The Death of the Pioneer Myth
Lost Children Archive opens as a family prepares for a transnational journey. The man is a sound artist; the woman’s a radio documentarian; the boy is 10; the girl, 5. The man has announced that he has to go to Arizona on a recording quest, and whether he intends to come home again is not clear. The woman is opposed but eventually agrees: They will all drive west until they find what the man is looking for, and decide later whether they’re returning home together.
If the broad details of the plot feel vaguely familiar, it’s because Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican novelist and essayist now living in the United States, has taken up the American pioneer myth: A family (here named, as is traditional, “Ma” and “Pa,” “the boy” and “the girl”) sets out from the relative safety of the East Coast in a wagon (here, a station wagon) in wary but hopeful search of a new home. Theirs is a pilgrimage to a kind of western Zion, fraught with peril, undertaken because it is the only solution to an existential threat. But the migration in Lost Children Archive is constructed as an inversion of the American frontier fable—its anti-myth, its interrogator.
Luiselli’s pioneer family departs from the Bronx. Unlike the old trope, in which the
