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There were approximately 45.3 million immigrants living in the US as of 2021. While this subset of the population is incredibly varied, many of them—particularly immigrants of color—did have something in common: They shared a struggle to survive in a country that was, until relatively recently, led by a president whose racist invective about Mexican immigrants helped to accelerate a long-simmering and often-contentious debate about who really “belongs” in America.
Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican American translator and immigrant justice activist, has devoted much of her career to trying to ease some of the difficulty that immigrants experience arriving in the US. Her new memoir, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, is a testament to just how many different ways there are to leave one’s home behind and attempt to build a new one—often while facing poverty, bigotry, and active repression. Vogue recently spoke to Oliva about working on the book while in divinity school, the role she’s played as a translator in helping to acclimatize newcomers to the US, and her own family’s journey toward the life she currently lives.
Vogue: When did this book start coming together for you?
Alejandra Oliva: It started coming together as a book probably in 2018. I was in divinity school at that time, getting my master’s in theological studies, and I was reading all of these translation theory texts and thinking a lot about religious pilgrimage and movement, and continuing to explore my interest in immigration issues that had started a couple years earlier. As all these different parts came together, I started thinking that there might be a book here; it was after an essay that I wrote for class in early 2019 that I was like, Oh, this is really a book. I think it has legs. I think I can start pulling all of these different things together and turning it into something more than six essays Super-Glued together.
How did you arrived at its beautiful title?
I had been thinking a lot about rivers and translation and language and all of these different things, and my grandmother is from Brownsville, Texas, which is located right at the mouth of the Rio Grande. It felt like something that brought together all of these different ideas that I had been playing with; not just in the first section, which is the one that is most explicitly like about rivers, but throughout the whole book, and in this idea of fluid speech and fluid language that I spent some of the book exploring.
What has surprised you most about your work as an interpreter?
I think the way that it causes you to interact with people. It’s a really interesting and sometimes kind of tricky relationship, depending on the formality of the setting. The ways that you are present and not present in the room, the ways that people are able or willing to talk to you or not talk to you, and how the relationship triangulates between you and the people that you’re translating for, I think all that has been really interesting.
What do you wish people understood better about immigration right now?
Very often, when we are reading about immigration or talking about immigration at any level, we are talking about numbers; like, this many people are here, it’s this many people from this country, you have to wait this many months to get this visa. I feel like the disconnect there is that every single number represents somebody’s life. Like, it’s not just this many people crossing the border; it’s this many individuals with individual stories and reasons for being there. It’s not just that it takes 18 months to get a work permit; it’s what a person is doing to survive for those 18 months when having a job could endanger their immigration status, but not working is basically impossible in the world and the society that we live in now. I think the understanding that it’s not just about the numbers, but the people that are behind them, is the thing that’s really missing from a lot of people’s understanding.
How did you care for yourself while writing the heavier parts of this memoir?
I think this is an issue that plagues anybody who’s in a kind of helping profession. The nice thing about writing a book is also sometimes the hard thing about writing a book, which is that it can take a really long time, and if you’re drafting it before you have a contract or before you’re in touch with anyone, then you’re not beholden to anybody else’s timeline. So I was able to rest when I needed to; like, if I had had a particularly difficult week at work or if there was a lot going on in the immigration world, I could take a step back and say, “You know, this is not a week where I am going to be able to emotionally or logistically sit down with the book and do good work, so I don t have to.” I think that kind of space and that kind of ability to rest is a luxury that people very often don’t have when they are doing direct services, or dealing with the immigration system themselves. Within that, it’s like, there’s this deadline coming up, you need to be able to talk about your experiences in this very specific way, and you don’t get the luxury of deciding when and how you’re going to engage with the difficult things.
I was really interested in the part of your book where you talk about the definitions of success and achievement, and how they can be such a moving target for immigrants. What do those definitions look like for you these days?
I talk about this a little bit in the book, but I am the first-generation daughter of immigrants, and for my family, what that looks like is my parents coming to the United States when my dad was getting ready to get his PhD. When they came over, he was already a US citizen because his mother was a US citizen, so there is this whole process and challenge and difficulty that my family wasn’t a part of. All of the energy and the focus and the determination that can sometimes go towards dealing with and normalizing your immigration status was instead able to go into, What kind of job do I want? What kind of life do I want to build for myself? I feel like when we talk about immigration success stories, what we’re actually talking about is people who can conform well to these hyper-capitalistic, middle-class achievement ideas that we have about what makes a successful person in the U.S. With citizens or people who are born here, we don’t necessarily hold them to the same standard of, You need to be a valedictorian for your life to be worth it. We can often be really guilty of holding immigrants to this incredibly high and specific standard of achievement, and what that’s supposed to look like.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
