Community & Culture
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Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
"With uncut rage and breathtaking prose, Oliva edifies, infuriates, and moves readers all at once. This is required reading."
-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
A chronicle of translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States' "immigration crisis"
In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border.
Having worked with asylum seekers since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the U.S. immigration system. As Oliva's stunning prose recounts the stories of the people she's met through her work, she also traces her family's long and fluid relationship to the border-each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande.
In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration, looking at how language and opportunity move through each of them: from the river as the waterway that separates the U.S. and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America's southernmost border.
With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who "deserves" American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?
As investigative and analytical as she is meditative and introspective, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is compassionate, seasoned interpreter Alejandra Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.
-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
A chronicle of translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States' "immigration crisis"
In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border.
Having worked with asylum seekers since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the U.S. immigration system. As Oliva's stunning prose recounts the stories of the people she's met through her work, she also traces her family's long and fluid relationship to the border-each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande.
In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration, looking at how language and opportunity move through each of them: from the river as the waterway that separates the U.S. and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America's southernmost border.
With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who "deserves" American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?
As investigative and analytical as she is meditative and introspective, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is compassionate, seasoned interpreter Alejandra Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.
Editorial Reviews
"Oliva's excellent debut recounts her experiences volunteering as a Spanish-English translator in an immigration detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in 2016….With uncut rage and breathtaking prose, Oliva edifies, infuriates, and moves readers all at once. This is required reading. "
-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"A timely book by a translator at America's southern border, Rivermouth is one of the most thoughtful meditations on our nation's immigration policy in recent memory. Oliva's Kafkaesque portrayal of her work retelling the traumatic stories of migrants in English for asylum applications will linger long after you're done reading."
-The Boston Globe
"Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist Alejandra Oliva is particularly situated to tell the stories of immigration at the US southern border. She has seen the suffering, the space and the struggles of the people firsthand as she interprets their words for them and now, their experiences for us."
-Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
"Undeterred by complexity, Oliva presents an accessible narrative electrified by transcripts of official exchanges, raw with emotion, that lay bare the tragic inadequacy of a sterile bureaucratic setting to ever do justice to petitioners in any "credible threat interview."
-Sara Martinez, Booklist
"A graceful meditation on the unresolved traumas of life in a land where one is often not welcome . . . Evenhandedly and without sentimentality, Oliva urges that we can stand to be both more understanding and more generous."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Alejandra Oliva is a brilliant new voice of her generation, a writer of resistance with echoes of Simone Weil; her attention to immigration justice reaches us as a prayer. Translation in her hands becomes a deeper type of storytelling where bearing witness to injustices of immigration becomes not only a path of political reform but spiritual transformation. Rivermouth is a rich delta of braided essays where we are invited into spaces that break our hearts and carry us to a place of healing grace."
-Terry Tempest William...
-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"A timely book by a translator at America's southern border, Rivermouth is one of the most thoughtful meditations on our nation's immigration policy in recent memory. Oliva's Kafkaesque portrayal of her work retelling the traumatic stories of migrants in English for asylum applications will linger long after you're done reading."
-The Boston Globe
"Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist Alejandra Oliva is particularly situated to tell the stories of immigration at the US southern border. She has seen the suffering, the space and the struggles of the people firsthand as she interprets their words for them and now, their experiences for us."
-Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
"Undeterred by complexity, Oliva presents an accessible narrative electrified by transcripts of official exchanges, raw with emotion, that lay bare the tragic inadequacy of a sterile bureaucratic setting to ever do justice to petitioners in any "credible threat interview."
-Sara Martinez, Booklist
"A graceful meditation on the unresolved traumas of life in a land where one is often not welcome . . . Evenhandedly and without sentimentality, Oliva urges that we can stand to be both more understanding and more generous."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Alejandra Oliva is a brilliant new voice of her generation, a writer of resistance with echoes of Simone Weil; her attention to immigration justice reaches us as a prayer. Translation in her hands becomes a deeper type of storytelling where bearing witness to injustices of immigration becomes not only a path of political reform but spiritual transformation. Rivermouth is a rich delta of braided essays where we are invited into spaces that break our hearts and carry us to a place of healing grace."
-Terry Tempest William...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Preface:
The River, The Table, The Wall
I am sitting in a church basement just off Washington Square Park, across the table from a woman who's only been in the United States for three weeks. Between us sits an I-589 form, the Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, and we're surrounded by a handful of other people, pens poised, hands hovering over their keyboards, ready to take notes on our conversation.
"¿Lista?" I ask. She nods. "We're ready," I tell the group, and we dive in.
It's the last day of January 2017. Eleven days earlier, Donald Trump was sworn into office, and in the next four years, the United States immigration system, especially the asylum system, will be systematically dismantled, rule and regulation by rule and regulation. One attorney general after another will step in to review and reverse the Board of Immigration Appeals rulings, restricting asylum categories one by one; entire nationalities and religions will be banned from entering the United States; the Federal Register will become cluttered with proposed rules limiting asylum, raising fees for application processing, cutting off immigration; the various tentacle branches of the Department of Homeland Security-Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol-will grow and extend into quasi-paramilitaries at the presidents' beck and call, deployed into too-welcoming sanctuary cities; the premise of birthright citizenship will be questioned; parents will be separated from their children; tent cities to house migrants will be erected in the desert and then eventually pushed back across the border into Mexico; miles upon miles of a "big, beautiful border wall" will actually be built up across parklands and ground sacred to the indigenous.
But at this table, at the beginning of 2017, none of that has happened yet. Today, I'm sitting across from a woman-Mayra, let's call her-and we're filling out an application so she can stay in the United States. The question of where Mayra will be allowed to call home is so critical because the answer is a matter of life or death. Back in Honduras, where she had lived her whole life up until a few weeks ago, her brother was shot in front of her, and the guy who did it told her that she would be next. This asylum application is her best shot at convincing the U.S. government that her survival is dependent on staying in the country.
Even though we are all here around this table, ready to fill out this application together, all of us wish we did not have to be. I, and the team of volunteers around me, wish that Mayra's presence in this country was not, to some extent, contingent on the strength of my translation for this application, on the tear-jerkiness or trauma of Mayra's story. The U.S. government appears to wish Mayra was not here at all. Mayra wishes that this translation we are working on was unnecessary-she would rather her life had continued in its familiar way-her brother alive, her family together-in Honduras. And yet, here we all are, Mayra, a tableful of volunteers and the U.S. government, collaborators on this translation that no one really wants.
While the task at hand may seem simple, linear even-figuring out how to best explain to the United States government that Mayra is afraid to return to Honduras because her life is at risk there-trauma often complicates the telling of a story like Mayra's. If you've experienced deep grief, if you've lived through any kind of event with an aftermath, you know the way that time fractures and splinters, the way true things take on the sheen of unreality while dreams feel vivid and visceral. You also know how talking about any of it can sometimes feel like reliving it, your pulse thundering in your ears, time shattering all over again, your breath stuttering out of you. My job, sitting across the table from Mayra, is to let her talk, to ask clarifying questions and see if, through the interview, new information can be shaken loose, placed in a chronological order to form a cohesive narrative with cause and effect. My job is also to take her words and carry them across, from the Spanish she has spoken her entire life, into English, the language spoken by most people in the United States, and critically, the language spoken by the government officials at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services that will read and judge her application.
Mayra is just one of thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants who have come to the United States from the entire spread of nations to the south, often fleeing the results of American intervention: gang members deported from overpoliced, under-resourced communities in Los Angeles full of refugees fleeing the dirty wa...
The River, The Table, The Wall
I am sitting in a church basement just off Washington Square Park, across the table from a woman who's only been in the United States for three weeks. Between us sits an I-589 form, the Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, and we're surrounded by a handful of other people, pens poised, hands hovering over their keyboards, ready to take notes on our conversation.
"¿Lista?" I ask. She nods. "We're ready," I tell the group, and we dive in.
It's the last day of January 2017. Eleven days earlier, Donald Trump was sworn into office, and in the next four years, the United States immigration system, especially the asylum system, will be systematically dismantled, rule and regulation by rule and regulation. One attorney general after another will step in to review and reverse the Board of Immigration Appeals rulings, restricting asylum categories one by one; entire nationalities and religions will be banned from entering the United States; the Federal Register will become cluttered with proposed rules limiting asylum, raising fees for application processing, cutting off immigration; the various tentacle branches of the Department of Homeland Security-Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol-will grow and extend into quasi-paramilitaries at the presidents' beck and call, deployed into too-welcoming sanctuary cities; the premise of birthright citizenship will be questioned; parents will be separated from their children; tent cities to house migrants will be erected in the desert and then eventually pushed back across the border into Mexico; miles upon miles of a "big, beautiful border wall" will actually be built up across parklands and ground sacred to the indigenous.
But at this table, at the beginning of 2017, none of that has happened yet. Today, I'm sitting across from a woman-Mayra, let's call her-and we're filling out an application so she can stay in the United States. The question of where Mayra will be allowed to call home is so critical because the answer is a matter of life or death. Back in Honduras, where she had lived her whole life up until a few weeks ago, her brother was shot in front of her, and the guy who did it told her that she would be next. This asylum application is her best shot at convincing the U.S. government that her survival is dependent on staying in the country.
Even though we are all here around this table, ready to fill out this application together, all of us wish we did not have to be. I, and the team of volunteers around me, wish that Mayra's presence in this country was not, to some extent, contingent on the strength of my translation for this application, on the tear-jerkiness or trauma of Mayra's story. The U.S. government appears to wish Mayra was not here at all. Mayra wishes that this translation we are working on was unnecessary-she would rather her life had continued in its familiar way-her brother alive, her family together-in Honduras. And yet, here we all are, Mayra, a tableful of volunteers and the U.S. government, collaborators on this translation that no one really wants.
While the task at hand may seem simple, linear even-figuring out how to best explain to the United States government that Mayra is afraid to return to Honduras because her life is at risk there-trauma often complicates the telling of a story like Mayra's. If you've experienced deep grief, if you've lived through any kind of event with an aftermath, you know the way that time fractures and splinters, the way true things take on the sheen of unreality while dreams feel vivid and visceral. You also know how talking about any of it can sometimes feel like reliving it, your pulse thundering in your ears, time shattering all over again, your breath stuttering out of you. My job, sitting across the table from Mayra, is to let her talk, to ask clarifying questions and see if, through the interview, new information can be shaken loose, placed in a chronological order to form a cohesive narrative with cause and effect. My job is also to take her words and carry them across, from the Spanish she has spoken her entire life, into English, the language spoken by most people in the United States, and critically, the language spoken by the government officials at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services that will read and judge her application.
Mayra is just one of thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants who have come to the United States from the entire spread of nations to the south, often fleeing the results of American intervention: gang members deported from overpoliced, under-resourced communities in Los Angeles full of refugees fleeing the dirty wa...
