Tim McCarthy and the Business of Good

Tell Me How It Ends | Valeria Luiselli

Aug 31, 2017 10:10:18 AM / by Tim McCarthy

Editor’s Note: I have strong feelings about immigration though I don’t speak much about it. That’s why I read this book; I want to know more before I speak with others. Luiselli is a young Mexican/South African immigrant to the USA. Her time as a volunteer translator in NYC’s immigration courts adds to her own experience and that of her husband, two children and niece who also went through the process. This brief and moving “essay in 40 questions” taught me a lot about what children, specifically from central America go through to get here and then stay. Did you know “La Beastia” is how most undocumented immigrants get here? It’s the freight trains that children climb on and ride through Mexico to reach our borders. Did you know they seek to be arrested rather than flee from Border Police? Right, me neither. The best part of “Tell Me How It Ends” is that it is fact-based yet moving without being a screeching rage against the machine. It’s instead a documentation of the reality of our broken system.

Favorite Excerpt: “we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are broken with it and feel ashamed, confused and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about that”.

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Tim McCarthy

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