Valeria Luiselli: ‘Borders are testing grounds for brutality’

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Afterwards, backstage in the festival’s Green Room, Luiselli tells me that the idea to create an archive and document of life on the border first came to her in the town of Shakespeare, New Mexico. Luiselli says that while Americans often say they’re sympathetic to the children’s plight, what they should really feel is a sense of “accountability and responsibility”. She adds: “Yes, it’s gangs, but it’s gangs among other things, and it’s a circumstance created by years of US interventionism in local governments, and then local governments being profoundly corrupt and working in unison with the interest of the United States, creating a kind of ongoing situation that’s only escapable really by migrating, and even then not entirely.” The election of Donald Trump as President in 2016 on a platform of anti-immigration rhetoric only exacerbated existing problems, and Luiselli points out that even if things have improved since the election of Joe Biden in 2020 it’s only incremental. “They may be given cell phones to be surveilled instead, so it’s a little bit less violent to have a cell phone that a government agent uses to check in with you every week, as opposed to an ankle bracelet which is such a brutal and horrible thing, but it’s a question of degree.” There are clear parallels between the ongoing situation on the US-Mexico border and the tragedies playing out on Europe’s border in the Mediterranean, which Irish journalist Sally Hayden wrote about so movingly in her recent book My Fourth Time, We Drowned.