Structure

The essay opens with the first of 40 questions on the intake questionnaire for child immigrants. As the first chapter continues, it splinters into multiple narratives. One narrative follows the author on her family road trip in the summer of 2014 from New York to Arizona, another follows the mainstream media reports on the growing immigration crisis during the same time frame as the road trip, and yet another narrative recalls various interviews with undocumented children. By the end of the chapter, the narratives regroup in order to describe how the author came to become a translator for children in the New York immigration court system. Each successive chapter similarly includes multiple narratives that reconnect towards the end in order to tie together a theme or motif.

The essay also includes an addendum of eight postscripts, entitled "Coda," meant to conclude several unfinished narratives outside of the basic structure...