Jackandjill Valeria [new] Direct
The deep truth of “Jack and Jill” in Valeria Luiselli’s universe is this: the hill is endless, the bucket is broken, and the only redemption is to fall in the same direction.
The most direct deployment of the rhyme appears in Lost Children Archive (2019), where a family—two parents and two children—drives from New York to the Arizona-Mexico border. The children, a boy and a girl (the step-siblings), explicitly reenact “Jack and Jill” as a game. They carry a bucket of water across hotel rooms and desert lots, pretending the floor is lava or the hill is a mountain of lost shoes. jackandjill valeria
A signature Luiselli move is to fragment the “I” into multiple voices. In Lost Children Archive , the mother’s narrative is typographically separate from the father’s, and the children’s audio recordings run in the margins. The Jack and Jill rhyme, typically a single, communal voice, is blown apart. The boy records himself reciting it; the girl sings a distorted version where “Jack” becomes “Jaque” (a Spanish pun on “check” as in chess, and “jack” as in a car jack). The father hums it off-key. The deep truth of “Jack and Jill” in
The most radical reinterpretation in Luiselli’s work is the hill itself. In “Jack and Jill,” the hill is a neutral geographic feature. In Luiselli’s America, the hill is —specifically, the stretch near Nogales where walls descend into ravines. Climbing that hill is not a child’s errand; it is a life-or-death crossing. The bucket of water is a canteen. The fall is a broken ankle, a shot by a drone, a disappearance into the scrub. They carry a bucket of water across hotel
In the final pages of Lost Children Archive , the girl (Jill) walks alone into the desert with a bucket of water for a lost boy (Jack). She knows she will fall. She knows the water will spill. But she walks anyway. In that single, doomed step, Luiselli rewrites the rhyme as an ethics of care: We fall not despite the other, but because the other is already falling.
Luiselli refuses metaphor here. In a stunning passage, the boy narrator (one half of Jack/Jill) finds a child’s sneaker at the base of the border wall. Inside is a drawing of two stick figures on a hill, with the caption: “Se cayeron los dos” (They both fell). The rhyme has become prophecy. The deep essay’s thesis crystallizes:
