Rivermouth; A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration

   Title of the book: Rivsrmouth; a chronicle of language, faith, and migration 

Author: Alejandra Oliva 

Publisher: Astra house

Publishing Date: 2023

ISBN: 978-1-6626-0169-9

Summary:

The Undocumented Americans meets Tell Me How It Ends in this chronicle about translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States' “immigration crisis.”

In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family’s long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration and looks at how language and opportunity move through each of them; from the river as the waterway that separates the US 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, in Rivermouth, 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.

Author Info:
(From goodreads) 

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer and translator. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her book, Rivermouth, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023, and received a Whiting Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022.

Personal Opinion:

I will be honest; I had a difficult time reading it. The writing was beautiful, definitely and I enjoyed learning things about illegal immigration that I hadn't known before, but I feel as if the author tried to take several different subjects she is passionate about and somehow couldn't connect them together. I also feel as if the story of immigration is best described as one sided in the book, my apologies. Parts of it should have been definitely something I connected, my family arriving from Soviet Union as immigrants, but I couldn't, I don't think. I definitely think that if the author wrote her experiences down the road, then perhaps I could have given it a higher rating. I also wish that Spanish in some parts of the book could have been translated because my pet peeve is when I have to interrupt my reading to look something up. 

This was given for review 

3 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)