![]() ![]() 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.įor Oliva, translation is a “constellation of many acts” that includes interpretation, interviewing, advocacy, diplomacy, and care. When done well, interpreting should empower folks to advocate for themselves. Interpreters are neutral and translate everything in a room, while advocates take a side and act on behalf of someone. 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. Oliva is stuck in the middle, “trying to translate into existence a respect that wasn’t there.” Some volunteers “got off on the sense of emergency” and the “high drama of Helping Others,” offering impractical, unearned, or blunt advice. Volunteers are instructed to call asylum seekers “friends” to avoid legal liability, a term she finds patronizing and overly intimate. 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.Ī 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. 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. 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. immigration policies, her personal politics, and those of her fellow translators. ![]() 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. 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. Tue 6/27 7 PM, Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W. 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. Translation can build connections and prompt material change, but it can also exclude and yield toward those with more power. 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. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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