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37 pages 1 hour read

Valeria Luiselli

Tell Me How It Ends

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Essay Topics

1.

How is this essay in conversation with modern concepts of the American Dream?

2.

How does Luiselli’s difficulty obtaining a green card compare to what the undocumented child migrants face in immigration court?

3.

What does documenting the individual stories of child migrants have to do with justice? What is the value of narrative in accomplishing action, either in the legal system, the public sphere, or in political spaces?

4.

How is Manu’s police report a complex symbol representing many different aspects of his situation?

5.

What does Luiselli means when she says that the undocumented child migrant crisis is a transnational problem? How does that challenge the American government’s treatment of the problem?

6.

How does this book’s depiction of child migrants challenge commonly held notions of immigration in America?

7.

How do the questions on the interview questionnaire reveal some of the problems and hypocrisies of the priority juvenile docket and the way immigration courts handle cases of undocumented children?

8.

How does Luiselli’s immigrant status help her understand the problem in terms that a natural-born United States citizen might not see?

9.

The book opens and closes on the same question: “Why did you come to the United States?” (7). How is this question a key to understanding the text’s main arguments?

10.

How might members of gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 be victims in their own right? How have social and political institutions failed them in the same way as the undocumented child migrants Luiselli is advocating for?

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