Alishya Almeida
Interview with Valeria Luiselli
Reading Valeria Luiselli’s work is placing an ear to the ground, listening keenly to what’s happening within and between the borders of North America, specifically the US-Mexico border. I first read Valeria Luiselli’s books during the pandemic from my university’s library in Pennsylvania. I began with Story of My Teeth, became obsessed with her writing and promptly proceeded to read all her other books. Valeria Luiselli is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. She currently lives in New York City, where I had the pleasure of engaging further with her work through New York University’s Creative Writing program. In a class with her during Spring 2025, we examined the ways sound can inform the politics and aesthetics of our relationships in several ways.
I interviewed Valeria on her most recent project, Echoes from the Borderlands, an ongoing ten-year-long sound project with collaborators Ricardo Giraldo and Leo Heiblum, where they record soundscapes across the US-Mexico border. They are presenting their findings through several iterations, one being the chapbook Echoes from the Borderlands, also titled Study One: Call You When I Get Home. Their Study Two was exhibited this winter at Dia Chelsea as a twenty-four hour “sonic documentary-fiction” from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
In this interview, Valeria portals us to be open to possibilities of constantly malleable configurations in writing and being in community and place—one where we treat process as absolutely integral to living and creating art. What does it look like to be immersed in a process that allows us to witness people in all their complexities? And how might listening irrevocably change us when we hold space for the collective, especially for those who have been missing in how we tell stories of history and the present?
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: You mentioned in an interview several years ago that listening has always been important to you. In Echoes from the Border- lands, listening takes on another dimension, a surreal quality that is shaped by our participation in the violence of the world, the ways we create borders and create singular narratives of land and its histories. A project like this, both the book and the longer project, rebels against those narratives. What is it like for you to immerse yourself in a multi-year project spending time across the curves and bends of the US-Mexico border and listen to the people, their old histories and new histories, the animals, water, and machines?
VALERIA LUISELLI: It has transformed so much over the years with what this project set out to be, and what it is now, and the transformation is primar- ily around listening because when we set out to do this project, there was a thesis. There was a theory, there was a complaint, there was a viewpoint—and that viewpoint, that complaint, that theory was informed by the great sadness, frustration, and anger that violence and xenophobia and racism at the border produced in me and in my collaborators. Our questions were: Why is the border between our two countries––us as Mexicans recording on this side, on the American side—why is the border between our two countries so brutal, so violent, so dark, so full of ignorance, and so full of hatred towards us, towards Mexico? And we set out in the spirit of that. Of pointing out the brutality and the violence, and soon we were confronted with something much more complex and difficult to pin down and reduce to the words I’ve just used. We were confronted, first of all, by the enormous beauty of land. And its animals and its mountains and its saguaros and its sunrises and the echoes in its mountains. Our first trip together in January 2020 was to the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona. That’s where we started.
Even though it wasn’t the linear beginning of the trip, it was kind of like the heart of where we started. Because I had been there previously when I was writing Lost Children Archive and knew that land very well. We just kind of started with the familiar, with what was kind of familiar to me. And we also thought at that point that the border project was not going to be a twenty-four hour entire border, a sweeping epic of a project, but something more limited to Arizona and New Mexico. Originally, that was where we were going to move. So we started out there and we started falling in love with space, with land, with sound in land. And . . . then you know, in conversations with people, with people that I would say have points of view very contrary to my own . . . we also have started falling in love with people. You know, just with their humanity, with what they say, with everyone’s right to believe what they believe, even if we think they’re totally wrong. People have reasons to feel one way or the other. One might think they’re misguided. But at the end, it’s people’s narrative of their own lives and of their home. And we just then fell in love, maybe not with people necessarily, not with everyone all the time. But with listening, the act of listening to people and not imposing in that act our theory about the border, our questions about violence and rage and all that, but rather, you know, we set out asking people, what are they afraid of? What are you afraid of and who is the other? And what do you think of Mexico? We set out like that. And now our questions very rarely arrive at that. They arrive at that if the conversation leads us there, but rather our questions are more about land and how people describe their land, what they know and they think about their land, the place where they live.
And what is emerging from that, now five years into the project, is a very complex tapestry of people bringing land to life through their conversations about it, through their sounds about it. And, I don’t think now that the border is any less violent, complex, brutal, and difficult than I thought at the beginning but I just have a sense of the complexity of it being worthy of attention, of all of our attention without our contention all the time.
So what this project now is, is like a ten-year study, a decade—the decade of the twenties of the 2000s. Listening to a space and how it is being transformed. And the thing is that it’s being transformed quicker than we thought it would be also. So we are kind of recording change in a way and the acceleration of time in a way that we also did not ever anticipate. For example, when we set out with the project, we didn’t know that a year into it, the government was going to start dynamiting the Saguaro forests in the Tohono O’odham nation in order to build a wall through holy land, and that happened, and we were not able to record the dynamite explosions but record what people said about them thereafter.
And then, more recently at the end of last year, we went to Brownsville. The Brownsville area of Texas, which is the end of Texas, almost in the Gulf of Mex- ico. And the day we arrived, something kind of extraordinary had just happened which was infamous in my regard, the infamous SpaceX community run by Elon Musk. It’s actually called Starbase. The company is SpaceX, but the place there in Brownsville is called Starbase. They had just launched, successfully, a rocket that had landed back. So the day we landed that had just happened. And so the space community, as they call themselves, who gather themselves around Elon Musk, were in a kind of Woodstock celebration. It was like everyone was celebrating and singing and talking about the rocket, like it was part of them. And the people outside the community that live in those areas were devastated. They were talking about how their animals and their houses had gone crazy with the sounds of the rocket and the shattering of glass. Everyone was, you know . . . there were very different viewpoints about what had just happened. And we were able to go there and sort of record this and—you know—just a few months later, Trump won the election and Musk took the place he now has in the government, and it was very eerie to see sort of that taking shape and understanding the power— the ideological power—that Musk has over a greater and greater following of people, that I did not know until we landed in Brownsville. They have murals of Musk everywhere. And pictures. And it’s really like there is a bit of a cult feeling around all of that. And they are people who believe that it is going to happen and they might even get a chance to go to Mars one day.
So it’s very interesting to see—it’s disquieting. But it’s, I think, you know, more and more in this America, it’s very important not to look away and not to pretend things are not happening. And not to shut your ears to what other people say. And it’s not about agreeing, disagreeing. It’s about listening. And listening is really a very active activity, but it’s an active activity in which one has to also just sit still and let it come.
WSR: When I’ve been looking at everything written about Echoes from the Borderlands, there’s a lot about “sound studies”. And I’m wondering if you use that term yourself, can you tell us a little more about sound studies. As a writer who’s written across several genres, why choose to write a sonic essay?
VL: Yeah, although now we’re calling Echoes from the Borderlands more than a “sonic essay” which was our original terminology for it, [now it’s] more like a sonic documentary fiction. Just to stay away from the pretense that we are documenting in the genre of nonfiction, and then what that means in terms of our commitment, not to truth because we have a commitment to truth in a very deep way, but in terms of our commitment to a more journalistic approach, which we don’t have. Like what we really compose with what we hear in the sense that, you know, at the end we choose out of the three hours that we listened to in an interview, we may choose like one line of a person. This is a good example: we spoke to someone, one of the SpaceX enthusiasts, about the launchings of that rocket. He was very happy to talk. He talked and talked and talked for hours. We recorded him. And at the end, what was left of that recording was his reproduction, his sonic reproduction of what he had heard in the sonic boom. Let me see if I can find it. And so in that sense, it’s fiction, right? It’s like you’re taking the raw material of reality and putting it together. Here, here it is:
“Ah, so when the rocket came back to be caught, you know, it does the sonic boom. We could watch it coming all the way down to the ground. And it was like
. . . you know, you could hear the jet engines, you know. But right when it got to the tower. It went Ka-boooooom! And I was like, holy no! I said, it blew up! But there was no big fireball or anything. And what it was, it was the sonic boom.”
So that’s an example, right? So we have hours and hours of interviewing this person, a man called Bram. But what we took was just a reproduction of sound because we didn’t record the sound of that moment, but we asked everyone the day after what it sounded like and what it felt like and so we were kind of recording an echo—in that way right, an echo of an event—and the ripples, also the emotional ripples that it leaves in people, that events leave in people. So in that way, I think, we’re working more like fiction writers or like fiction soundists.
WSR: And I can see that curation in Study One of Echo from the Borderlands. What was the curation of this book like with Ricardo and Leo? What were some decisions you all chose in the format along with some of the visual features? What were some of the decisions you all had to make with this iteration (Study One)? Now that I’m beginning to understand this larger project, what was it like for this book [in particular]?
VL: The way we conceived this project as it is now is we formed a collective and this collective is called Echoes from the Borderlands, and our task as a collective is to produce different studies from the border. This book is Study One. The sound installation at the Dia Art Foundation that you heard with the class was Study Two. And for example, if you compare the two, Study One—the book—is a space where I allowed myself and they allowed themselves, my collaborators, Ricardo and Leo, to put in a little bit more of our narratives. So in a way, there are four narratives in this study that do take you on a journey that is more informed by their own viewpoints, their own politics, their own ideologies that confront the ideologies of some of the people that we listened to in the border- lands. So in the book, you have a miner talking about drilling with such complete expansive joy, and simultaneously or juxtaposed to that [there’s] a narrator talking about the brutalities of copper in women’s bodies—it’s a juxtaposition of two things: someone being very enthusiastic about copper mining and then women talking about copper in their bodies, and it’s not necessarily one is an indictment of the other, but just having a juxtaposition like that allows there to be some tension and conflict. So the book works more narratively in that way. It creates that juxtaposition that creates tension and conflict.
But then Study Two has no insertion of our voices, other than you’re setting up a mic right side, left side, etc. And it was much more raw, much more archival. There’s still curatorship of course, because there has to be a selection because of the sheer amount of hours we have and the actual time we have to expose those hours to others, we have to cut. But in those cuts, there’s a lot of back and forth between the three of us. We had to decide the most objectively possible, what gets to stay and what doesn’t. And we have to push back against our own ideologies to allow others to speak that we don’t normally want to hear. I don’t necessarily want to hear Trump supporters talking about Mexicans but that’s just a part of the sonic landscape. So we try to just curate in a way that’s not informed by our ideologies but rather by our duty as listeners of a very complex landscape.
WSR: After reading Echoes from the Borderlands and then listening to Study Two at Dia Chelsea, I was struck by how the chapbook specifically sits with the relationship between land, labor, and gender, especially in the first half of the book—it’s deeply motivated with examining how history is not the past but rather an ongoing present. How did you and your collaborators decide these passages and voice clips from the soundscapes to map this curation?
VL: That’s a very good question. First of all, to circle back to the record of history as something ongoing—the heart of the idea in Echoes, in recording Echoes, is that an echo allows us to imagine what the original event was. It’s an emission, it’s an original emission that is still bouncing around, so when we are recording, indeed, are the ripples that history leaves behind and they are not just an after-effect, but still a presence of a past event that continues to reverberate over time. And actualize itself. So yes, you captured that perfectly in what you said, and that’s the very idea behind Echoes.
And second, in terms of curation of ideas that are present in terms of land and gender, we had a series of curiosities and concerns when we set out to do this project and we mapped them, we listed them, we were like okay, we want to understand the history of mining in the region of the border. And we want to understand the history of industrialization and emergence of factories. We want to understand the history of agricultural exploitation over monocultures and agriculture that is aggressive towards land. We want to understand the history of land over migration. Arms trade. Women trafficking. The immense crisis of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and in El Paso, oil and fracking. There are so many things. We had a very complex conceptual map. My collaborator, Ricardo, who has a very peculiar and brilliant mind—he is always mapping things out and we made a very complex map. And this goes across the borderlands. These are the twenty-four hours that start with a prologue; this is just our narrative map of things. Hour zero is a prologue and each of these is one hour, until we get to our twenty-four hours and there’s an epilogue which is underwater in the Gulf of Mexico just as our prologue is underwater at the coast of Tijuana, San Diego. Each of these hours is a chunk of roads along the borderlands. For example, hour number seven or eight, you heard some bits and pieces of it because that’s copper mining in Arizona. So recordings from the miners are here, the interviews with Doug Graeme, Chris Dietz, reenactors and others, the themes here are copper mining and extractivism. The themes in hour number seven are indeterminate as of yet. Here, in number six, which still is in Caton, Arizona—there’s internment, reservations, environmental violence, wall building, lost myths, erasure of narratives, and so on and so forth. So we do visit themes along the way at least for the chapbook version of this. Not for our more raw sound piece that’s up to twenty-four hours.
So we thought of themes this way. In the section of California, we would look at the history of eugenics, shadow, agricultural exploitation, internment camps and the demarcation of the border. In Arizona, we would look at mining, sexual violence, prisons, Chiricahua people’s resistance, vigilantism in the South West, reservations, environmental violence, and in New Mexico, we would look at reenactments and myths . . . narratives of the foundational narratives of the West, the Wild West, nuclear explorations and explosions, the history of the Trail of Tears, the original peoples. Then towards Texas, we would look at femicide, surveillance, police violence, detentions, guns, oil, maquilas, religion and cults, water—the Rio Grande, drug trade, human traffic, and so on and so forth. So those were the themes.
WSR: And were these themes that emerged as you were doing the recordings?
VL: Yes, as we were doing research and as we were recording. A lot of them grew from research and reading and talking and thinking . . . but the thing is as we move along, we don’t impose those questions anymore. We started being more aggressive with a subject matter in conversation with people but now we won’t talk about oil and fracking with someone just out of the blue unless they tell us they work in the oil industry. And then we say, oh, tell us about it. And now, for example, we have an incredible interview with a guy who works in oil who loves it. It’s his job—he tells us about it, the noises, the machines, how it works, and the kind of life it means to be out there in the oil fields for two or three weeks at a time, and then coming back to see his family. So it feels right now that we have learnt a lot about how to listen and how to not impose conversation but let it grow.
WSR: And in many ways, the chapbook does that too because to me, it isn’t interested in a singular voice. So one follow up question I have is in terms of voices—we have several voices in the book as well as a semichorus and a chorus in the book. And it makes me realize across your books, you have always involved multiple perspectives and voices that are engaged with the collective. And in this book, it materializes as the collective “we” that shows up in multiple ways. Could you speak a little more about how this “we” that includes different voices might expand our notions of storytelling within the Western canon or the Western-centric determinations of what a story is?
VL: I think the we—there’s several layers of we in the book because of course, we could talk about the we of every single unity individual that appears, every individual and not, that appear in the chapbook, like the whales that speak and sing in the beginning to the hummingbirds that speak at the end to maybe also, there’s certain objects, inanimate objects that we find are very animate like a door that is opening and closing and screeching and kind of expressing its doorness very forcefully. And then of course, there’s the human “we” from all the drillers and the border patrol and fiddle maker in San Carlos reservation and Joey, the medicine man in Mescalero Reservation talking about extinction. So there’s the we of all of those, but it’s not a collective that acts as an entity with one will, but rather, a we that’s full of internal conflict and contradiction. They are put together by the we-ness of existing in the same territory—whatever the demarcation of borderlands is, but it’s not a we that is uniform in any way.
And then there’s a “we” of the chorus/semichorus indeed which is purportedly a group of women—the voices of the narrators who are called the voices in the chapbook, and I confess, that just grew from my everyday life because the years we worked on this project coincided with the pandemic and at that time,
I lived here in this house with my nieces, my mother, my daughters—we were a group of women and couple of friends who were over here all the time during the pandemic so the first recordings we made, the narrative voices, were here at home with whoever was available to record and that was my daughter, Maia. We started recording Maia when she was five and now she’s fifteen. So even pre this project, I had recorded her talking many times about detention centers or immigration policies . . . the project spans her voice from when she was a little girl to now. And my mother’s voice is also present in the text for a very few moments but in Echoes, you hear my mother talking about fear . . . fear of losing memory and so on and the other voices are my nieces. So that “we” is we, the family, we, a group of women sitting around the table every night, being together and reading to each other, talking, making sense of the world. And for a long time, and this is not fully discarded yet, one of the more fictional ideas of Echoes from the Borderlands, maybe Study number four or five, I don’t know [laughs] is a more speculative fiction along the border in which a group of women, a family, is travelling across the borderlands listening, recording, and moving alongside in a kind of peregrination through it. So we might end up in that kind of study in the future that’s a semichorus of women in a family.
WSR: And that goes back to the line “This is the story of the missing, the missing story” that keeps reverberating across the book.
VS: There’s this passage that we read aloud in [our] class that’s at the very beginning of Seneca’s version of the women of Troy, “Trojan Women,” and the opening scene is very striking. The women of Troy gather in the burnt down city of Troy because the Greeks have just won and destroyed the city. And Ulysses or Odysseus—who’s usually hailed as this hero of Western Civilization—is at least in this point of his career basically a women trafficker. And he’s going to take all the women of Troy and sell them off as sex slaves to his Greek friends and the generals/lieutenants whatever the titled ranks would have translated into then. And the women gather to sing in chorus, or rather lament in chorus, to offer a lament for their fallen city and for their loss of home. And they take off their tunics and show themselves bare chested and cover their chests in ash and loosen their hair and they begin a collective lament for their loss. And it’s a very powerful striking image that stuck with me so deeply and it was one of the first images I had in one of my trips down to the border thinking of all the women who lose their lives and who we never get to hear their stories directly.
And the stories you do hear, for example in reenactment—and I was very obsessed with reenactment culture for a long time, and still am—are stories who have no women present at all. There’s a piece that I wrote for the New Yorker that talks a lot about the origins of this before I even knew I was going to work on Echoes from the Borderlands. Some of those scenes were in those pieces because I was so frustrated after a trip to New Mexico and Arizona because of listening to reenactors talking about reenactment, basically the reedification of the foundational myths of the US and how they excluded, absolutely excluded the voices of others—the Mexicans don’t even appear as the voices, not even as enemies in those stories, and women don’t even appear at all except a random prostitute here and there in this reenactment culture, which is also mass tourism culture. But I asked a reenactor in Shakespeare, New Mexico—which is a city in New Mexico—what he thought could be a new generation of reenactment and of course, he didn’t mention anything even remotely considering the voices of women and the voices of Native and Mexican women who all live in the area. And then I remembered this scene from Troy and then I thought what if, how I would love to somehow take Shakespeare back because it’s a reenactment town, like buy it from them and create out of Shakespeare, a counter-reenactment space for all the stories that have been not lost but silenced. And use it as a theatrical reimagining of the borders. So that then is what I called the missing stories. And so the thread of the missing stories is present in what we are doing now but it’s a part of the project that I haven’t explored yet.
WSR: In some of your previous interviews, you have spoken about how you move between Spanish and English as you draft notes for each book and that relationship changes over time with each book. For Echoes from the Borderlands as a project that has and is moving across different forms, has the work of trans- lation shifted into new ways of thinking about language for you? What does it mean to move across a polyvocal register of texts/sound textures where how we communicate or how we speak language in solely human forms is no longer at the center?
VL: Indeed, I move between Spanish and English constantly as part of the process of my writing even though more often than not, the final result is, either one language or the other. With some exceptions where I’ve worked in both languages and that has resulted in two works, one in each language. But the process itself mixes the languages and it’s at the end where they separate or bifurcate. That definitely changed and expanded while working on Echoes from the Borderlands because it is a project about listening and documenting all there is, all we hear at the border.
And therefore, first of all saliently, voices both in Spanish and English are prominently present and, of course, also voices in other Native languages such as Apache have also made their way into the piece, but also the language of animals. We have a long recording of humpback whales underwater or the long recordings of the sounds hummingbirds make with their wings, such specific and beautiful sounds when listened to carefully. But then also the noise a creaking door pushed constantly by wind gusts might make has also become part of the verbal language, so to speak, of the piece—the language we listen to as language. And it’s different from some of the other ways we treat the sounds coming from inanimate objects, not all of them become speech in the piece. And we don’t have a clear taxonomy as to why a door might become speech but not the sound of a certain motor. I think it’s more kind of intuitive, more how a specific object seems to be sounding like conversation or sounding with so much soul, if that can be said of inanimate objects. So the result is that the sound piece both in its sound form and its transcribed form into text contains a multiplicity of language and sound marks that we can put all of them in the same plane.
WSR: Who are some of your latest literary and sonic/auditory influences? Are there a few that have moved alongside you as you worked on Echoes, and you see them in conversation with the project going forward?
VL: My latest sonic influences—this a hard one because they don’t all come necessarily from the world of sound but they do in other ways, and enrich the understanding of the world of sound, even if they don’t maybe record sound. Maybe the best example of that is someone that we read in [our] class recently: Alice Oswald and her book length poem Dart about the Dart river, more spe- cifically, the River Dart in England, a sonic cartography of this one river drawn through with voices of all those who come into different forms of interaction with the river. Be it the voices of canoeists or factory workers by the river or fishermen or a drowned boy or certain animals or the rocks or even some more mythological creatures. And how the river emerges through the sounds of these different entities coming into relation with it is something I found completely fascinating. I came across Dart thanks to a dear friend, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who is a nature documentarist, a very peculiar kind of documentarist and who is very focused on sound, and he gifted me the book and we read it and I’ve continued to read it at least once or twice a year. I tend to teach the book because I really love it and it gives a lot to my students, too.
And I was about halfway through, little before the halfway mark of the sound recordings at the border when I came across that book and we were just about to start recording in Texas which is where the liquid border begins—the border between the US and Mexico all the way to El Paso is mostly agricultural fields and California, and then a lot of the desert land of the Sonoran desert across Arizona and New Mexico. But where Texas begins, begins the river and that poem really made me conceptualize our approach to the liquid border differently. So I think the way we are recording and trying to listen to that river has a lot more to do exactly in a way that Dart does it through all the voices that relate to the river itself. And so I think the recordings we are aiming for [are] more of those who are much more in direct relation to the river. It’s becoming much more of an axis. I mean it can’t not be, I mean it really is a kind of axis around which a lot of things revolve so I think that’s one great influence. There are of course many others but I think I would highlight that one as the most important one for me so far.
WSR: What are you working on now? Are there new projects or books we can look forward to?
VL: I am, I just finished a novel that I’ve been working on for the last six years titled Beginning Middle End, and I’m now in the process of rewriting it in Spanish, so I haven’t quite finished but I’ve finished it in English. But of course as I translate into Spanish, little changes appear in the English version because maybe I find things in the Spanish that I hadn’t thought of in the English version. So I’m not quite there in fact . . . I’ve turned it in and it’s not really in my hands, the novel in English, but I’m still inside its universe just kind of reimagining it in my other language, in Spanish.