Lost Children Archive is the first English-language novel by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli. Published in 2019, Lost Children Archive was awarded the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2019 Booker Prize. The novel illustrates the intersections and overlaps between a troubled family’s cross-country journey and the treacherous journeys of “lost” children migrating from Mexico to the United States.

Lost Children Archive is also an archive in its own right, featuring a combination of fictional and nonfictional narratives, quotes from inspirational authors, and a collection of images and ephemera (such as maps, historic documents, official reports on migrant mortality, Polaroid photos, and transcriptions of audio recordings). The novel draws extensively from Luiselli’s personal experiences volunteering as an interpreter for migrants in New York City’s federal immigration court. This guide is based on the 2019 Alfred A. Knopf edition.

Plot Summary

An unnamed female narrator and an unnamed man are hired to collaborate on a soundscape of New York City: a recorded compilation of atmospheric noises and languages spoken throughout the city. At first, the project brings the woman and the man together, and they move into the same apartment (she with a daughter from a previous marriage, he with a son from a previous marriage). Soon after the completion of the project, however, they begin to realize that their creative goals, professional aspirations, and perspectives on life are subtly (but significantly) different. The narrator ascribes this difference to the fact that she is a “documentarian” and he a “documentarist,” likening the former to a chemist and the latter to a librarian.

Having finished the New York City soundscape, the narrator and her husband begin to work on separate sound projects. The husband plans to develop a soundscape in the region once known as Apacheria. He wishes to capture Apache ghost echoes and absences by recording ordinary sounds—bird song, wind, insects humming—in spaces significant to Apache history. Meanwhile, the narrator volunteers as a Spanish language translator in New York City’s federal immigration court and develops a project to document migrants’ stories. She meets a woman named Manuela who hired a “coyote” (a person who helps migrants cross the border from Mexico to the United States) to help guide her two young daughters to her home in New York City. Manuela explains that her daughters are now being held in a detention center and asks the narrator to help her translate some legal papers, hoping to free them from Border Patrol.

The husband announces that he is going to move to Arizona to pursue his project. The narrator agrees to temporarily accompany him on this move, hoping she will be able to find Manuela’s daughters. Once she has located them, the wife plans to return to New York with her daughter while the husband and his son remain in Arizona. Though the daughter is too young to fully understand the familial tension, the son, the father, and the mother seem to recognize that this is likely their last trip together as a family. All four family members bring along their own archive boxes containing books, Polaroid photos, and other scraps of research and ephemera significant to their respective projects (or—in the case of the children—mementos of their family journey). The novel’s chapters are interspersed with inventories of each box.

Throughout the novel, phrases heard, read, and spoken by members of the family resonate with the struggles of Mexican and Central American refugees. They hear stories about migrant detention on the radio; they hear lines in songs that remind them of loss and being lost. Listening to her husband tell the children stories of Geronimo and the Indian Removal Act, the narrator hears echoes with the present-day plight of refugees. Her own children even begin to “echo” these stories with roleplaying games wherein they pretend to be “lost children.” novel. The narrator searches for clarity in the books she’s brought for the trip, underlining, re-reading, and revisiting previous reflections. She begins to record her own “novel” within the novel based on the stories she’s collected in the immigration court and her processing of another novel, Elegies for Lost Children by fictional author Ella Camposanto.

In Part 2, “Reenactment,” the narrative voice switches from the mother to the 10-year-old son. The text consists of a story the son is telling to his much younger sister. The first part of the son’s section re-illuminates experiences the mother has already recounted from his own point of view. The son repeatedly expresses his frustration with the distant manner his mother displays toward both him and his sister. After a particularly bad fight, the son realizes that his parents will soon divorce and their family will be divided. That night, while the rest of the family is sleeping, he goes through one of the mother’s archive boxes and finds a map of the desert with two Xs drawn on it. He concludes that they must indicate where Manuela’s daughter are and decides to go find them with his sister. He leaves a note on the map telling his parents to look for them in Echo Canyon (a place they recently visited as a family).

The children quickly become lost and frightened. They become temporarily separated, but the boy finds his sister sleeping at the end of a train car. They secretly board the train, modeling their actions on stories of the refugee “lost children” who ride on the tops of train cars. The jump off and wander into the desert, searching for Echo Canyon as they encounter other lost children. Eventually, they reach Echo Canyon, where they shout the names of their parents, listening to the echoes of their voices until their parents shout back. The literal echoes of their voices blend with the figurative echoes of all the other stories, sensations, fears, anxieties, and hopes that have surrounded them on their journey. These “echoes” take the form of a 19-page chapter narrated in one unbroken sentence.

Though the parents decide to separate as planned—the son staying with his father in Arizona, and the mother returning to New York with her daughter—the boy’s narration concludes with a promise to his sister that they will find each other again. Lost Children Archive closes with a visual inventory of all 24 Polaroid photos the boy took throughout their journey. With its layering and echoing of migrant experiences, Lost Children Archive invites readers to consider the ways they process stories of others’ trauma.