Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

1. 这是一本极短的书，题目描述地非常准确，是篇论文。即使短，8月7日开始阅读，13日才完成。
2. 作者是西班牙语的翻译，为违法越境的南美小孩提供翻译，在法院提供证词，最后帮助他们拿到在美国的居留许可。
3. 本文就像是一本越境指南，要做什么，不要作什么。
4. 作者自己也是南美人，等待绿卡获批准。所以天然地，她是站在小孩那一边。文字偏向性非常强烈，而且反川普。
5. 题目40个问题是指越境后的小孩在送到法庭前会被问到的40个问题，比如：a. 你是如何过来的；b. 你家里还有谁; c. 如果回去，你会收到迫害吗？d. 在这边，会有谁帮助你和你一起住？e. 你爸妈在哪儿？f. 路上有没有人对你实施犯罪? g. 你有没有上学？ h. 你为何要来美国? i. 你的姓名？j. 你在哪儿出生？k. 你有没有参加过犯罪组织？... 老了，记不了那么多问题，但是就是问得非常细。
6. 有的父母生下小孩，就自己越境到美国打黑工了，从未长时间和自己小孩住在一起。嗯，这点倒是和我很像。攒够钱了，就雇佣当地的coyote把自己小孩从洪都拉斯、从哥伦比亚弄过来。他们会越过境，爬上墨西哥的野兽列车，把自己绑在车顶上以防掉下来。路上会有各种各样的危险，比如所有的女孩在出发前都会吃上避孕药，因为有极大概率会被强奸。也有人会被带去做种植大麻的奴隶，不从者就直接被爆头。即使过了境，也会有人在路上渴死，饿死，淹死。比起来，我们家的小朋友倒是很幸运。
7. 越境后，一定要让boader patrol抓起来，因为这是documenting的第一步。之后要打电话给当地的亲戚把自己接走，在法庭开庭前后，还要公布这些黑亲戚的住址和电话。
8. 我在看这本书之前，刚好看到有推友发推，前后两次越境墨西哥。再看一下这本书，就颇有感触。里面提到只有非接壤国家的越境不会被直接遣返，而是等待法庭开庭。而墨西哥越境的，执法人员执行自由裁量权不用羁押，直接就可以遣返。这位推友拿着墨西哥的绿卡，直接没有任何理由地被送回去，可能就是因为这个原因。
9. 美国一直认为它是非法越境的受害者，旁观者。但实际上这是个很复杂的问题，更多的是，它是当事者，是造成它南边这些国家动乱，混乱不堪，无法居住的部分原因。但凡家里环境能够忍受地，也就不会有那么多人冒着生命危险北迁了。和19世纪福建、广东下南洋是差不多吧。就是讨生活，实在活不下去了。书里说一个小孩因为不愿加入帮派，逃跑路上，眼睁睁看着自己的同学一枪被干翻。他的姨直接让他不上学了，在家呆着，花了4000美元雇了coyote把他带过来越境。

slender,

• 您在位置 #182-183的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月8日星期日 下午1:42:50

It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

• 您在位置 #200-201的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:27:49

Did they pencil in “protest against illegal immigrants” on their calendars, right next to “mass” and just before “bingo”?

• 您在位置 #204-204的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:28:35

locusts!

• 您在位置 #214-214的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:30:29

bleaker

• 您在位置 #219-219的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:31:28

overcast

• 您在位置 #262-267的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:41:36

crossing the desert beyond the border alone is too dangerous, if not impossible. They also know that if they are not caught at this point, or if they do not surrender themselves to the law, it is unlikely that they will arrive at their final destination—the home of a relative in some city, usually far from the border. If the legal proceedings don’t begin now, their fate will be to remain undocumented, like many of their parents or adult relatives already in the United States. Life as an undocumented migrant is perhaps not worse than the life they are fleeing, but it is certainly not the life that anyone wants. So, the children who cross the border, into the desert, try to stick to the busier roads and walk openly along highways, until someone—hopefully an officer and not a vigilante—sees them.

• 您在位置 #272-274的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:43:29

As soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, commonly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The icebox derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody.

• 您在位置 #289-290的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:45:30

we see a trail of flags that volunteer groups tie to trees or fences, indicating that there are tanks filled with water there for people to drink as they cross the desert.

• 您在位置 #317-318的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:51:59

Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

• 您在位置 #318-322的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 上午8:53:06

Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333. Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico.

• 您在位置 #363-363的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月9日星期一 下午6:41:06

Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.

• 您在位置 #464-464的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 上午8:42:22

nuance

• 您在位置 #519-519的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 上午8:54:49

coveted

• 您在位置 #548-549的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:17:30

But in many answers, it can be inferred that “the people with whom you lived” are precisely the reason the child was driven out of his or her home and community in the first place.

• 您在位置 #557-564的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:19:12

Which goes more or less as follows: Children leave their homes with a coyote. They cross Mexico in the hands of this coyote, riding La Bestia. They try not to fall into the hands of rapists, corrupt policemen, murderous soldiers, and drug gangs who might enslave them in poppy or marijuana fields, if they don’t shoot them in the head and mass-bury them. If something goes wrong, and something happens to a child, the coyote is not held accountable. In fact, no one is ever held accountable. The children who make it all the way to the U.S. border turn themselves in to Border Patrol officers and are formally detained. (Often by officers who say things like “Speak English! Now you’re in America!”) They are then placed in the icebox. And, later, in a temporary shelter. There they must start looking for their parents—if they have parents—or for relatives who will sponsor them. Later, they are sent to wherever their sponsor lives. And finally, they have to appear in court, where they can defend themselves against deportation—if they have a lawyer.

• 您在位置 #564-567的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:20:20

There is one exception, however, one little twist to the part of the plot where children are formally detained by Border Patrol officers. The exception is: being Mexican. Mexican children detained by Border Patrol can be deported back immediately. They don’t have to be given temporary shelter, are not allowed to attempt contact with parents or relatives in the U.S., and are certainly not granted a right to a formal hearing in court where they could defend themselves, legally, against a deportation order.

• 您在位置 #570-571的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:21:01

A Border Patrol officer can base a decision to deport a Mexican child on any evidence—no matter how substantial or insubstantial—and is not required to document a rationale behind it.

• 您在位置 #585-585的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:23:10

mahogany

• 您在位置 #599-604的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:25:22

One day she called her mother—the grandmother of the girls—and told her that the time had come: she had saved enough money to bring the girls over. I don’t know how the grandmother responded to the news of her granddaughters’ imminent departure, but she noted the instructions down carefully and later explained them to the girls: in a few days, a man was going to come for them, a man who would help them get back to their mother. She told them that it would be a long trip, but that he would keep them safe. The man had taken many other girls from their village safely across the two borders to their mothers, and everything had gone well. So everything would go well this time, too.

• 您在位置 #604-608的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:26:16

The day before they left, their grandmother sewed a ten-digit telephone number on the collars of the dress each girl would wear throughout the entire trip. It was a ten-digit number the girls had not been able to memorize, as hard as she tried to get them to, so she had decided to embroider it on their dresses and repeat, over and over, a single instruction: they should never take this dress off, not even to sleep, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American policeman, they were to show the inside of the dress’s collar to him. He would then dial the number and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.

• 您在位置 #613-614的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:26:52

Yes, that’s how it ends. But of course it doesn’t end there. That’s just where it begins, with a court summons:

• 您在位置 #624-629的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:28:36

How do you plead? We admit the allegations and concede the charge. And what is the charge? Fundamentally, that the child came to the United States without lawful permission and is therefore “removable.” Admitting this charge alone leads to deportation unless the child’s attorney can find those potential avenues of relief that form a defense against it. The admission of guilt, then, is a kind of door that the law holds half open. It is the only way for the accused to begin defending themselves against a categorical sentence and seek legal avenues to immigration relief.

• 您在位置 #639-641的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:30:35

The main problem with asylum—the reason lawyers often consider it a secondary choice—is that if it’s granted, the children can never return to their home country, where they fear being persecuted, without jeopardizing their immigration status in the United States. Less common are the U visa, which can only be granted to victims of certain crimes, and the T visa, for victims of human trafficking.

• 您在位置 #647-649的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:31:32

When children don’t have enough battle wounds to show, they may not have any way to successfully defend their cases and will most likely be “removed” back to their home country, often without a trial.

• 您在位置 #717-718的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:40:09

Because immigration court is a civil court, these child “aliens” are not entitled to the free legal counsel that American law guarantees to persons accused of crimes.

• 您在位置 #735-735的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月10日星期二 下午6:42:37

Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives.

• 您在位置 #901-902的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:22:34

The belief that the migration of all of those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution.

• 您在位置 #946-948的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:36:55

The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “immigrants,” not “illegals,” not merely “undocumented minors.” Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have

• 您在位置 #961-964的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:47:40

As the weeks passed, one student, who at the beginning of the semester had argued that the United States had too many “internal” problems to deal with the burden of receiving more immigrants, became the most extreme supporter of the idea that the immigration of children into the United States should be conceived of not as a foreign affairs problem, but as a local concern.

• 您在位置 #993-994的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:51:00

To stop talking about the problem, one of them says, and start doing something about it.

• 您在位置 #1005-1007的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:52:33

It only takes a group of ten motivated students to begin making a small difference. Between the ten of them, before my astonished—even disbelieving—eyes, they draft a constitution, appoint duties, and get the university’s approval.

• 您在位置 #1008-1010的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:53:02

The United States is a country full of holes, and Hempstead in particular is a giant shithole, as Manu says. But it’s also a place full of individuals who, out of a sense of duty toward other people, perhaps, are willing to fill those holes in one by one.

• 您在位置 #1013-1014的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:53:42

the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.

• 您在位置 #1017-1017的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月12日星期四 下午9:54:29

lucid

• 您在位置 #1020-1023的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:36:39

I investigated further, asking several lawyers if I could continue working without pay. The answer, without a shade of ambiguity, was no: one is not allowed to “volunteer” at a job where one was previously paid while his or her papers are being processed. United States immigration laws are stringent; it would have been an act of total irresponsibility to have tried to find a loophole, especially since it would have put my family’s well-being at risk.

• 您在位置 #1027-1027的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:38:02

the Immigrant’s Prayer.

• 您在位置 #1028-1029的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:38:12

llegar”—“To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive.”

• 您在位置 #1030-1031的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:38:54

that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting.

• 您在位置 #1033-1041的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:41:07

And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society. To stay in the United States, you will unlearn the universal metric system so you can buy a pound and a half of cooked ham, accept that thirty-two degrees, and not zero, is where the line falls that divides cold and freezing. You might even begin to celebrate the pilgrims who removed the alien Indians, and the veterans who maybe killed other aliens, and the day of a president who will eventually declare a war on all the other so-called aliens. No matter the cost. No matter the cost of the rent, and milk, and cigarettes. The humiliations, the daily battles. You will give everything. You will convince yourself that it is only a matter of time before you can be yourself again, in America, despite the added layers of its otherness already so well adhered to your skin. But perhaps you will never want to be your former self again. There are too many things that ground you to this new life.

• 您在位置 #1041-1042的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:41:16

Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive.

• 您在位置 #1050-1052的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月13日星期五 上午8:43:08

At one point, she dug her index finger into the miniature bucket of white paint, and as she spread it across her cheeks she said, “Look, Mamma, now I’m getting ready for when Trump is president. So they won’t know we’re Mexicans.”