Rivermouth
A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Best Nonfiction of 2023 - Kirkus
“One of the most thoughtful meditations on our nation’s immigration policy in recent memory."
—The Boston Globe
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Folding in past stints at an immigration aid center in New York City and Boston's immigration court, Oliva shares insights into the tragedies and trials of asylum seekers, revealing that what they find on arrival in the U.S. is an uncaring, complex system that denies refuge to as many migrants as possible. "Detention centers," she writes, "are black boxes, stuck in the blank spaces of our maps, and the people in them are meant to be forgotten, meant to be disappeared." Oliva also explores what it means to be a bilingual Latina working on the front lines of a humanitarian crisis, whose family, situated on both sides of the Rio Grande, has a history of easy passage between America and Mexico. "I hear my own name, both first and last, my mother's name, my father and brother's name, my sister's name," she writes of her time at the detention center, where she wrestles with the gap between her family's experience and those she's witnessing every day. With uncut rage and breathtaking prose, Oliva edifies, infuriates, and moves readers all at once. This is required reading.