Narrar la huida para quedarse: lenguaje y poder en la política migratoria estadounidense

This article examines a way of approaching from the literature the state control of a migratory phenomenon: the entry of undocumented minors in the United States. From the essay by Valeria Luiselli Los niños perdidos (an essay in forty questions), which outlines the questionnaire applied by the Federal Immigration Court of New York to children who cross the border between Mexico and the United States alone to determine its migratory status, we reflect on the relationships between language and power with respect to the narrative genre, the construction of discourse and its transformation through translation. The framework for analysis is represented by language as a frontier space, between literary, journalistic and administrative language, between autobiographical narration and the reworking of testimony, but also, between official discourse, cold and calculated, that formulates the questions and the fragmentary, confusing and emotional discourse that the children offer in their answers. Likewise, the role of the interpreter as border agent of the languages that seeks to circumvent the intricacies of the legal process to avoid the deportation of the small migrants fled from the violence of their countries of origin.