Rivermouth

Starred review from May 15, 2023
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. Agent: Dana Murphy, Trellis Literary.

May 15, 2023
"Caminante No Hay Camino," the first of three Spanish-titled sections, is from a classic bolero and can be translated as "pilgrim, there is no path," which is certainly a prescient image for those seeking asylum in the U.S. The focus is on the Rio Grande (in Mexico, the R�o Bravo), and Oliva's stint as a volunteer interpreter at a processing center in Tijuana. "Sobremesa" ("over the table") covers her time translating in immigration court in Boston; in "El Azote" ("the wall"), she visits an immigration detention center in the rural south. As a Mexican American who grew up on the border, Oliva glides over and through memory, empathy, and rational thought in this lyrical testimonio as participant and witness to the broken immigration system. She interrogates the act of translation; language is used as a bridge but also as a wall. 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."

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
A graceful meditation on the unresolved traumas of life in a land where one is often not welcome. "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." So writes Oliva, who, bilingual in English and Spanish, worked for years as a translator and interpreter for refugees and immigrants seeking admission into the U.S. Hidden inside the Spanish of those arrivals from Central America is the terror of living amid gang wars and political repression, of being dispossessed from one's land, of being hungry. The border, writes Texas native Oliva, "is porous. Sometimes you cross for a day job, and sometimes you cross for keeps." For those who have arrived from afar, it can be an insurmountable barrier. Confronting it requires courage, and it is no easy matter to decide to leave one's homeland, even when survival is at stake. Going from big cities and courtrooms to small outposts on the border, the author encounters many similar stories, bringing the words of those in need into a "lingua franca of global systems of capital, whose speakers expect to be met and accommodated within this language." Yet, of course, it is those people who make it across the border, legally or not, who wind up harvesting the food we eat and staffing the restaurants where we eat it, drawn in at the very bottom of that capitalist regime. Evenhandedly and without sentimentality, Oliva urges that we can stand to be both more understanding and more generous: "We sit here, on our prosperous shores, surrounded by the materials to build bridges, to build homes, to build cathedrals, to build irrigation canals and make plenty for everyone." A humane, elegantly written book that gives voice to the voiceless at our borders.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.