I’ve often described my advocacy and communications work as “translation,” learning a person’s story and molding it into a form—a news article, an op-ed, an action toolkit, or an application—in an attempt to fulfill needs by way of words.
Translation can build connections and prompt material change, but it can also exclude and yield toward those with more power. Within these complexities is where Mexican American translator, immigration advocate, and divinity school graduate Alejandra Oliva focuses her attention in Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration.
Alejandra Oliva celebrates Rivermouth
Tue 6/27 7 PM, Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W. 18th, pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/26455, free
Oliva’s nonfiction debut is sectioned into three parts, “Caminante No Hay Camino,” which explores the river as a metaphor for border crossings and the crossings between languages; “Sobremesa,” which delves into Oliva’s experience with language around her family’s dinner table and the tables where she translates for the I-589, the Application for Asylum and Withholding of Removal; and “El Azote,” on how the walls of the immigration and carceral systems intersect.
While many narratives about immigration focus on literal borders or border crossings, Oliva shows that the immigration system’s impact is far-reaching and spans generations, triggering migrant crises all over the U.S., including in Chicago. She follows migrants’ paths chronologically and geographically, from places as varied as the bordertown of Tijuana to a church basement in New York, immigration courts in Boston, and prisons in the rural South.
One might also expect a book following migrants’ journeys to closely follow and profile characters in a journalistic fashion, but Oliva takes on a less externally probing role, turning the lens toward U.S. immigration policies, her personal politics, and those of her fellow translators.
Now a community engagement manager at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, Oliva’s work in the immigration world began in January 2017, fresh into Trump’s presidency. Wanting to focus on something new and to make herself useful, she accepts a friend’s invitation to do translation work at a pro se asylum application clinic in New York. A “heritage speaker,” Oliva is often working in groups of three “well-meaning” volunteers, asking strangers to recount traumas and condense whole lives into the 150 words allotted by the I-589.
A lawyer at the clinic calls this “‘bureaucratic violence,’ the carrying across of people out of their own words, their own language, the mutilation of the stories they tell.” It is “a violence I participated in,” Oliva writes, “even if it was as gentle as I could make it.” She doesn’t leave readers with guilty hand-wringing, however, or offer relenting justifications for her role in the larger system of “government surveillance.” Instead, she delves into the underlying dynamics of the room, offering lessons learned and a path forward.
Volunteers are instructed to call asylum seekers “friends” to avoid legal liability, a term she finds patronizing and overly intimate. Some volunteers “got off on the sense of emergency” and the “high drama of Helping Others,” offering impractical, unearned, or blunt advice. Oliva is stuck in the middle, “trying to translate into existence a respect that wasn’t there.”
She shields people from the worst comments, before later coming across organizer Roberto Tijerina’s popular curriculum “Interpreting for Social Justice,” in which he outlines the separate goals of interpreters and advocates. Interpreters are neutral and translate everything in a room, while advocates take a side and act on behalf of someone. When done well, interpreting should empower folks to advocate for themselves. By trying to protect people that hadn’t asked for her protection by translating around awkward moments, Oliva inadvertently engaged in her own form of paternalism.
For Oliva, translation is a “constellation of many acts” that includes interpretation, interviewing, advocacy, diplomacy, and care. Her work cannot be divorced from her own upbringing, growing up “between two languages.” She speaks Spanish with her parents, a “bright Spanglish” with her younger siblings, and English in public. Other volunteers speak with a warmer Spanish, calling people cariño, or with a truncated Spanish obviously learned in English-language high schools.
In translation settings, she finds that the way she gives care mirrors how her parents care for her when they converse. Giving attention to people feels like inviting them into a familial language, welcoming them into the bounds of her own awkwardness and limited ways of using Spanish and “hoping they felt the affection at the heart of it.” Oliva’s book is similarly open, offering up her own motivations and not shying away when they are at times flawed, as human lives are.
In 2019, Oliva travels to Tijuana to translate, to Boston Immigration Court as a volunteer court observer, to an immigration detention center on behalf of a professional organization—always bearing witness. In Tijuana, she observes the workings of “la lista,” a notebook containing the names of every migrant who wants to cross the border “the right way.” People are randomly called to cross in a purposely opaque and arbitrary way, keeping them in the dark and shielding the U.S. government from culpability.
In Boston, Oliva similarly observes that “deportation court, and all the forms and motions and tiny minutiae that feel overwhelming even for someone who speaks English, sometimes feels like it has been specifically designed to make it difficult to proceed—deportation by bureaucracy.” Asylum seekers participate in court hearings through video calls while translators are phoned in, creating a jumble of disembodied voices as information travels slowly around the room. It is a cruel and disturbing scene, one that Oliva literally sits in as she attempts to explore the territory of “solidarity and its limits.”
Oliva doesn’t argue that translation alone will better the world, and for many it is simply a matter of survival rather than a “specialized skill” to be flexed. On Oliva’s worst days, translation feels “pointless in the face of great suffering,” yet she also believes it matters as a political reality and as a gesture—like faith, it can be enough to ritualize your values into a practice, to invite others in, and to show up, again and again.
Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva
Astra House, hardcover, 304 pp., $28, astrapublishinghouse.com
related stories
‘Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair’
In Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba ask organizers to retire their inner cynic and imagine what could exist instead. Out this month through Haymarket Books, Let This Radicalize You is filled with lessons from Hayes and Kaba, both longtime organizers and movement educators. The…
Steeped in history
In the most famous lines of his 1855 poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” After reading S. L. Wisenberg’s insightful new book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, it’s clear that she, too, contains…
Sandra Cisneros feels the love of the universe
When Sandra Cisneros talked about romance, writing, and faith over Zoom from her bright home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she discussed her own poetry but also referred to Peanuts. In the strip Lucy complains about not finding love while ignoring Snoopy’s embrace. Almost on cue, Cisneros then got a face lick from Nahui…