RIVERMOUTH

A graceful meditation on the unresolved traumas of life in a land where one is often not welcome.

“If you’ve experienced deep grief, if you’ve lived through any kind of event with an aftermath, you know the way that time fractures and splinters, the way true things take on the sheen of unreality while dreams feel vivid and visceral.” So writes Oliva, who, bilingual in English and Spanish, worked for years as a translator and interpreter for refugees and immigrants seeking admission into the U.S. Hidden inside the Spanish of those arrivals from Central America is the terror of living amid gang wars and political repression, of being dispossessed from one’s land, of being hungry. The border, writes Texas native Oliva, “is porous. Sometimes you cross for a day job, and sometimes you cross for keeps.” For those who have arrived from afar, it can be an insurmountable barrier. Confronting it requires courage, and it is no easy matter to decide to leave one’s homeland, even when survival is at stake. Going from big cities and courtrooms to small outposts on the border, the author encounters many similar stories, bringing the words of those in need into a “lingua franca of global systems of capital, whose speakers expect to be met and accommodated within this language.” Yet, of course, it is those people who make it across the border, legally or not, who wind up harvesting the food we eat and staffing the restaurants where we eat it, drawn in at the very bottom of that capitalist regime. Evenhandedly and without sentimentality, Oliva urges that we can stand to be both more understanding and more generous: “We sit here, on our prosperous shores, surrounded by the materials to build bridges, to build homes, to build cathedrals, to build irrigation canals and make plenty for everyone.”

A humane, elegantly written book that gives voice to the voiceless at our borders.