Undocutime: DREAMers, Lost Children Archive, and the politics of waiting and storytelling in twenty-first-century migration narratives

This essay introduces the concept of undocutime, the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented, by bringing together Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive , and DREAMer narratives, stories by and about would-be beneficiaries of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. To bring undocutime into focus, the article locates DREAMer narratives and Luiselli’s novel in the context of the twenty-first-century boom in child migrant stories, stories by or about a child migrant or former child migrant. This essay argues that, whereas many first-person stories by formerly undocumented child migrants adhere to a Bildung structure and offer closure and the authority of witness, Lost Children Archive uses layered narratives, nonnarrative forms, a nonlinear structure, and non-realism to tell a story about the contemporary child migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border in medias res. Via its content, form, and fictionality, Luiselli’s novel brings into relief the paralysis of witnessing and the slow violence of undocutime.