Translating nations in a global era: Valeria Luiselli´s approach to the child migrant crisis

Abstract

American public opinion toward immigration policies and the legal status of Latinx immigrants have been heavily impacted by economic and political tides throughout the twentieth century. While the Trump era has been regarded by many scholars as an inflection point, this research contends that his electoral victory was merely one of the numerous symptoms lying at the heart of a nativist wave that has engulfed the public sphere in various guises for years. In order to carry out this task, I focus on Valeria Luiselli´s representation of the child migrant crisis during the Obama era in her nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017). This article examines the way in which Luiselli´s work opens a discursive space revolving around the metaphor of the translation that adopts different layers of meaning related to connectivity.