Lost Children Archive: A Novel
Page 25
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
§ CLIPPING / PHOTOGRAPH
Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida, September 10, 1886
§ BOOK
Le goût de l’archive, Arlette Farge
§ LOOSE NOTE
Euphemisms hide, erase, coat.
Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget.
Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.
&n
bsp; Remember terms and meanings. Their absurd disjointedness.
Term: Our Peculiar Institution. Meaning: slavery. (Epitome of all euphemisms.)
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion and dispossession of people from their lands.
Term: Placing Out. Meaning: expulsion of abandoned children from the East Coast.
Term: Relocation. Meaning: confining people in reservations.
Term: Reservation. Meaning: a wasteland, a sentence to perpetual poverty.
Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion of people seeking refuge.
Term: Undocumented. Meaning: people who will be removed.
§ LOOSE NOTE / QUOTE
On Saturday, November 19, 2002, sixty people incarcerated in a camp for illegal immigrants sew their lips together. Sixty people with their lips sewn reel around the camp, gazing at the sky. Small muddy stray dogs scamper after them, yapping shrilly. The authorities keep postponing consideration of their applications for leave to remain.
—FROM BELLADONNA, BY DAŠA DRNDIĆ
§ LOOSE NOTE
Words, words, words, where do you put them?
Exodus
Diaspora
Genocide
Ethnic cleansing
§ BOOK
Belladonna, by Daša Drndić
§ SCRAP / POEM
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
HISTORIES
Outside our window, the sky had got red and pink and orange the way the sky in the desert always gets before the sun comes out, before it suddenly turns blue, which is a natural phenomenon you wouldn’t understand now even if I explained it.
I climbed out of bed and quietly packed all my useful stuff in my backpack. I had a lot of useful stuff I got because I had turned ten years old the day we started the trip. As a birthday present, you made me a card that said, Today I will always love you more than yesterday. Though only I could make out your terrible spelling, which was probably something like, Tday I wll owaz lov you mre than yustrday. I put that in my backpack. Pa gave me a Swiss Army knife, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, and a small compass, and Ma gave me my camera. I put all those things in my backpack. Then I realized that Ma’s sound recorder, her big map, and the little red book were still lying on the bedside table, I’d forgotten to put them back in the car the night before. So I just put them in my backpack, too.
I tiptoed to the kitchen and got two bottles of water and a lot of snacks. Also, at the last minute, I decided to take a small map that came with the house and that I’d found earlier in a basket next to the door. That map was called Map of Continental Divide Trail, and it included the walking trails in the Burro Mountains area, so it could come in handy. Finally, I emptied your backpack on the floor behind the bed, and put only The Book with No Pictures back in. I didn’t want to pack anything else in your backpack because I knew if it was too heavy, I’d end up carrying it for you.
Out our window, I noticed that the sun was just coming up from behind the mountains, and so I hurried to wake you up. I woke you up nicely, Memphis. You hated being woken up loudly or too fast. You smiled, sleepy-eyed, then said you were thirsty. So I tiptoed quickly back to the kitchen, poured you a glass of milk, and fast-walked back to our room holding the glass a bit away from me and making sure not to spill. You sat up on the bed and gulped the milk down. When you handed the empty glass back to me, I told you, hurry, get up, we’re going on an adventure and I have a surprise for you. You got up, refused to get out of your nightgown and get properly dressed, but you at least put on a pair of jeans under your nightgown, and socks, and your good shoes, and we walked out of the room, very quiet, and then out to the porch.
The morning felt warm and full of stories, like the ones Pa told us. We walked out onto the Continental Divide Trail, went down the steep hill from the house toward the dry creek. And when we reached the creek, you stopped to look up toward the house, and asked if Ma and Pa had given us permission to walk this far, all alone. I told you a lie I had already planned. I told you yes, Pa and Ma had given us permission to go explore on our own. I said they’d told me that you and I had to go and find more echoes, all the way in Echo Canyon. Really? you said. And for a moment I worried you weren’t going to believe this story. Yes, I told you, Ma and Pa said so. And they also said they’d catch up with us later in Echo Canyon.
After thinking about it for a moment, you finally said, that’s so nice of Ma and Pa. And that’s the surprise you had for me, Swift Feather! Right? Yes, exactly, I said, and I felt relieved that you had gone along with it, but it also made me feel a little guilty that you believed anything I said.
We walked in silence for a while, the way street dogs walk together like they’re on a mission, the way all dogs walk in packs like they’re on a mission. We weren’t a pack, it was just you and me, but it still felt like that, and I howled like a dog-wolf, and you howled back at me, and I knew we were going to have fun on our own. I thought then that even if we got lost forever and Ma and Pa never found us, we would at least still be together, which was better than being separated from each other.
STORIES
It wasn’t even noon when you said you were starving and hot, because the sun wasn’t even right on top of us. But I didn’t want you to get too tired too quick, so I said, time for a picnic. I chose a shady spot and we put our backpacks under a small tree. I realized I’d forgotten to bring a cloth to sit on. But I told you that Apache children needed no cloths or anything, they would sit right on the ground, and you agreed. We ate some of our snacks and drank a little water, three gulps each from our bottles.
I studied my Continental Divide Trail map, like Ma studied her map, and I knew we were probably near a place called Mud Springs under the Sugarloaf Mountain and had to walk toward Spring Canyon and then Pine Canyon. I was in control of the situation and proud to be able to follow a map as well as Mama did. Then I asked you if you wanted me to read you a bit from the story of the lost children, not because I really wanted to read to you but because I wanted to know what came next in the story. But you said no thanks, very politely, maybe later.
BEGINNINGS
We started walking again, one behind the other like we formed part of a line, and we walked for so long, talking about how we’d find echoes. You kept on coming up with ideas about how to trap echoes and said, if only we still had that glass jar that was empty where we trapped the dragonfly back some days ago.
I don’t know exactly when, but suddenly I thought, perhaps now we are actually lost, and I told you, Memphis, maybe we’re lost. And I felt excited but also a little worried. We turned around, but we couldn’t make out anything except the same rocky hills and desert woodland everywhere in front of and behind us. When I noticed that you looked worried, but not too worried, I said, this is all part of the plan, trust me. And you nodded, and asked for water, and we drank so much, we finished our two bottles.
The cowpath rose and fell along the creek. We stopped to look back and look forward, trying to look at it like our parents would look at a path and know how much longer and how much farther. You kept on asking how much farther, how many more blocks, which is also what you would ask Ma and Pa in the car on the way here and it would make them giggle and would make me annoyed. This time, though, I understood why it was a little bit funny for a serious question, but I didn’t laugh or giggle, and took you seriously and just said, one more uphill one more downhill and then we’ll get there, though really I had no idea, even though I’d studied the map so hard. I started to get really worried suddenly, and thought we should maybe turn back.
NARRATIVE ARC
Finally, when the sun was a little lower, we noticed the creek next to the path had a bit of water and we rushed down to wet our mouths and drank the water though it was green and slimy on our tongues. We took off our shoes also and walked on the watery stones, feeling the fresh and the slipperyness.
We called for Ma and Pa now and then, but our voices got drowned in the air as soon as we cried out. Not an echo, not anything. That�
�s when we really realized, like inside our stomachs, that we’d got lost. We called Mama, Papa, louder and louder, and there were no echoes, and we tried other words like saguaro, Geronimo, but nothing came back.