There was another map similar to that one, which I’d put right on top of your belly. It also had many red dots, and I was about to skip it because it made me feel sick, but then I realized it was a map of exactly where we were going to go in Apacheria. The map was missing most names of places, but I was able to make out the Dragoon Mountains in the west. Then, in the east, the Chiricahua Mountains, where Echo Canyon was. And between the two ranges, the big dry valley where there was a dry lake called Wilcox Playa, though on this map the name didn’t appear. Papa had shown me other maps of this same part of Apacheria many times, pointing to places and telling me their names. I had to repeat them after him, especially the names that were important in Apache stories, like Wilcox, San Simon, Bowie, Dos Cabezas Peaks, and Skeleton Canyon. I felt proud of it now, that I knew my way around Apacheria so well without even having been there yet. In Ma’s map, for example, even if the names weren’t written on it, I think I spotted the town called Bowie, north of the big dry valley, right on the railroad tracks, which is where Geronimo and his people had boarded a train after their final, final surrender. I also spotted Skeleton Canyon, southeast of the Chiricahua Mountains, which was where Geronimo and his people were captured before boarding that train in Bowie, and of course Dos Cabezas Peaks, which is where the ghost of Chief Cochise still walks around.
Then I noticed that on this map, right in the center of the valley between the Dragoons and the Chiricahuas, Ma had marked XX with a pen, and then made a big circle around the two X’s. It was the only map where she’d made any markings. I wondered what that meant. I thought about it for a long while, and out of all the possibilities I came up with, I think this was the one: Mama had made those marks because she was sure that some lost children were there. Two children: XX.
Then I realized: maybe the two X’s were the two girls Mama often spoke about, Manuela’s daughters, who had gone missing. Mama had good instincts, she was Lucky Arrow, after all. So if she was looking for them there, they were probably there, or somewhere near there. And then I had an idea that felt like an explosion in my head, but a good explosion. If the girls were there, maybe we could help Ma find them.
ELECTRICITY
So this is what I decided. The next morning, before Ma and Pa woke up, you and I would leave. We’d walk for as long as we could, like the lost children had walked, even if we might get lost. We’d find a train and board it, heading toward Apacheria. We’d walk into the valley where Ma had circled those two X’s. We’d look for the two lost girls there. If we got lucky and found them, we’d all head together to Echo Canyon, where Pa had always told us we could be easily found if we got lost, thanks to all the echoes. And if we didn’t find the girls, we’d still head to Echo Canyon, which, according to Ma’s map, was not too far from the place where she’d marked XX. I knew, of course, I’d get into big trouble for this. Ma and Pa would be so angry when they realized we had run away. But after a little while, they’d be more worried than mad. Ma would start thinking of us the way she thought of them, the lost children. All the time and with all her heart. And Pa would focus on finding our echoes, instead of all the other echoes he was chasing. And here’s the most important part, if we too were lost children, we would have to be found again. Ma and Pa would have to find us. They would find us, I knew that. I would also draw a map of the route you and I would probably follow, so that they could find us at the end. And the end was Echo Canyon.
It was silly of me to have broken a promise and looked inside Ma’s box. But also I finally understood some important things after looking at all that stuff, understood them with my heart and not only with my head. Though my head was spinning, too. But I’d finally got it, and that’s what matters, ’cause now I can tell you about it also. I finally got why Mama was always thinking and talking about all the lost children, and why it seemed like she was farther and farther away from us every day. The lost children, all of them, were so much more than us, Memphis, so much more than all the children we ever knew. They were like Pa’s Eagle Warriors, maybe even braver and smarter. I also finally understood what you and I had to do to make things better for all of us.
ORDER & CHAOS
I got so excited about my plan that I even felt I should wake everyone up to share it with the family, which of course I didn’t do. I breathed deep and slow, trying to keep calm. I put all of Ma’s things back in her box, in the right order, or almost, because you had turned around on your side and made a bit of a mess.
Before I closed the box, using the lid for support, I drew the map of my planned route. I based my map on one of the maps in Ma’s box, the one where she’d made the circle around the two X’s. First I drew the map, in pencil. Then I drew the route you and I would take, in red. Then, in blue, I drew the route that I imagined the lost children in Ma’s book might take. And the two routes, red and blue, met at a big X, which I made in pencil, and which was kind of at the same spot where Ma had marked XX on her map.
When I was finally finished, I looked at the map, and rubbed my stomach butterflies. It really was a very good map, the best I’d ever made. I put it at the top of the pile of things inside Ma’s box, right on top of her map with the two X’s. I knew she would find it there. Before closing the box, I thought maybe I should also leave a note in case my map was not clear enough to them, though it was clear enough to me. So I unstuck a blank Post-it from between the pages of one of the books in the box, a book called The Gates of Paradise, and wrote a note like old telegrams in stories, saying, went out, will look for lost girls, meet you later at Echo Canyon.
I still had to take the box back to the trunk, and I did. I crept outside, opened the trunk, put the box in its place. And when I went back inside, I felt like I was a finally almost a grown man.
§ MAP
§ MAP
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: HUERTAS-FERNANDEZ, NURIA
Sex: Female
Age: 9
Reporting Date: 2003-07-09
Surface Management: Private
Location: SMH
Location Precision: Physical description with directions, distances, and landmarks (precise to within 1mi/2km)
Corridor: Douglas
Cause of Death: Exposure
OME determined COD: COMPLICATIONS OF HYPERTHERMIA WITH RHABDOMYOLYSIS AND DEHYDRATION
State: Arizona
County: Cochise
Latitude: 31.366050
Longitude: –09.559990
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: ARIZAGA, BABY BOY
Sex: Male
Age: 0
Reporting Date: 2005-09-19
Surface Management: Pima County
Location: ARIVACA RD MP19
Location Precision: Vague physical description (precise to within 15mi/25km)
Corridor: Nogales
Cause of Death: Nonviable
OME determined COD: STILLBORN NONVIABLE MALE FETUS
State: Arizona
County: Pima
Latitude: 31.726220
Longitude: –111.126110
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: HERNANDEZ QUINTERO, JOSSELINE JANILETHA
Sex: Female
Age: 14
Reporting Date: 2008-02-20
Surface Management: US Forest Service
Location: N 31′ 34.53 W 111′ 10.52
Location Precision: GPS coordinate (precise to within ca. 300ft/100m)
Corridor: Nogales
Cause of Death: Exposure
OME determined COD: PROBABLE EXPOSURE
State: Arizona
County: Pima
Latitude: 31.575500
Longitude: –111.175330
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: LÓPEZ DURAN, RUFINO
Sex: Male
Age: 15
Reporting Date: 2013-08-26
Surface Management: Private
Location: INTERSTATE 10 MILEPOST 342.1
Location Precision: Physical description with directions, distances, and landmarks (precise to within 1mi/2km)
Corridor: Douglas
Cause of Death: Blunt force injury
OME determined COD: MULTIPLE BLUNT FORCE INJURIES
State: Arizona
County: Cochise
Latitude: 32.283693
Longitude: –109.826340
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: VILCHIS PUENTE, VICENTE
Sex: Male
Age: 8
Reporting Date: 2007-03-14
Surface Management: Private
Location: 2 MILES WEST OF 12166 EAST TURKEY CREEK
Location Precision: Street address (precise to within ca. 1000ft/300m)
Corridor: Douglas
Cause of Death: Undetermined, skeletal remains
OME determined COD: UNDETERMINED (SKELETAL REMAINS)
State: Arizona
County: Cochise
Latitude: 31.881290
Longitude: –109.426741
§ MIGRANT MORTALITY REPORT
Name: BELTRAN GALICIA, SOFIA
Sex: Female
Age: 11
Reporting Date: 2014-04-06
Surface Management: Private
Location: UMC MORGUE
Location Precision: GPS coordinate (precise to within ca. 300ft/100m)
Corridor: Douglas
Cause of Death: Exposure
OME determined COD: COMPLICATIONS OF HYPERTHERMIA
State: Arizona
County: Cochise
Latitude: 31.599972
Longitude: –109.728027
§ CLIPPING / PHOTOGRAPH
Objects found on migrant trails in the desert, Pima County
§ LOOSE NOTE
A map is a silhouette, a contour that groups disparate elements together, whatever they are. To map is to include as much as to exclude. To map is also a way to make visible what is usually unseen.
§ BOOK
The Gates of Paradise, by Jerzy Andrzejewski
§ CLIPPING / POSTER
Homes for Children. Orphan Train Movement, 1910
§ NOTE
In the year 1850, there were around thirty thousand homeless children in New York.
They ate out of trash cans, roamed the streets in packs.
Slept under the shadows of buildings or on sidewalk heating grates.
They joined street gangs for protection.
In 1853, Charles Loring Brace created the Children’s Aid Society, to offer them help.
But there was no way to offer sustained relief.
A year later, the Aid Society came up with a solution.
Put children on trains and ship them to the West.
To be auctioned off and adopted by families.
Between 1854 and 1930, more than 200,000 children were removed from NY.
Some ended up with good families, which took care of them.
Others were taken in as servants or slaves, enduring inhumane living conditions.
Sometimes unspeakable abuse.
The mass relocation of children was called the Placing-Out Program.
The children became known as the Orphan Train Riders.
§ FOLDER (FROM BRENT HAYES EDWARDS’S WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY: “THEORIES OF ARCHIVE”)
“What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Terry Cook
“The End of Collecting: Towards a New Purpose for Archival Appraisal,” Richard J. Cox
“Reflections of an Archivist,” Sir Hilary Jenkinson
Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History, Jeannette Allis Bastian
Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India, Antoinette Burton
“ ‘Othering’ the Archive—from Exile to Inclusion and Heritage Dignity: The Case of Palestinian Archival Memory,” Beverley Butler
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes
Lost in the Archives, Rebecca Comay, ed.
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida
“Ashes and ‘the Archive’: The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof,” Frances E. Dolan
“Archive and Aspiration,” Arjun Appadurai
§ CLIPPING / PHOTOGRAPH
Orphan Train
§ BOOK
The Children’s Crusade, Marcel Schwob
§ LOOSE NOTE / QUOTE
“Until the 18th century most trading companies had little or no desire to purchase children from the coast of Africa, and encouraged their captains not to buy them….By the middle of the 18th century, however, planters economically dependent on the slave trade came to depend on children and youth. As the abolitionist movement increasingly threatened their slave supply, planters adopted the strategy of importing younger slaves who would live longer. As a result, youth became an attractive asset on the auction blocks of the slave markets. Ironically, abolitionist sentiment changed 18th-century definitions of risk, investment, and profit. As the plantocracy purchased more breeding women and children in order to save their economic interests, traders modified their ideas of profit and risk and ideas of child worth changed throughout the Atlantic World.”
—COLLEEN A. VASCONCELLOS, “CHILDREN IN THE SLAVE TRADE,” IN CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN HISTORY
§ LOOSE NOTE / QUOTE
THE DOLBEN’S ACT OF 1788:
“II. Provided always, That if there shall be, in any such ship or vessel, any more than two fifth parts of the slaves who shall be children, and who shall not exceed four feet four inches in height, then every five such children (over and above the aforesaid proportion of two fifths) shall be deemed and taken to be equal to four of the said slaves within the true intent and meaning of this act….”
ANNOTATION: “THE DOLBEN’S ACT OF 1788 WAS PROPOSED BY NOTED ABOLITIONIST SIR WILLIAM DOLBEN BEFORE THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. WHILE IT WAS MEANT TO RESTRICT THE SLAVE TRADE, IT ACTUALLY HAD AN ADVERSE EFFECT ON CHILDREN.”
—ELIZABETH DONNAN, DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE SLAVE TRADE TO AMERICA, ANNOTATED BY COLLEEN A. VASCONCELLOS, IN CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN HISTORY
Lost Children Archive Page 25