Lost Children Archive

The three of us met in a waiting room in the New York City Immigration Court. The lawyer followed a brief questionnaire, asking questions in English that I translated into Spanish for Manuela. She told her story, and the girls’ story. They were all from a small town on the border of Oaxaca and Guerrero. About six years ago, when the younger of the two girls turned two and the older was four, Manuela left them in their grandmother’s care. Food was scant; it was impossible to raise the girls with so little, she explained. She crossed the border, with no documents, and settled in the Bronx, where she had a cousin. She found a job, started sending money back. The plan was to save up quickly and return home as soon as possible. But she got pregnant, and life got complicated, and the years started speeding by. The girls were growing up, talking to her on the telephone, hearing stories about snow falling, about big avenues, bridges, traffic jams, and, later, about their baby brother. Meanwhile, the situation back home became more and more complicated, became unsafe, so Manuela asked her boss for a loan, and paid a coyote to bring the girls over to her.

The girls’ grandmother prepared them for the trip, told them it would be a long journey, packed their backpacks: Bible, water bottle, nuts, one toy each, spare underwear. She made them matching dresses, and the day before they left, she sewed Manuela’s telephone number on the collars of the dresses. She had tried to get them to memorize the ten digits, but the girls had not been able to. So she sewed the number on the collars of their dresses and, over and over, repeated a single instruction: they should never take their dresses off, never, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American, be it a policeman or a normal person, they had to show the inside of the collar to him or her. That person would then dial the number sewed on the collars and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.

And it did, except not quite as planned. The girls made it safely to the border, but instead of taking them across, the coyote left them in the desert in the middle of the night. They were found by Border Patrol at dawn, sitting by the side of a road near a checkpoint, and were placed in a detention center for unaccompanied minors. An officer telephoned Manuela to tell her that the girls had been found. His voice was kind and gentle, she said, for a Border Patrol officer. He told her that normally, according to the law, children from Mexico and Canada, unlike children from other countries, had to be sent back immediately. He had managed to keep them in detention, but she was going to need a lawyer from now on. Before he hung up, he let her speak to the girls. He gave them five minutes. It was the first time since they’d left on the journey that she’d heard their voices. The older girl spoke, told her they were okay. The younger one only breathed into the phone, said nothing.

The lawyer we met with that day, after listening to Manuela’s story, said sorry, she could not take on their case. She said the case was not “strong enough,” and gave no further explanation. Manuela and I were escorted out of the courtroom, along corridors, down elevators, and out of the building. We walked out onto Broadway, into the late morning, and the city was buzzing, the buildings high and solid, the sky pristine blue, the sun bright—as if nothing catastrophic were happening. I promised I’d help her figure it out, help her get a good lawyer, help in any way possible.

JOINT FILING

Spring came, my husband and I filed our taxes, and we delivered our material for the soundscape project. There were over eight hundred languages in New York City, and after four years of work, we had sampled almost all of them. We could finally move on—to whatever came next. And that was exactly what happened: we started to move on. We were moving forward, but not quite together.

I had gotten involved further with the legal case against Manuela’s two girls. A lawyer at a nonprofit had finally agreed to take on their case and, although the girls were still not with their mother, they had at least been transferred from a brutal, semi-secure detention facility in Texas to a supposedly more humane setting—a former Walmart supercenter converted into an immigration detention center for minors, near Lordsburg, New Mexico. To keep up with the case, I had been studying a bit more about immigration law, attending hearings in court, talking to lawyers. Their case was one among tens of thousands of similar ones across the country. More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.

At that time, the radio and some newspapers were slowly starting to feature stories about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the country, but none of them seemed to be covering the situation from the perspective of the children involved in it. I decided to approach the director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. I presented a rough idea of how to narrate the story from a different angle. After some back-and-forth, and a few concessions on my part, she agreed to help me fund a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border. Not a big production: just me, my recording instruments, and a tight time line.

I initially hadn’t noticed, but my husband had also started to work on a new project. First, it was just a bunch of books about Apache history. They piled on his desk and on his bedside table. I knew he’d always been interested in the subject, and he often told the children stories about Apaches, so it wasn’t strange that he was reading all those books. Then, maps of Apache territory and images of chiefs and warriors started filling the walls around his desk. I began to sense that what had been a lifelong interest was becoming formal research.

What are you working on? I asked him one afternoon.

Just some stories.

About?

Apaches.

Why Apaches? Which ones?

He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they’d been the last Apache leaders—moral, political, military—of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. It was, of course, a more than compelling reason to undertake any kind of research, but it wasn’t quite the reason I was waiting to hear.

Later, he started referring to that research as a new sound project. He bought some bankers boxes and filled them with stuff: books, index cards full of notes and quotes, cutouts, scraps, and maps, field recordings and sound surveys he found in public libraries and private archives, as well as a series of little brown notebooks where he wrote daily, almost obsessively. I wondered how all of that would eventually be translated into a sound piece. When I asked him about those boxes, and the stuff inside them, as well as about his plans, and how they fit with our plans together—he just said that he didn’t know yet but that he’d soon let me know.

And when he did, a few weeks later, we discussed our next steps. I said I wanted to focus on my project, recording children’s stories and their hearings in the New York immigration court. I also said I was considering applying for a job at a local radio station. He said what I suspected he’d say. What he wanted was to work on his own documentary project, about the Apaches. He had applied for a grant and had gotten it. He also said the material he had to collect for this project was linked to specific locations, but this soundscape was going to be different. He called it an “inventory of echoes,” said it would be about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.

The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger. What I didn’t expect my husband to say was that, in order to be able to work on his new project, he needed time, more time than just a single summer. He also needed silence and solitude. And he needed to relocate more permanently to the southwest of the country.

How permanently? I asked.

Possibly a year or two, or maybe more.

And where in the southwest?

I don’t know yet.

And what about my project, here? I asked.

A meaningful project, was all he said.

ALONE TOGETHER

I suppose my husband and I simply hadn’t prepared for the second part of our togetherness, the part where we just lived the life we’d been making. Without a future professional project together, we began to drift apart in other ways. I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed. But can anyone really prepare? Can anyone tackle effects before detecting causes?

A friend had told us during our wedding party, some years earlier, with that oracular aura of some drunk men right before they fade, that marriage was a banquet to which people arrived too late, when everything was already half eaten, everyone already too tired and wanting to leave, but not knowing how to leave, or with whom.

But I, my friends, can tell you how to make it last forever! he said.

Then he closed his eyes, sunk his beard into his breast, and passed out in his chair.

ITEMIZATION

We spent many difficult evenings, after putting the children to bed, discussing the logistics around my husband’s plan to relocate more permanently to the southwest. Many sleepless nights negotiating, fighting, fucking, renegotiating, figuring things out. I spent hours trying to understand or at least come to terms with his project, and many more hours trying to come up with ways to dissuade him from pursuing his plan. Losing temperance one night, I even hurled a lightbulb, a roll of toilet paper, and a series of lame insults at him.

But the days passed, and preparations for the trip began. He searched online and bought things: cooler, sleeping bag, gadgets. I bought maps of the United States. One big one of the whole country, and several others of the southern states we’d probably cross. I studied them late into the night. And as the trip became more and more concrete, I tried to reconcile myself to the idea that I no longer had any other choice but to accept a decision already taken, and then I slowly wrote my own terms into the deal, trying hard not to itemize our life together as if it were now eligible for standard deductions, up for some kind of moral computation of losses, credits, and taxable assets. I tried hard, in other words, not to become someone I would eventually disdain.

I could use these new circumstances, I said to myself, to reinvent myself professionally, to rebuild my life—and other such notions that sound meaningful only in horoscope predictions, or when someone is falling apart and has lost all sense of humor.

More reasonably, regathering my thoughts a little on better days, I convinced myself that our growing apart professionally did not have to imply a deeper break in our relationship. Pursuing our own projects shouldn’t have to conduce to dissolving our world together. We could drive down to the borderlands as soon as the children’s school year finished, and each work on our respective projects. I wasn’t sure how, but I thought I could start researching, slowly build an archive, and extend my focus on the child refugee crisis from the court of immigration in New York, where I had been centering all my attention, to any one of its geographic points in the southern borderlands. It was an obvious development in the research itself, of course. But also, it was a way for our two projects, very different from each other, to be made compatible. At least for now. Compatible enough at this point, in any case, for us to go on a family road trip to the southwest. After that, we’d figure something out.

ARCHIVE

I pored over reports and articles about child refugees, and tried to gather information on what was happening beyond the New York immigration court, at the border, in detention centers and shelters. I got in touch with lawyers, attended conferences of the New York City Bar Association, had private meetings with nonprofit workers and community organizers. I collected loose notes, scraps, cutouts, quotes copied down on cards, letters, maps, photographs, lists of words, clippings, tape-recorded testimonies. When I started to get lost in the documental labyrinth of my own making, I contacted an old friend, a Columbia University professor specializing in archival studies, who wrote me a long letter and sent me a list of articles and books that might shine some light on my confusion. I read and read, long sleepless nights reading about archive fevers, about rebuilding memory in diasporic narratives, about being lost in “the ashes” of the archive.

Finally, after I’d found some clarity and amassed a reasonable amount of well-filtered material that would help me understand how to document the children’s crisis at the border, I placed everything inside one of the bankers boxes that my husband had not yet filled with his own stuff. I had a few photos, some legal papers, intake questionnaires used for court screenings, maps of migrant deaths in the southern deserts, and a folder with dozens of “Migrant Mortality Reports” printed from online search engines that locate the missing, which listed bodies found in those deserts, the possible cause of death, and their exact location. At the very top of the box, I placed a few books I’d read and thought could help me think about the whole project from a certain narrative distance: The Gates of Paradise, by Jerzy Andrzejewski; The Children’s Crusade, by Marcel Schwob; Belladonna, by Daša Drndić; Le goût de l’archive, by Arlette Farge; and a little red book I hadn’t yet read, called Elegies for Lost Children, by Ella Camposanto.

When my husband complained about my using one of his boxes, I complained back, said he had four boxes, while I had only one. He pointed out that I was an adult so could not possibly complain about him having more boxes than me. In a way he was right, so I smiled in acknowledgment. But still, I used his box.

Then the boy complained. Why couldn’t he have a box, too? We had no arguments against his demand, so we allowed him one box.

Naturally, the girl then also complained. So we allowed her a box. When we asked them what they wanted to put in their boxes, the boy said he wanted to leave his empty for now:

So I can collect stuff on the way.

Me too, said the girl.

We argued that empty boxes would be a waste of space. But our arguments found good counterarguments, or perhaps we were tired of finding counterarguments in general, so that was that. In total, we had seven boxes. They would travel with us, like an appendix of us, in the trunk of the car we were going to buy. I numbered them carefully with a black marker. Boxes I through IV were my husband’s, Box VI was the girl’s, Box VII was the boy’s. My box was Box V.

APACHERIA

At the start of the summer break, which was only a little more than a month away, we’d drive toward the southwest. In the meantime, during that last month in the city, we still played out our lives as if nothing fundamental were going to change between us. We bought a cheap used car, one of those Volvo wagons, 1996, black, with a huge trunk. We went to two weddings, and both times were told we were a beautiful family. Such handsome children, so different-looking, said an old lady who smelled of talcum powder. We cooked dinner, watched movies, and discussed plans for the trip. Some nights, the four of us studied the big map together, choosing routes we’d take, successfully ignoring the fact that they possibly mapped out the road to our not being together.

But where exactly are we going? the children asked.

We still didn’t know, or hadn’t agreed on anything. I wanted to go to Texas, the state with the largest number of immigration detention centers for children. There were children, thousands of them, locked up in Galveston, Brownsville, Los Fresnos, El Paso, Nixon, Canutillo, Conroe, Harlingen, Houston, and Corpus Christi. My husband wanted the trip to end in Arizona.

Why Arizona? we all asked.

And where in Arizona? I wanted to know.

Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:

Here.

Here what? the boy asked.

Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.

And? the boy asked.

And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.

Is that where we’re going? the girl asked.

That’s right, my husband replied.

Why there? the boy asked him.

Because that’s where the last Chiricahua Apaches lived.

So what? the boy retorted.

So nothing, so that’s where we’re going, to Apacheria, where the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to surrender to the white-eyes.

What’s a white-eye? the girl asked, possibly imagining a terrifying something.

That’s just what the Chiricahuas called the white Europeans and white Americans: white-eyes.

Why? she wanted to know, and I was also curious, but the boy snatched back the reins of the conversation, steering it his way.

But why Apaches, Pa?

Because.

Because what?

Because they were the last of something.

PRONOUNS

It was decided. We would drive to the southeastern tip of Arizona, where he would stay, or rather, where they would stay, for an undetermined amount of time, but where she and I would probably not stay. She and I would go all the way there with them, but we’d probably return to the city at the end of the summer. I would finish the sound documentary about refugee children and would then need to find a job. She would have to go back to school. I couldn’t simply relocate to Arizona, leave everything behind, unless I found a way and a reason to follow my husband in this new venture of his without having to abandon my own plans and projects. Though it wasn’t even clear to me if, beyond this summer road trip together, he indeed wanted to be followed.

I, he, we, they, she: pronouns shifted place constantly in our confused syntax while we negotiated the terms of the relocation. We started speaking more hesitantly about everything, even the trivial things, and also started speaking more softly, like we were tiptoeing with our tongues, careful to the point of paranoia not to slip and fall on the suddenly very unstable grounds of our family space. There is a poem by Anne Carson called “Reticent Sonnet” that doesn’t help solve this at all. It’s about how pronouns are “part of a system that argues with shadow,” though perhaps she means that we—people, and not pronouns—are “part of a system that argues with shadow.” But then again, we is a pronoun, so maybe she means both things at the same time.

In any case, the question of how the final placement of all our pronouns would ultimately rearrange our lives became our center of gravity. It became the dark, silent core around which all our thoughts and questions circulated.

What will we do after we reach Apacheria? the boy would ask repeatedly in the weeks that followed.

Yes, what next? I’d ask my husband later, when we crawled into bed.

Then we’ll see what next, he would say.

Apacheria, of course, does not really exist anymore. But it existed in my husband’s mind and in nineteenth-century history books, and, more and more, it came to exist in the children’s imaginations:

Will there be horses there?

Will there be arrows?

Will we have beds, toys, food, enemies?

When will we leave?

We told them we’d leave on the day after the boy’s tenth birthday.

COSMOLOGIES

During our last days in the city, before we left for Apacheria, our apartment filled with ants. Big black ants in the shape of eights, with a suicidal drive for sugar. If we left a glass of something sweet on a kitchen counter, the following morning we’d find twenty ant corpses floating in it, drowned in their own hedonism. They explored kitchen counters, cabinets, the sink—all normal haunts for ants. But then they moved on to our beds, our drawers, and eventually our elbows and necks. One night I became convinced that if I sat silent long enough, I could hear them marching inside the walls, taking over the apartment’s invisible veins. We tried sealing every crevice in the molding between the walls and floors with tape, but it peeled off after a few hours. The boy came up with the much better idea of using Play-Doh to seal cracks, and for a while it did the trick, but the ants soon found a way in again.

One morning, the girl left a dirty pair of panties on the bathroom floor after her shower, and when I picked them up a few hours later to put them in the laundry basket, I noticed that they were alive with ants. It seemed like a deep violation of some sort, a bad sign. The boy found the phenomenon fascinating; and the girl, hilarious. Over dinner that night, the children reported the incident to their father. I wanted to say that I thought those ominous ants foreshadowed something. But how could I explain that to the family, to anyone, without sounding crazy? So I shared only half my thought:

A catastrophe.

My husband listened to the children’s report, nodding, smiling, and then told them that ants, in Hopi mythology, are considered sacred. Ant-people were gods who saved those in the upperworld from catastrophes by taking them down to the underworld, where they could live in peace and freedom until the danger had passed and they were able to return to the upperworld.

Which catastrophe are the ants here to take us away from? the boy asked him.

I thought it was a good question, involuntarily poisonous, perhaps. My husband cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Then the girl asked:

What’s a catastrophe?

Something very bad, the boy said.

She sat silent for a moment, looking at her plate in deep concentration and pressing the back of her fork against her rice to flatten it down. Then, looking up at us again, very serious, she delivered a strange agglutination of concepts, as if the spirit of some nineteenth-century German hermeneutist had possessed her:

The ants, they come marching in, eat my upperworldpanties, they take us where there’s no catastrophes, just good trophies and tooshiefreedom.

Children’s words, in some ways, are the escape route out of family dramas, taking us to their strangely luminous underworld, safe from our middle-class catastrophes. From that day on, I think, we started allowing our children’s voices to take over our silence. We allowed their imaginations to alchemize all our worry and sadness about the future into some sort of redeeming delirium: tooshiefreedom!

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?

PASSING STRANGERS

There’s a part in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that used to be a kind of ur-text or manifesto for my husband and me when we were still a new couple, still imagining and working out our future together. It begins with the lines:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you, and slept with you …

The poem explained, or so we thought, why we had decided to devote our lives, alone but together, to recording the sounds of strangers. Sampling their voices, their laughter, their breathing, despite the fleetingness of the encounters we had with each of them, or perhaps on account of that very fleetingness, we were offered an intimacy like no other: an entire life lived parallel, in a flash, with that stranger. And recording sound, we thought, as opposed to filming image, gave us access to a deeper, always invisible layer of the human soul, in the same way that a bathymetrist has to take a sounding of a body of water in order to properly map the depth of an ocean or a lake.

That poem ends with a vow to the passing stranger: “I am to see to it that I do not lose you.” It’s a promise of permanence: this fleeting moment of intimacy shared between you and me, two strangers, will leave a trace, will reverberate forever. And in many ways, I think we kept that promise with some of the strangers we encountered and recorded over the years—their voices and stories always coming back to haunt us. But we never imagined that that poem, and especially that last line, was also a sort of cautionary tale for us. Committed as we were to collecting intimacies with strangers, devoted as we were to listening so attentively to their voices, we never suspected that silence would slowly grow between the two of us. We never imagined that one day, we would somehow have lost each other amid the crowd.

SAMPLES & SILENCE

After all that time sampling and recording, we had an archive full of fragments of strangers’ lives but had close to nothing of our own lives together. Now that we were leaving an entire world behind, a world we had built, there was almost no record, no soundscape of the four of us, changing over time: the radio in the early morning, and the last reverberations of our dreams merging with news of crises, discoveries, epidemics, inclement weather; the coffee grinder, hard beans becoming powder; the stove sparking and bursting into a ring of fire; the gurgling of the coffeemaker; the long showers the boy took and his father’s insistent “Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late”; the paused, almost philosophical conversations between us and the two children on their way to school; the slow, careful steps the boy takes down empty school corridors, cutting class; the metallic screech of subways halting to a stop, and the mostly silent ride on train cars during our daily commutes for field recordings, inside the grid or out into the boroughs; the hum of crowded streets where my husband fished for stray sounds with his boom while I approached strangers with my handheld recorder, and the stream of all their voices, their accents and stories; the strike of a match that lit my husband’s cigarette and the long inward hiss of his first inhalation, pulling in smoke through clenched teeth, then the slow relief of an exhalation; the strange white noise that large groups of children produce in playgrounds—a vortex of hysteria, swarming cries—and the perfectly distinct voices of our two children among them; the eerie silence that settles over parks after dusk; the tousle and crackle of dry leaves heaped in mounds at the park where the girl digs for worms, for treasures, for whatever can be found, which is always nothing, because all there is under them are cigarette butts, fossilized dog turds, and miniature ziplock stash bags, hopefully empty; the friction of our coats against the northern gusts come winter; the effort of our feet pedaling rusty bicycles along the river path come spring; the heavy pant of our chests taking in the toxic vapors of the river’s gray waters, and the silent, shitty vibes of both the overeager joggers and the stray Canada geese that always overstay their migratory sojourns; the cannonade of instructions and reprimands fired by professional cyclists, all of them geared up, male, and middle-aged: “Move over!” and “Look left!”; and in response to that, our voices either softly mumbling, “Sorry sir, sorry sir,” or shouting loud heartfelt insults back at them—always abridged or drowned, alas, by the gushing winds; and finally, all the gaps of sound during our moments spent alone, collecting pieces of the world the way we each know how to gather it best. The sound of everything and everyone that once surrounded us, the noise we contributed, and the silence we leave behind.

FUTURE

And then the boy turned ten. We took him out to a good restaurant, gave him his presents (no toys). I got him a Polaroid camera and several boxes of film, both black-and-white and color. His father got him a kit for the trip: a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a small compass. At his request, we also agreed to deviate from the planned itinerary and spend the next day, the first of our trip, at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. He’d done a school project about Calypso, the five-hundred-pound turtle with a missing front flipper that lives there, and had been obsessed with her ever since.