Sanctuary

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to xenophobia, enslavement, other violence, and challenges faced by immigrants.

Math, numbers, and word problems symbolize the difficult real-life challenges that Vali faces. Vali is continuously faced with obstacles that seem impossible to overcome, especially with the few tools and money she carries with her. She repeatedly tries to turn her actual problems into math games, hoping to make the problems seem fun, simple, and solvable. However, doing this only highlights how impossible some of the problems are, given her limited information and resources. She considers issues like how much further they need to walk, how long they can survive on their remaining water, and how fast they should jump onto a moving train. At times, she can solve a basic problem such as how many miles they need to walk, but this is not the same thing as actually walking those miles, so the challenge is not really “solved” by completing the word problem. Other challenges, such as how fast they should jump onto the train, are beyond Vali’s ability to compute, and she has to simply make her best guess with the information she has. In this sense, math, numbers, and word problems sometimes highlight The Importance of Resilience in the Face of Adversity.

Just like condensing her real-life challenges into word problems seems to oversimplify the challenges, statistics and numbers shared about undocumented immigrants in an activist meeting seem to not tell the full story, in Vali’s opinion. The speaker lists how many undocumented immigrants may have been captured and enslaved by DF, as well as how many have arrived in California and how many are thought to still be unaccounted for in the Other 49. Vali points out that these numbers don’t convey how families have been torn apart, what people had to do to get to California, or what goes on in the enslavement camps, and are essentially meaningless compared to the breadth and depth of meaning that exists in all these peoples’ individual stories.

Likewise, California creates a database in an attempt to help undocumented immigrants, but the database consists mostly of more numbers, such as Vali’s former addresses. Just like Vali’s personal challenges were too complex to solve using the basic information and tools she had, the large-scale problems of xenophobia and aggressive immigration policy are too complex using the basic numbers and tools possessed by the sanctuary state of California.