confusion collects. The Echo Canyon chapter reads as one continuous sentence of blended associations, as it is impossible to separate an echo from its source (let alone one echo from another).
Luiselli’s formal blended-ness, fragmentation, and melding of truth and fiction exemplify a mode of writing historically employed by Chicanx and Latin American writers (especially those who have migrated between different countries). In Lost Children Archive, Luiselli writes from the “cracked spaces” described by Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldua: a space that is neither Mexican nor American, an “Echo Canyon” between two countries and two cultures.
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