Literature of the Americas

2541-7894 2542-243X

IWL RAS

https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2026-20-138-161

Research Article

Articles

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive: At the Crossroads of Cultures, Languages and Literary Allusions

2026

The article analyses Lost Children Archive, a novel by Valeria Luiselli, an American writer of Mexican descent. The author’s third novel, unlike the first two, was originally written in English rather than in Spanish, and was published in 2019 as Lost Children Archive. Then it was translated into Spanish with the participation of V. Luiselli and published seven months later under the title “The Sound Desert” (Desierto sonoro). This multimodal literary work, where text, image and even sound are intertwined, is primarily devoted to the problem of child migration from Mexico to the United States and the search for a way to tell readers on both sides of the border about this tragedy. The story focuses on children who have to emigrate illegally due to unbearable living conditions in their homeland, often to reunite with their parents in the United States. Many die on the way, and even if they manage to cross the border, they are subsequently deported. Intertextual elements play a significant role in Lost Children Archive, which enables the novel to engage in a dialogue with the works of European, American and Latin American writers, elevating political issues to the level of philosophical reflection. The primary objective of this study is to compare the English-language original and the Spanish-language version of the novel, enabling a deeper exploration of key concepts such as migration, documentation, sound, borders and loss, as well as a closer examination of the linguistic and cultural dichotomy of Self and Other within the context of the novel. The research suggests that Desierto sonoro is not just a translation; it is rather a transfer of the text into the space of another culture, resulting in a second version of the novel as a different perspective on the events.

Aínsa 2014 — Aínsa, Fernando. “Granitsa kak predel, inakovost’ i topos vstrechi i transgressii” [“The Border as a Limit, Otherness, and a Place of Encounter and Transgression”]. In Problemy kul’turnogo pogranich’ia. Pamiati Valeriia Borisovicha Zemskova (1940–2012) [Problems of the Cultural Borderland. In Memory of Valery Borisovich Zemskov], 21–36. Moscow: IWL RAS Publ., 2014. (In Russ.)Gavrik 2022 — Gavrik, Olga V. “Osobennosti neomifologizma kak tipa khudozhestvennogo soznaniia v romane Arkhiv poteriannykh detei Valerii Luizelli” [“Features of Neomythologism as a Type of Artistic Consciousness in Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli”]. In Aktual’nye voprosy mezhkul’turnoi kommunikatsii i zarubezhnoi literatury: Sbornik nauchnykh statei po materialam XXXII Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii [Current Issues of Intercultural Communication and Foreign Literature: Collection of Scientific Articles Based on the Materials of the XXXII International Scientific and Practical Conference], edited by N.V. Kormilina and N.Iu. Shugaeva, 295-302. Cheboksary: Chuvashskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet im. I.Ia. Iakovleva Publ., 2022. (In Russ.)Goncharova 2025 —Goncharova, Iana S. “Gibridnyi tekst kak prostranstvo mezhdiskursivnogo vzaimodeistiia (na materiale romana V. Luizelli Arkhiv poteriannykh detei)” [“Hybrid text as interdiscursive interaction space (based on Lost Children Archive by V. Luiselli)”]. Vestnik Cherepovetskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 6, no. 129 (2025): 31–44. (In Russ.)Jayasinghe 2025 — Jayasinghe, Dharshani Lakmali. “Archival Narrative Justice in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive.” Humanities 14(4), no. 74 (2025):1–19.Logie 2020 — Logie, Ilse. “¿Escritos en la traducción y para la traducción? Dos ejemplos: Valeria Luiselli y Mario Bellatin.” In Literatura latinoamericana mundial: Dispositivos y disidencias, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Jorge J. Locane, Benjamin Loy and Gesine Müller, 207–222. Berlin, Boston, 2020. Vanden Berghe 2022 — Vanden Berghe, Kristine. “Rutas, raíces y afectos en Desierto sonoro, de Valeria Luiselli.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, no. 99 (2) (February 2022): 147–162.Velázquez 2023 — Velázquez Soto, Armando Octavio. “Fotografías narrativas: el archivo multimodal en Desierto sonoro de Valeria Luiselli.” Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista De Teoría Literaria Y Literatura Comparada, no. 7 (2023): 140–155.Voronchenko 2022 — Voronchenko, Tatiana V. “Pogranichnye lokusy v istoriko-kul’turnom kontekste: geopoetika granitsy (na literaturno-fol’klornom materiale rossiisko-kitaiskogo i meksikano-amerikanskogo pogranich’ia)” [“Border Loci in the Historical and Cultural Context: The Geopoetics of the Border (Based on the Literary and Folklore Material of the Russian-Chinese and Mexican-American Borderlands)”]. Gumanitarnyi vektor 17, no. 3 (2022): 47–58. (In Russ.)Voronchenko, Gavrik 2021 — Voronchenko, Tatiana V., Gavrik, Olga V. “Kategoriia khudozhestvennogo vremeni v romane Arkhiv poteriannykh detei Valerii Luizelli.” [“The Category of Artistic Time in Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.”]. In Filologicheskoe obrazovanie i sovremennyi mir: Materialy XVII Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii [Philological Education and the Modern World: Proceedings of the XVII International Scholarly and Practical Conference]. Part 1, 102–106. Chita: Zabaikal’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet Publ., 2021. (In Russ.)