P2006.005.077, Historic Postcards Collection, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, Palm Springs, CA

In Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive, a husband and wife take a road trip from New York City to the Southwest with their two young children as their marriage silently falls apart. The couple document sound for a living, working for a project that aims to capture “a soundscape of New York City” for NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. They spend their days recording, as the wife sees it, “an archive full of fragments of strangers' lives.” 

The family is heading to the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona so that the husband (all characters are unnamed) can work on a research project about Geronimo. The wife has her own agenda for the excursion: to document the unfolding crisis of the detention and deportation of child migrants at the US/Mexico border, and to trace the whereabouts of two young girls in particular, who were being held in detention but disappeared during deportation.

The novel’s narrative is framed around the archive of the journey: the boxes the family has brought with them, numbered I - VII. Boxes I - IV hold the husband’s research material on Geronimo. Box V belongs to the wife, containing her notes, maps, readings, photos, reports, ephemera and clippings. Boxes VI and VII are the children’s and are empty, awaiting collections created on the journey.

As the wife researches and builds her archive relating to undocumented migrants, she also delves into writings on archival theory to understand her process. “When I started to get lost in the documental labyrinth of my own making, I contact 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," the character explains. "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.” Her bibliographies include Richard J. Cox’s “The End of Collecting: Towards a New Purpose of Archival Appraisal,” Terry Cook’s “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” and Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s “Reflections of an Archivist,” among others. 

Archival concepts and evidence are found throughout Lost Children Archive. Section headers are titled Archive, Inventory, Itemization, Document, Order. Box contents are listed; notes, reports, and court documents transcribed. Photographs, both for research and of the trip itself, are reproduced. Luiselli discusses her writing process in the Works Cited section at the end of the novel, stating: “The archive that sustains the novel is both an inherent and visible part of the central narrative… reference to sources—textual, musical, visual, or audio-visual—are not meant as side notes, or ornaments that decorate the story, but function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past.” 

Pages from Lost Children Archive.

The material itemized and reproduced in the novel was collected by the author before and during the process of writing. In a 2019 Guernica magazine interview, Luiselli explains, “I usually collect a lot of material things—scraps, pieces, cutouts, and photos—while I write a book... It was in the arrangement of that material... that I started to compose a story.” 

“There are always fingerprints of the archive in my books—my books are both the book and an archive of the book.” Lost Children Archive, she continues, “is essentially about ways of documenting, ways of telling, and ways of creating an archive—whether truthful or fictitious... Everyone in this novel is creating an archive to tell a story they want to tell in their own way.”

In the end, the author’s real archive of Boxes I - VII becomes fictional: “I recreated the family’s boxes, which I don’t dare open now, because they don’t feel like they’re mine anymore—they belong to this family.” The material collected for Lost Children Archive now belongs to the world of the imagination. 

Further Reading

As an archivist, I've always enjoyed reading fiction that embraces historical research, archival concepts of documentation, collecting, family legacies, lost letters, found diaries, and, of course, actual archives. Here are a few others:

Henry James, "The Aspern Papers"

Katherine Anne Porter, "Old Mortality"

Jose Saramago, All the Names

Martha Cooley, The Archivist

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

Nina Revoyr, A Student of History

also check out this list by writer Sara Sligar

Melissa Haley is the American Presidential Papers Project Archivist at the Huntington Library.