We’re thrilled to host Alejandra Olivia to share Rivermouth, which examines the immigrant journey from beginning to end, through a personal, human centric account of our system, how broken it is, and how it fails us.

This event is free to attend. However it helps us in planning to receive your RSVP.

About the Book:

In this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration, looking 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?

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About the Author:

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, translator, immigrant justice advocate, and embroiderer. She is a recipient of the 2022 Creative Nonfiction Whiting Grant. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, was nominated for a Pushcart prize, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She was the Frankie Fellow at the Yale Whitney Hummanities Center in 2022. Read more at olivalejandra.com

About the Conversationalist:

Our Marketing Coordinator, Alana Haley, will be in conversation with Alejandra. She was on the committee that chose Rivermouth as an IndiesIntroduce title. Her review: “In Rivermouth the important topic of immigration is addressed through compassionate and beautiful prose, in short digestible bursts, with a translator’s thoughtful and precise eye. Rivermouth examines the immigrant journey from beginning to end: the border, the application process, the final court decision of who may stay and who gets deported. It is a personal, human centric account of our system, how broken it is, and how it fails us all. The author, herself Mexican-American, bilingual, with a foot planted in two worlds, is ideally suited to frame the discussion.

Contact the host of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration with Alejandra Oliva