Invested objects: found childhood, materiality and the migrant child in Valería Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) and Ali Smith’s Spring (2019)

In a laboratory in San Marcos, Texas, is a box containing a small stuffed lion and a luchadore’s mask. The laboratory is associated with Operation Identification, an initiative working to identify the remains of migrants found on the Texas-Mexico border. Many of the bodies are those of children. It is not only corporeal remains which are recovered. The soft toy and child’s mask are among a range of personal effects collected at sites along the border. Such objects resonate with the ‘found childhood’ approach which reads the discarded material traces of childhood as capable of unsettling monolithic understandings of the child. The object landscapes encountered by Spradley are mapped in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2020), a narrative of the migrant crisis on the Mexican border. Such found migrant childhood is also present in Ali Smith’s Spring (2020) which considers the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. This article explores both texts as articulations of ‘found childhood’, demonstrating the significance of material culture for comprehending the precarious and spectral status of children engaged in national border crossings. It argues that the insistence of such material traces puts pressure on systems of thought and policy which render the migrant child specifically ‘immaterial’.