Valeria Luiselli's father (36 years old) worked in an NGO until Mexican President Carlos Salinas assigned him to the diplomatic corps. "It was a way to send it as far as possible from Mexico, which was South Korea at the time." There the writer grew up until in 1994 her father was commissioned to open the first Mexican embassy in South Africa. Then, at 16 years old, Luiselli spent two courses in India surrounded by teenagers of different nationalities and classes committed to doing social work. Schools like his own, near Pune, were created by the NGO United World Colleges during the Cold War with the intention of educating to prevent a recurrence of world wars. "The idea, beautiful but naive, was that if the people sleeping next to you were from Kosovo or Jamaica, there were going to be future generations that would not allow the previous disasters." Luiselli sips tea from a tall metal cup. We are in the living room of his wooden house on a hill in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx, in northern Manhattan.
Has the world repeated mistakes?
I don't know if we live in a more cruel time than 100 years ago. There are human beings for whom the lives of others matter little. There are, however, other people for whom this is not the case, and in that balance the world remains standing.
He denounces that migrant children are treated as disease carriers and not as children.
It is a symptom of how this country tells its collective identity. The founding myth of the United States excludes both Hispanics and American Indians. There is something in the collective imagination that makes the Hispanic be seen as a foreigner, despite the fact that here we are more than 60 million. There are more people who speak Spanish here than in Spain. What interests me right now is to rewrite the story that is perpetuated and write the one that is missing.
Why, among all the problems in the world, have you concentrated with migrant children?
It is impossible to be a Latina in the United States and not be perennially concerned and doing something for members of your community who do not have the same rights and privileges as you. So I got involved giving writing classes to young immigrants and in the New York Immigration Court as a translator.
Have you been especially involved because you are an immigrant yourself?
You don't have to be a mother to worry about children ... Many non-mother lawyers dedicate their lives to defending them. I would like to think that empathy and a sense of social responsibility do not come only from their own.
It has gone from an intellectual writing to one that shakes consciences.
Pretending that literature is activism is limited and can not only generate bad writing, but also be pretentious and dangerous. As an activist I try to give other tools so that one day they can report.
With his latest book, he has reached the literary establishment , but a decade ago he was rejected for writing. What has changed?
"As a young woman you have to be twice as serious, twice as bastard, twice as much to be taken seriously"
It is difficult to publish essay when you are young. If you are also a woman, it is more difficult, or it was. As a young woman you have to be twice as serious, twice as bastard, twice as much for those men wearing ties to take you seriously and say: "Oh, look, maybe she is a serious writer and not a pretty girl" .
He also seems to have left literary culture behind to start talking about feelings: love, fear ...
At last I let my guard down. Desierto sonoro is a much more emotional novel than my other books, but all are born from listening to others. The story of my teeth comes from listening to a group of workers at the Jumex juice factory discussing the value of the pieces of art that their work finances. My writing mechanism is based on listening and writing about realities that art often ignores.
Have you tried to make your writing more useful?
I do not make fiction with the intention of giving, but with the commitment to explore and explore myself honestly and in depth. There is no other purpose than to give words to what you do not have.
Teach migrant minors and their families to write. Is it possible to transform your priorities without transforming yourself?
Of course not. Giving part of your life to one thing excludes others. I would be interested in finding a balance between my obsession, my work as a mother and as a writer, and my political work. Is not easy. When the novel came out, traveling and talking was part of my commitment to the publisher, but that part of the job empties your soul. So then it is essential to collect.
Is trying to reach everything a condition more feminine than masculine or a sign of vocational passions?
Plus the latest. It hurts me physically not to write. I manage as best I can; if sometimes it is falling asleep at four in the morning, well then that is it, and if, on the contrary, it is getting up at four to have two hours before the machinery of the day begins, well I do that.
The claiming part is almost genetic in you.
There have always been women in my maternal family involved in political struggles and social movements. My grandmother worked all her life in Puebla, in the community of San Miguel Tzinacapan, of course it was not conceived then as political work, but as a charitable occupation.
While living in South Africa, her mother stayed in Mexico to collaborate with the Zapatista Commission for Women and Children. Did you understand her?
When I was little, I remember that it bothered him every time he smoked. He smoked a little, but every time he did it it bothered him. I imagine it was the push and pull between parents and children. But my mother is a generous, luminous figure. It has not only been politically seasoned, with very clear ideas, it also gave us a lot of freedom. With her example, she has taught the other women in the family to be together, to make a home and to support each other so that we have free time. Today in my house we have a coexistence of solidarity and respect for the time of others.
It is a completely feminine family that lives right now in this house.
Well ... there are a couple of men out there who walk in carefully.
With her nomadism, and saving distances, did she also feel like a lost girl?
Surely I lack the feeling of being rooted in a place. But I also believe that my shifting childhood created the circumstances for me to find in writing a profound way of taking root. It sounds a little cheesy, but it's true. In a space where I feel strange, I take out my notebook and, as if it were a lifeline, I connect with the place.
He writes: "He was crying when he landed in Mexico." It seems she wants to be Mexican ...
I have always aspired to be a chilanga.
If you ever write your autobiography, how far will you go through Mexico?
I would never write it. It is what would interest me least in the world.
But a good part of his life appears in his books. The decline of their marriage ...
I write with what I can and if what I have is my personal experience, fibers of that enter my writing. For me it does not change whether or not it is true, except satisfying the natural morbidity that we all have. But all my books are about divorce. My first book is about a couple with a divorcing baby. And I wrote it just married.
Is divorce an obsession?
It is one of the most primary components of human pain: loss of relationships.
How old were you when your parents separated?
They separated several times in my life. I was 14 years old when they divorced. It is a possible psychoanalytic explanation, but also cheap.
In Desierto sonoro, the immigration crisis is mixed with the crumbling of the marriage of a protagonist who has a lot to do with you.
A novel is a slice of life: there are people who breathe, who divorce, who make love, who lick their fingers, who forgive themselves, who yell at each other.
"I am interested in the work of the Chicano community that both the United States and Mexico ignore and that is finally making its way now"
You force fiction by including photographs. Why does he do this?
I am interested that the act of writing is present as fingerprints. Fiction is manufactured.
He has spoken of mothers "trained to take on crap as a destination." Did it cost you to reconcile motherhood with your life?
I talk a lot with my mother friends and I feel that it cost me less than many of them for a reason: I decided to integrate motherhood into my creative process instead of fighting against it. All my books are about motherhood. I made one that is a map of the swings in the parks of Harlem. I had to find a way to occupy the afternoons being with my daughter, but also doing my job because I lived on it, I had no other. While she ran, I wrote. At that time I had migraines and I began to write about migraines, about light, instead of trying to distance myself from everything that seems to be a wave against writing.
In 2017, he bought this house in the Bronx.
It is not mine. The owner is a fucking bank who asked me for a lot of monthly interest, but for the first time I was able to at least have an advance on my work that he gave me to get into debt.
Did you need to take root?
Look if. Prices in Harlem were rising sharply. The city expels you. Coming to the Bronx was much wiser financially and what I didn't know is that you live much better here than in Harlem.
Why did you choose to emigrate to New York?
The reasons that brought me have been renewed. I came because I wanted to be a dancer, but I was lousy. Despite dancing for so many years, most were better than me. I realized my physical limits. It was frustrating not being able to get there.
Was he already writing?
I spent a summer working at the UN and dancing. I decided that I wanted to do my PhD here because I kept going to [Columbia University] and they wouldn't let me into the library. I snuck in and had never seen such a library. I thought, "I have to be here." I wasn't so interested in the academy as in that library, having that space. I came for that. I came to study with the intention of continuing to dance and little by little I released the dance, realizing that I was not going to be a professional, and I started writing my first essay, False Papers. It took me a long time because I was learning to write.
Is your daughter one of your reasons for staying in the United States?
I had Maya in Mexico. It's a complicated story, but I wanted him to be born where his father was. I was a 25-year-old student with two pesos and there was simply no way to have her here. Then, until I had the economic conditions to return, I did not. There, Columbia was generous. My Hispanic department helped me pay for Maya's health insurance, because in this country it is ruin to get sick. It cost $ 7,000 a year. Thanks to my professors I was able to finish the doctorate, become a mother and write two other books and the doctoral thesis.
He has been in New York for 10 years. It is the place where you have lived the longest. Are you rooted for your daughter, for your house ...?
My daughter, my house, my community of friends and my group of sisters in arms .
She writes in English and continues to claim that she is Mexican.
Chilanga.
His novel Desierto sonoro, praised by The New York Times as one of the 20 books of 2019, updates the road movie making it mestizo and political beyond adventure.
After so many years with Latinos, and Mexicans in particular, poorly represented in this country, many people are rewriting that story. I am interested in the work of the Chicano community that both the United States and Mexico ignore and that now finally makes its way, as always with bullshit, because if no one listens to you. Chicano women outraged — and with good reason — at the American Dirt book by Jeanine Cummins] have made a lot of noise. It is an outrageous book. We are living an opportunity for other Latino voices to make themselves known in the United States.
Have Latin demands been silenced by institutionalizing them: making museums on both sides of the border?
The worst part is the Mexican. Of all migrant children, 80% are raped before reaching the border. There have been more than 11,000 kidnappings, 120 dead, 72 killed in the back by Los Zetas, when the migrants refused to work for them ...
The migrant's prayer says that ...
"Leaving is dying a little and arriving is never final."
A lost girl from her novel declares: "I came because I wanted to get there."
The generations that arrive and migrate to the United States do so to offer their children better lives and to flee from violence and death, but they arrive at a place of extreme legitimate institutional violence, with which they end up experiencing two types of violence.