Echoes of Silence: Listening and Creating Echoes to Break the Archival Violence in Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

In Lost Children Archive (2019), Valeria Luiselli examines how lost, silenced, or forgotten voices can be preserved and understood. This essay argues that, through the stories of refugee children and Native Americans in the Mexico–United States borderland, the novel uses echo as a metaphor and method to create an archive of erased narratives. Echo serves as a means to connect with the past, expand archival possibilities, and reenact history, as it provides a profound approach to understanding intergenerational stories across time and space.