Archival Narrative Justice in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws.