Video: "Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration"—A Conversation with Alejandra Oliva

Hear from Alejandra Oliva, MTS '19, Mexican-American writer, translator, and immigration-justice activist, speak about her work and her recent book, "Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration." Héctor Tobar, author of Translation Nation, described it as "a supremely intelligent account of a translator's journey into the Kafkaesque machinery of U.S. immigration and asylum policy."

This event took place October 12, 2023.

Transcript: 

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Rivermouth, A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration. October 12, 2023.

STEPHANIE PAULSELL: I'm grateful for your presence and so glad to be gathered with others to hear from Alejandra Oliva about questions which are very much at the heart of our shared humanity. We have coffee and tea in the back.

And we have books right outside in the hallway. Harvard Bookstore is with us tonight, and they will gladly sell you a copy of Alejandra's new book. And she will gladly sign it for you, but thank you so much all of you for being here.

Five years ago, an extraordinary student took my class on Virginia Woolf and religion and wrote a paper about Woolf's novel, The Waves, which she read aloud one day in class. "The voices in The Waves wring out from the dark to insist on the humanity of the characters," Alejandro Oliva wrote.

"Woolf," she said, "bears witness to a borderless existence, able to recognize and envelop all of humanity." "This is a political argument," Alejandro wrote, "but also one that is deeply entrenched in Woolf's sense of morality and her religious self."

I'll never forget hearing that paper for the first time. It opened the novel to me in a new way, and it captured the commitments by which Alejandra lives her life. An insistence on the humanity of others, a hope for a world without borders, and a perspective in which the political, the moral and the religious are inseparable.

Now, not only did Alejandra write brilliant papers while a student at HDS. She also spent time in Tijuana with support from the Schwartz Fund to serve as a translator for asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border-- work she had done previously in New York City.

Having encountered the chaos and the cruelty of our immigration system on both sides of the border, she began to write about it both as a student and after graduating from HDS in 2019 as a staff member of the National Immigrant Justice Center, a columnist for The Christian Century and a freelance writer, whose essays were frequently nominated for prizes and collected in anthologies.

Alejandra is here today to speak with us about her first book, Rivermouth, A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration. These braided essays asked urgent questions about our immigration system. By what metrics are we measuring who deserves American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally?

What do we owe one another, especially those who are suffering? Whose stories get told, and whose do not? And what is the role of the writer and the artist in working toward a borderless existence in which people and families can move freely and safely?

In a week in which we're all struggling to respond meaningfully to the suffering of others, I can't imagine a better time to have a conversation with writer, translator, artist and activist, Alejandra Oliva. Alejandra will speak to us for a bit and read a bit from her book, and then we'll have time for discussion.

Following the event, you can find your copy of Alejandra's book outside with the Harvard Bookstore. But for now, please join me in welcoming Alejandra Oliva back to Harvard Divinity School.

[APPLAUSE]

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: All right. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for that beautiful introduction and to all of you for being here tonight. I'm going to do a little bit of a reading, a little bit just talking about what's in the book. And so I'll get started.

Thank you so much to Harvard Divinity School and for all the staff, who have been arranging things behind the scenes, making sure that we have video, doing everything, and to Harvard Bookstore and their booksellers, who are here to sell you many, many, many copies of my book tonight.

I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky to be back here in a community that taught and shaped me so, so deeply. I've been lucky enough to be a guest in a few of Stephanie's classes this week and was again, reminded of all the ways that discussions in these hallways, and classrooms, and libraries were a way into conversations and questions about what it means to do good, to be present to others, to act and contemplate in a world that needs a great deal more of both.

In these classes this week, I watched as students took these huge problems. Problems that barely fit in our field of vision. Problems we can barely wrap our arms around. Problems of war and catastrophic climate change, of people not receiving the help or the care that they need and talk through them. Tried to wrestle them down into a human size or at the very least, find a corner of them to latch on to start unraveling this Gordian knot.

This is work that I'm deeply familiar with and not just through my time at HDS. I am, as Stephanie said, an activist, a writer, a translator and interpreter, and an advocate for people moving through the US immigration system. A system that itself is breathtaking in its cruelty, sprawling in its reach and presence, and long lasting in its effect on every life it touches.

I've translated for people, who are filling out asylum applications in the basement of a church. Done translation and accompaniment work at the US-Mexico border in Tijuana for people waiting to cross. I've observed interpretation happening over language line, a telephonic translation service in immigration courtrooms here in Boston for people appearing in court over video link. And I've witnessed the effects of a lack of language support for immigrants incarcerated at a prison owned by CoreCivic in a small town in Mississippi.

I've helped people who have fought their way through their immigration cases and wanted to tell the world about what happened to them-- find their platforms. I've also watched as the US government again and again, regardless of administration, continually chooses cruelty, chooses deterrence and chooses violence against people who arrive in our country seeking sanctuary.

I have watched as it funnels money into enforcement rather than processing or resettling our humanitarian care as it raises the number of people in immigration detention year over year, even as it continues to kill and disable the people already in its care. I say "watched" even though I have protested. I have written letters and op-eds. I have submitted comments to the Federal Register.

I say "watched" because very often, it feels as though the power I have, that any other individual, even my immigration attorney, colleagues, people who are filing federal lawsuits-- it feels like the only power they have within the system stops at shepherding a single person through at a time. I don't want to discount the importance of that. There is overwhelming joy every time I hear that someone I worked closely with has won their asylum case. Encouragement in knowing that just one family breathes easier without the threat of deportation.

At the same time, the more I have done this work, the more I have become aware of the massive churning engines of dehumanization that lie at the heart of it. The systems that ensure that without outside help, many people will not make it through at all. I first came into this work as a translator and an interpreter working with individual people at a weekly asylum clinic in New York City, helping them fill out asylum application forms one horrifying question at a time.

The I-589, the application for asylum and withholding of removal as it's known, is this horrifying little document that pulls in all the worst parts of doing your taxes, all those fiddly questions that if you get them wrong, you're going to be in trouble later. But there are also these details that nobody really remembers. And adds to it a demand for the applicant to explain the inciting event for their request for asylum. Often, violent terrifying deeply traumatizing in the clinical and detached language of government paperwork.

The form this work often takes then is sitting across from a single person and working with them painstakingly to reconstruct the narratives of their worst days, putting into order chronologies that had been shattered by trauma, and passing it through one language and into another from someone's voice into the stiff formalism of a government form. Translation and interpretation, for those of you who aren't practitioners, can be a shockingly intimate experience.

Translation is something we do with our bodies. Something that lives in our blood. We move through our mother tongue into new homes. We sense what the right word or phrase is not with our minds necessarily but with some kind of bodily intuition, where shades of meaning dwell. Our bodies remember the specific flavor of words in two languages-- the flavor of the edge between two ways of saying.

As the word implies, we also use our bodies to carry meaning from one language to another. The translation work at the clinic involves sitting across from someone knee to knee and feeding their words back to them in a different language. I've also done translation of books, of essays and articles for teenagers, of know-your-rights pamphlets and legal documents, of someone's words well after they've spoken or written them.

It's impossible not to feel what I am translating inside my body. Impossible not to carry it with me from the church basement, where the clinic took place or a plaza or after I hang up the phone, damp and hot from being pressed next to my ear for an hour. In my translations for asylum seekers, this goes double. Their stories are often ones of violence against their bodies, stories that pass through me as they pass through language.

I can catalog on my own body, the places where people have shown me their scars as I've translated their stories, turning me into a mirror. Cigarette burns on the back of a carefully manicured hand, the aftermath of a surgery that was itself the aftermath of a stabbing someone's chest and the softness of their belly crisscrossed with ropes of scar. Old, old bullet scores running cleanly through both ankles. An unset broken leg and the weight on my shoulder of the man who used me as a crutch for a short walk.

I don't in my body what it's like to be hurt in these ways, but I carry a record with me anyways because it's impossible not to. So much of translation interpretation requires me to pass someone else's language through the first person. Their eye becomes my own. Their injuries and experiences enter a language that for all that I'm trying to render faithfully as theirs is in reality only mine. This line of self and not self is like chalk on a blackboard.

From far away, the line looks crisp, stark, easy to understand. But as you approach it, as your nose bumps the dusty slate, you understand that the line is not exactly unbroken. That no matter how much you erase the particles of chalk where that line still float through the air. Walter Benjamin describes a good translation as one that is transparent so that it does not cover up the original. Does not block its light but allows the pure language to shine upon the original all the more.

We think of this work, translation, particularly in literary spaces as doing justice to the original. By that, we mean that it expresses it fully, that whatever heights of prose or sleights of hand the author concocted in the original language, the translator managed to do the same backwards and in heels. When a translation is just, it is seen and considered and transmitted into a new language all of the facets and possibilities inherent in a text.

There's another sense of the phrase to do justice, of course. And it involves our orientation towards other people. There too, we value seeing people for what they are considering both their flaws and possibilities and allowing them to flourish as best we can. I was a very casual literary translator before I was a translator for asylum seekers. And a thing that I've always loved about translation is the way that it allows you, sometimes forces you to reach beyond the edges of yourself and your abilities.

When you're a translator, you're by necessity spending a lot of time immersed in someone else's words. Their sentences. The particular way they link one thought to another. There's no way to pay that kind of attention without it turning into a kind of love. This love is manifested in a desire to do justice to the text, but I find myself stuck with the fact that I'm not, in fact, the person who wrote the original text. I'm still just myself.

And as I translate, I almost always get the sense that if I could just stretch a little bit beyond myself, be a little quicker, a little better read, I might actually be able to do justice to this work I've so come to love and admire in the time I've been sitting with it. Part of this is because in order to translate well, you have to really understand what you're reading. If you miss a joke or an allusion, that won't show up for the reader in a new language. A note in the chord of the text falls silent.

It's not a big deal maybe. Most people don't know won't know what they're missing, or they'll have a sneaking suspicion that literature and translation is less than anyways. But nevertheless, as a literary translator, there's nothing that keeps me up more than the idea of doing a reading so constrained by my own experiences that my translation is constrained by them to.

However, in the other kind of translation work I do, the idea of not doing justice has implications far, far greater than someone missing the full range of an author's brilliance. With the asylum seekers I was working with, winning their case would allow them to stay in the United States and begin building a life here. Losing might mean deportation to a country that had been too dangerous to stay in.

My co-volunteers at the clinic and I would sit with people and ask them questions about the worst things that could happen to them so we could note it down on a government form. We would translate and reshape their answers to fit in the forms tiny boxes and then staple a photograph of them to this form. Photocopy it and return it to them so they could submit it to the immigration court in triplicate.

That work is strange and bureaucratic as parts of it felt also called for care and attention for spending time alongside someone else's minds and words and ideas. It also called me into a love. And importantly, it also called me into a desire to be greater than I was. This desire is different from the one that comes out in the middle of literary translation.

It's more urgent, more all encompassing. A feeling that instead of wanting to be a little smarter, a little wittier, I need instead to be better or braver than the person I am. That the person sitting across the table from me, who is themselves being incredibly brave in confronting the traumas of their past and insisting with their whole lives that they deserve better, to help them make the US government understand how important it is that they be allowed to stay.

And just like with translating, I'm stuck with the fact that I'm just myself. No less and no more. There's some amount of hope that I get with my volunteers sitting to my left and my right with the room full of people engaging in the same kind of work. And in a way, a desire for justice is love for another enacted and made real both on and off the page. And that feels nearly palpable in rooms like this.

And yet again, we come back to the problem of the single person against the wider system. The place I think I first really realized the horrifying difference in scale between the amount of people that needed help and the number of people that could be helped was my trip to Tijuana in January of 2019. Before arriving, I thought I knew what I'd find there. I was prepared to be useful, prepared to bear witness because that was what you did when the world broke down or rather, when it pointed at its own brokenness like the border did that year.

I spent the prior year here at HDS talking endlessly about witnessing in the abstract, about not looking away, about the differences between action and prayer. And so while this trip wasn't about faith in that I don't think it was about God necessarily, it was a little about having faith in myself as an agent of change, as a comforting presence, as someone who could be helpful. This was a conviction I had carried over from my time in the clinic. Had experienced the rush of seeing relief across someone's face when we finished those forms.

I thought I'd be doing similar work in Tijuana. Thought that I might be useful in the same ways. Because of my work in the asylum clinic in New York, I knew the kinds of stories people were carrying with them on their long walks to the United States. I had watched women take deep breaths to muster the bravery to give their testimony. Had laughed with boys barely out of their teens cracking wise to get through the telling.

I knew without a doubt that every single person I had talked to deserved safety, deserved the chance to start over after an irrevocable harm. In assisting with these applications, I was able to help them take the first step towards claiming that right. With my work in the clinic, I could enumerate the help I gave. Could count the number of applications filled. Quantify the good I had done that day.

I thought Tijuana would be the same kind of experience. It was another opportunity to break out of the quotidian feeling of not knowing whether I was right or wrong, helping or harming, and instead, turn myself into someone who was doing "good," because that is the messy truth of it. I went to Tijuana for myself. I went because I wanted to be the kind of person who moved towards those in need, who showed up. I went because I wanted to prove to myself my own goodness.

And then as I arrived and began to sink into the work, it became clear. We, me and all the other volunteers were there. Yes, to offer information, to give know-your-rights talks, to explain the next steps of the immigration system to the people who had gathered there. But the real work lived underneath all of that. We were there to accompany people as they prepared to cross the border.

That week, I discovered that this real work looked very different than what I expected. My job was to play with kids, to hand out the [SPEAKING SPANISH] and Styrofoam cups of coffee. I was there to listen to someone's story not because there was a form between us that we needed to fill out or boxes we needed to check, but because they needed to tell anyone, someone what they had lived through.

I was there to reassure them that they were making the right choices, that they were keeping their kids safe, that I could see how hard they were working for the people they loved. I was there to see scars, to see tears, to see immigration officials shouting and to serve as a warning that they were being observed, to be a warm hand on a back, a tissue held out quietly, a body between a person and someone else with a microphone and a clipboard. I was there to gossip or to commiserate about the cold or the rain.

I was there to answer questions, scan documents, lend a telephone, write names and numbers on arms and permanent marker. What this all means is that I was there in the plaza every morning as people were called across the border one by one. While I was in Tijuana, there was this particular system in place known as "metering," which numbered and counted the people actually admitted into the United States every day, supposedly because of processing limits.

The reality is much more complicated, but the end result of all of it was that all of the border crossing activity in Tijuana centered around this one plaza called El Chaparral , which was nestled right up against the pedestrian bridge between Mexico and the US. People would gather there every morning to see if they would be called or just spend time there. Volunteers would assemble to answer last-minute questions, fill last-minute needs. Government officials would lurk around the edges of the plaza watching.

When people were called, what would actually happen is that they'd be taken to the side and put into a line to wait. From there, they'd be loaded into a minibus that would take them to a port of entry 10 minutes down the road, where they would be processed and either released or sent to a detention center or in some other way, get pulled into the labyrinth of the US immigration system.

Even though the wait in that line was never long, 30 minutes, an hour maybe, it was all there waiting of the last few months condensed into a tight package. It was the moment when crossing the border went from a longed for abstraction into a real thing. They would be getting into those vans that would take them finally across this stretch of border. These clothes they put on that morning would be the ones taken from them by border patrol agents later that day.

Crossing the Mexican-US border is going into a tunnel, where an uncertain future is on the other side. And this line was the moment when that black mouth of the tunnel was yawning towards them. The line waiting for this bus is like a church and a beauty salon and a departures gate all in one. Couples get married in this line, kiss each other goodbye in this line, cry, recite over and over to themselves the answers that they have prepared for their credible fear interviews like litanies.

Mothers Sharpie phone numbers onto their children's bellies. The family separations have allegedly stopped at this point, but nobody wants to take any chances. Sometimes, there's a white collared priest or pastor among the volunteers and they ask if anyone wants prayers. Sometimes, I translate. A huddle of us holding hands.

There are little moments of comfort. A woman passes a huge jar of Vaseline to a single man waiting in line next to her, so he can use it to cover scrapes and bumps on his leg. A woman rebraids the hair of someone else's daughter eye wateringly tight to prevent the lice that is said to run rampant at the detention centers and the hopelessly tangled hair that results from not being able to brush or bathe adequately for days.

[SPEAKING SPANISH] the woman says, snapping an elastic band on to the end of a wispy little braid. And then just as the last baby hair has been brushed into submission, as clothes are straightened out and crumbs and dirt are brushed off, a border official starts calling out names again. Checking things off on a clipboard, sending people around the concrete bars that make up the fence and into waiting vans with metal grates across the windows.

Up until this point, everything has felt ad hoc, somewhat informal and loose or at least, negotiable. But with that clipboard and that line, there's an order put in place. The knowledge of some kind of authority standing over it all. A feeling that disobedience comes with consequences. Two times each day, one in the morning and again in the afternoon, we watch this familiar procession.

Those who'd heard their number called that morning load whatever luggage they have into the back of the van, pass children into the cabin and then climb up its steep steps themselves, disappearing behind windows with bars over them like a prison van. A border official shuts the door, and the grates close over. Then as the van slowly pull out of the lot, we stand there yelling, [SPEAKING SPANISH].

You can barely see their hands waving out of the windows, their faces peering back out of the glass as the vans hurtle down the street, turning a corner and falling off the face of the earth. This happens every day, twice a day for as long as we are there. Some version of it is happening now.

Throughout those long days, as we prepared people to cross over, we listened to them talk about [SPEAKING SPANISH] with burning intensity even as they could only give vague answers about what it would look like and feel like-- what they would do when they got there and what would happen next. We prayed over people blessing their journeys. I helped translate the prayers of clergy from English to Spanish.

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

We offered a few small comforts before they left, but all with a forced cheerfulness of a wake that's trying to be a party. Our language was that of crossing a border, but it was also the language of death. In my book, I write about [SPEAKING SPANISH], the slum. This comes from a bilingual joke my dad used to tell when I was a kid. The story of the Little Mariposita goes like this.

Once upon a time, there was a Little Mariposita. She was [SPEAKING SPANISH] around the garden when, [SPEAKING SPANISH], she assaulted. "Oh, no," she cried. "I forgot to open my little [SPEAKING SPANISH]." This is a very silly joke that none of you laughed at, which is fine.

[LAUGHS]

That has a lot more to do with the delivery and of being very, very small maybe when you first hear it. And as none of you are under the age of 5, I get it. But I do think that it's a joke that gets at something about working to make the world better really in any capacity but particularly, in the immigration world.

You can be wandering along [SPEAKING SPANISH] in your garden if you will, doing all the good you can with all the strength you can, thinking you understand the problem when [SPEAKING SPANISH], you slam into a new facet of this reality. A new way in which your ability to make the material conditions of even one person's life better are limited and hampered. You forgot to open your little [SPEAKING SPANISH] or worse still, your [SPEAKING SPANISH] are powerless in the face of a 20-foot steel wall.

As with many things, I think the French mystic and theologian, Simone Weil, an answer to the 20-foot steel walls and to what often feels like the futility of our endeavors in her writings on attention. In her essay on the right use of school studies, she moves nimbly from a teacher's order in front of the classroom, "pay attention," to a prayer to the bedsides of the suffering other.

In the essay, attention transforms from the kind of scattered concentration that a school child turns to a tricky Latin translation. Something I have some experience in myself. Unfocused, unrewarding, aware of one's own shortfalls and failings into the kind of attention that is turned towards God in prayer and towards the suffering other. I'm sure many of you have read this essay. I first encountered it here at HDS.

And I still think about it all the time because sometimes, it feels like the only way to survive in a world that is full of problems so large and entrenched that any individual human feels tiny and insignificant next to them. The attention Weil asked for in the essay sometimes feels like the only way to wake up each morning and put my shoulder to dislodging what feels like a Sisyphean Boulder of systematic widespread brutality.

Let me give you an example. When I worked at an Immigration Services Nonprofit, a job I held for nearly the last 4 years, I would wake up every weekday morning and log on to my computer for work. And the first thing I would do every day was to copy paste a dozen or so links on how utterly broken and destructive our immigration system was on that particular day into an email. And I would send it to my 100-plus colleagues in their cubicles or their apartments. Each of whom in their own ways were busy helping one person through the system at a time.

And then I would go on with the rest of my day, writing a little press release about an unjust policy, or formatting something on the website, or scrolling through 1,000 page PDFs of FOIA requested detention center inspection reports, reading and annotating them to make them legible for journalists, or any of the 10,000 other tasks that are just a part of the modern workplace.

The whole time, I'd be paying attention to detail and control lie and control viewing things to make sure they were legible and looked nice, and getting frustrated when I erased my own work with an inadvertent backspace or being actively resentful of every email that landed in my inbox. And the whole time, there's this knowledge of all the injustice in the world-- everything wrong with the immigration system, which I had very carefully copy and pasted into an email just that morning just screaming and howling on the other side of my computer screen.

And I, sitting there at a desk in Chicago, could do absolutely nothing about it. But what I was doing, which is to say making, note of it, telling other people who could help, moving around what paperwork I could and talking to people one at a time to see how we could help. But this is, of course, where Weil helps. In her essay, Weil speaks of this kind of attention as an experimental certainty.

If you continue to pay attention and are certain that this attention will change things, change will happen. You'll get better at translating or after 10,000 hours of good faith prayer that results in silence, you'll hear the whisper of the divine or maybe, just maybe, by showing up and paying attention and doing your job every day, no matter how rote or insignificant feeling, your shoulder next to everyone else's on the millstone, will eventually bend the arc of justice really, truly decisively towards justice.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this concept of prefigurative politics-- the idea that you should live "now" in the present as if you lived already in the world to come. You begin forming the relationships, and the communities, and the practices and the habits of body and mind that reflect the world you're working towards day by day. It makes it all feel a little nearer, a little less distant.

I think this is part of what Weil means when she talks about attention, when she illustrates the effects of cultivating these habits. It's creating a little space in your life every day where justice might go, making the way smooth even as you can't really see your way there. The work still has to be done person by person. But when you've got an eye on building the future world, all the little administrative tasks can feel like a byproduct of that attention. The least you can do for the people on the other side of the screen for the work you're helping along, however minutely.

I also want to gesture the specifics of my work, of what translation means in the context of justice and of building community. I want to say that translation also is primarily an activity dedicated to the future. Not just because readers of the translation are always future readers. Not just because we translate the texts of the past into the language of the future. Not just because the most starry eyed of translation proponents seem to be gesturing towards building a utopian future in which we all share a sort of global, Esperanto language literature, culture in which all things are held equal.

But because like prefigurative politics, translation is a way of life that corresponds to a mode of living that exists now and will exist even more in the future. In the words of Gloria Anzaldúa translation is, [SPEAKING SPANISH]. The mere presence of a translation does not make the world a broader or a better place. Reading a text that has been carried across from one language to another will not change your mind on its own.

But I believe that the act of doing the carrying yourself changes something. Translation is a practice forces you to step outside the structure of your sentences-- the shapes that your languages are accustomed to taking. Translation is an encounter, an embrace of another mind, willingly ceding the egotism of your own words to amplify another. As Simone Weil points out, a lot of times, it underscores your mediocrity. Reading a first draft of a translation is always an exercise in humility.

I've translated, I don't know how many semi-legal documents and advisories, and I still have to look up the word "parole" every time. I keep inventing new words workarounds for the phrase "law enforcement." It's just every time. Translation also teaches you to be creative, to be flexible, to walk yourself around a word you don't-- the one to one equivalence for.

Translation gives you a second way of talking about a thing. A language that will feel, despite your best attempts, like a different kind of register. More intimate, or louder, or sharper or funnier. A different kind of personality. My parents even claimed that my voice in Spanish is softer, less strident than when I'm speaking in English.

There are millions of kids who have grown up as tiny professional translators, helping their parents shuttle meaning from one language to another, figuring out the shape of their own rooms within language. And they know these lessons by heart already. There are adults painstakingly finding their footing in a second language through necessity or adding a third or a fourth to a list already shaped by colonialism and global forces.

For them, translation is not an expansion. It's not anything special. It's just the way life is lived day after day because there's no other way to bridge their worlds. Switching languages is not a matter of a specialized skill being flexed or specialty. It's a matter of survival. But the survival brings along with it all of the lessons above. The openness, the willingness to meet on someone else's ground, the knowledge of worldviews beyond your own encoded in languages you've never heard spoken. There are lessons learned not out of curiosity but out of necessity. But they're there.

I think in the end, what I want to leave you with is this. You make a personal politics the same way you translate a text, the same way you read a book. You look at the world around you, and there are things that you notice, and there are things that. If you're lucky you read the words of other people, who have looked out on the world before you, who have caught other things you didn't. And you change your mind. You change your actions. You start seeing things you had been blind to before.

There are many things that because of the family, the place, the society that I was born into, I had the luxury of learning slowly, of learning only intellectually and never emotionally until someone who had learned them the hard way was kind enough to show me. There are other things, other experiences I know people to be blind to that I've felt down to my bones.

I wrote a book that is in a lot of very important ways about immigration, but I think Rivermouth is also about reading and rereading, going over passages in your life, poring over someone else's words until you find your own life irrevocably altered. I can't go back to the person I was before that church basement in New York, before Tijuana or before my job at the legal nonprofit.

I can't unbecome my parents' daughter, can't unlearn Spanish or unteach myself English. And so I'm left to return to these things in places over and over to draw strength from them, to see the world more clearly, to think of them, not as the facts of a biography but as tools to dismantle walls, tools to fling open doors and beckon people in. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 3: Thank you so much--

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Thank you.

SPEAKER 3: For your beautiful-- are you willing to take some questions?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER 3: Do you want to field your own questions?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER 3: OK.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: If anyone has them.

SPEAKER 3: [INAUDIBLE] if anyone wants to [INAUDIBLE].

Oh, yeah.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Immigration is brought up in just common, well, political discourse of the days. I, certainly from hearing you speak your experiences, that the truth of what you've been through and what you know obviously is not what's trying to be portrayed by the media.

I was wondering if you could say more about that or what would you hope that because it is in the common conversation of evening news and politics, what would you wish to convey more? And also, what do you really dislike, or what makes you like, "no that's not right"? That's got to stop saying that?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah. I think that the best place to start is what I don't like and what I wish would happen. So I think that a lot of coverage right now of a lot of news around immigration focuses on numbers. And talking about numbers is a great way to obscure the fact that every single number is a person with their own story, with their own reasons for coming here, with all the complexity and personhood that being a person includes.

And so I think that every once in a while, we will see a person's individual face or someone giving like the quick flash, like nightly evening news quote. And you kind of get to see a person's face or hear a person's experience for a minute. But when you zoom out that far to be like, "10,000 people across the border this month," that's not giving you any real context, any real information other than those numbers.

It's not telling you where they're from or why they decided to come or any of that. And I recognize that is a difficult thing to do when you are talking about the news. But it's so, so rare for any of that to get covered unless something bad happens to someone that it feels like it's obscuring this reality of the immigration system. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: OK. [INAUDIBLE].

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: That is a great question. I am in the very, very, very, very, very, very early stages of working on a book about food and food systems here in the US. And not just food systems because that you think of factory farms and meat processing plants but also, food as it shows up on your dining room table or is the thing that you have to make you feel closer to your grandmother. So something kind of in the middle of those two areas.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I really appreciate what you read, and I look forward to reading the book. I'm curious about how you made choices in terms of how much time and energy and space to give to colonialism and US imperialism, and how much to then bring that into the narrative into your experience without letting it kind of take over the story in that sense?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah, there is definitely like a fair amount of conversation of all of that in the book because it feels like with so many other things that we have this very presentist lens of "what is the latest thing that is happening?" What is the most recent event that is going on when in reality, there is all this context, and all these ways in which US imperialism is the reason that so many people are displaced and coming up here when climate change that is caused in large part by like US-owned and funded corporations that is displacing people. All of these big reasons.

And so it felt important to give as much of that context as possible. And the balance I think that I tried to strike in the book was connecting those to real stories or real reasons that I've heard that people have come up here, and then finding the balance between also like explaining all these huge, huge systems.

Explaining all the weird lingo and language that goes into the US immigration system and all the weird policies that are like fine grained and also, can really ruin people's lives by their fine-grainedness. And then like keeping it readable and functional was one of the bigger challenges in writing the book, I think.

AUDIENCE: As a follow up to that, what was your [INAUDIBLE]?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: I knew that it would be read beyond that. And so there are a lot of concessions to a wider book-buying audience.

But to be totally honest, my imagined audience was people like me, who had sort of known about immigration as an issue, who had seen it on the evening news and not really had it land for them until they heard about a story or they heard someone's experience in it and then were like, "wait, hold on. This doesn't align with my view of what this country is. This doesn't align with my view of how we should be treating people." And wanting to know more and wanting to know how they could get involved. And I think specifically for me, that also meant English-Spanish speakers.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] question. [AUDIO OUT] correctly about what was your experience [AUDIO OUT]?

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yeah, absolutely. So I came to HDS out of a desire for a career change basically. I'd been working in publishing. I'd been doing the work at the clinic on a volunteer basis once a week, and I realized that wasn't enough. And I wanted to be thinking about bigger things and asking bigger questions.

And I knew that I was a writer, but I didn't really know what that actually meant in any real way. And so the ways that HDS I think informed and shaped me is that this is a community. And when I say community, I mean other students. I mean professors. I mean the people that you meet just kind of walking around the hallways.

People are here trying to answer these questions of like, what does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to do things in the world, and to change things and to make something a little better, a little more just? And in a lot of cases, especially right now, that means tackling problems of this size?

That means tackling these big huge things that it isn't just one person swooping in and changing everything. It's not pressing a button. It's not. It's this big project work that is going to take lifetimes and is going to take collaboration, and that is really hard to wrap your head around often times.

And working and talking to people here at HDS that were willing to take on questions of that size, that were willing to engage in the work even if it felt like that work would be unfinished despite how hard they threw their shoulder against it, felt like such important grounding and such an important community to start doing that work in. Yeah.

Yeah, so a lot-- there is one story in the book that is someone's full story that is attached to her name. And that is someone that I am still in touch with. I was able to translate the things that were about her. And DM them to her over Facebook and say, are you OK with this? Is there anything you change? Are you OK with all of this?

And every other story every other detail that appears in the book is fictionalized-- is kind of glossed over. And so I think that the ethics that I developed around doing this work, not just in writing the book, but in my previous work doing communications for a legal aid nonprofit were a lot around giving people as much agency and control and choice in their stories as possible.

So if I would interview someone, before the interview, I'd say, you can or do not have to tell me any answers to any of the questions I ask you. Like they would first come having been told by their lawyers. This is a totally optional process. You can go through it. It would be helpful to us in these ways, but like to your story, you don't have to do it. It's up to you.

So it's having the conversation before being like, you can share as much or as little as you want. I am going to show this to you after I've written up whatever comes out of this interview to see if it aligns with the way that you tell your story, and what you feel comfortable being out there in the world. You can choose to have your name attached to it, or we can make up a pseudonym together.

And then it was presenting that story to them in their own language and publishing it also in their own language in addition to English whenever that was possible.

We got one more.

[LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

SPEAKER 3: You're welcome.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, Alejandra. I want to thank you for your talk and for your work.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I was actually in Tijuana, I think maybe a few weeks before you.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Oh, that's super interesting.

AUDIENCE: In December and early January. And you're talking-- it's been really helpful for me. I didn't and don't do translation work because my Spanish is truly terrible to the extent that it even exists. But I remember that tunnel very well and kind of the inherent violence of the wall and the border, and the lack of translation from Tijuana to San Diego.

I have this very strong memory of housing and development coming right up to the wall in Tijuana, and then you get to San Diego. And there's that an outlet mall.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And border patrol guys with of Darth Vader like helmets on four wheelers. And then there's not much till you get to the city. And I don't know where this goes. I'm going to be thinking about it on the way home.

But you've sort of opened a really interesting window for me on the kindness, the love, the delicacy of translation of language as an alternative to that. So I don't know exactly where I go with that, but it's really lovely. Thank you.

ALEJANDRA OLIVA: --so much.

SPEAKER 3: Let's just thank Alejandra once more.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.