Lost Children Archive

The father is passionate about Apache heritage and seems to identify personally with revolutionary figures (decorating the walls of their apartment with images of Malcolm X and Geronimo). His “Inventory of Echoes” sound project is less journalistic and more conceptual than his wife’s, and he seems to resent the idea of political journalism. Maintaining the aesthetic goals of his projects is very important to him, and he criticizes his wife’s methods as “blind obedience to funders and funding” (99). His project seems very personal to him, and he is guarded and protective of it, refusing to share information about his intentions and methods with his wife, to the degree that he suddenly announces his move to Arizona without discussing it. For this reason, he also justifies taking up far more (literal and figurative) space with his project materials, with five archive boxes in the car compared to his wife’s single box.

Though guarded about the specifics of his project, the father enjoys sharing stories of Apache legends and history with his children, including tales of ranchers’ children who joined the Apaches and preferred their new lives. He also makes a point of teaching his son how to use his sound recording equipment and involving him in the recording process for his project. Just as the mother seems to identify more closely with her biological daughter, the father seems to identify more closely with his biological son.

Whereas the mother narrator is interested in ways present-day migrant issues mirror Native American and Mexican history, the husband seems more interested in meditating on the past. Whereas the mother narrator seems angry about the injustice she sees, he seems more embittered, making statements such as, “[This whole country] is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history” (215). For her, this trauma, loss, and mass erasure are impossible to ignore, as they are still happening. For him, the loss doesn’t seem to feel fresh. He perceives the displacement of migrants as a historic loss that has already occurred.

The unnamed boy is the primary narrator for most of the novel’s second half. He is the 10-year-old son of the husband (his biological son from a previous marriage). He is intelligent, articulate, and oddly serious, mimicking his parent’s elevated vocabulary and alluding to writers such as T.S. Eliot. He is also very attentive and curious about everything his parents do, think, and believe, asking probing questions such as what it means to document, why Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, and what might have happened if Geronimo hadn’t been forced to surrender to the white-eyes.

As both a serious, inquisitive, adult-like thinker and a child, the boy serves as a kind of translator between his parents and his little sister, between the world of adult language and kid language. For example, when his sister seems confused by the echoes she hears at Echo Canyon, he immediately understands that she believes there are people shouting back to them from the other side and explains her confusion to his parents. He also resolves to translate between his mother’s perspective and his father’s perspective on documenting, resolving to perform the roles of both “documentarian and documentarist” as he creates a narrative about their travels and experiences for his little sister. The boy can also be read as a kind of (re)translator of his mother’s experiences as he re-tells many of the same moments from his perspective.

Like his mother, the boy feels personally connected to Manuela’s lost daughters and often mentions them when migrant news stories play on the radio. He seems to believe that finding Manuela’s daughters—and becoming “lost children” themselves—will help their mother to notice and appreciate them, and perhaps re-unify their family. Because he is such a mature thinker, the boy also seems to underestimate how little he understands about where he’s going, what he’s doing, and what kind of danger he’s putting himself and his sister into.

The boy’s sections of the novel evoke interesting questions about the form and source of his narration. At some intervals, he seems to be writing a kind of diary for his sister, whom he frequently addresses by her invented family name, “Memphis.” He often assumes a pedagogic tone, explaining ideas that are too mature for her to understand. The boy’s narrative becomes more convoluted, however, when it starts to include passages from Elegies for Lost Children (which are worded differently from his mother’s section, wherein they previously appear) and details that extend beyond his perspective (such as the lines about the woman at Border Patrol in the one-sentence chapter “Echo Canyon). His final chapter, “Document,” seems to be a transcription of a recording he makes for his sister. In short, his sections are even more hybrid in form and tone than his mother’s. These hybrid sections compel the reader to ask questions about what is “happening” in his stories versus what is an “interpretation” or “performance” of something that happened, or even something he read or heard but didn’t experience directly.

The unnamed girl is the mother’s five-year-old biological daughter from a previous marriage. She is playful, curious, and inventive and enjoys creating new words (whether on purpose or accidentally, as a result of mishearing or mis-intuiting a word’s meaning). She serves as a source of comic levity for much of the novel and the source of many terms in their “family lexicon.”

The mother seems to see her daughter—and her attempts to understand the world around her—as an extension of herself. Because she constantly questions her family members and demands explanations, she becomes a kind of hub for intellectual connection within the family.

Manuela is a woman the narrator initially meets when working on the New York City soundscape project. She speaks a rare native Mexican language that the narrator desires to record for the soundscape. In return, the narrator agrees to help Manuela translate some legal paperwork into English, a process that inspires the narrator to volunteer as an interpreter at the federal immigration court.

Manuela migrated illegally across the US border from Mexico, then moved to New York, where she fell in love and had a child. Unable to easily return to Mexico, she hired a coyote to help her two young daughters cross the border, asking their grandmother to sew her phone number into the collars of the girls’ dresses. The girls are apprehended by Border Patrol. Before Manuela can retrieve them, the girls mysteriously disappear. Manuela and her daughters serve as a stand-in for the many migrant families and “lost children” who disappear from detention centers each year.