Rivermouth

A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration

By: Alejandra Oliva

Narrated by: Angela Juarez

In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family's long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration and looks 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.

As investigative and analytical as she is meditative and introspective, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is compassionate, in Rivermouth, Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.

©2023 Alejandra Oliva (P)2023 Tantor

Loved the book not the reader

Alejandra captures the border crisis from a unique perspective and humanizes the souls who bravely and desperately decide to embark on a journey that they believe will result in freedom only to find out that the system they are counting on to protect them is going to further expose them to suffering because they are less than perfect. She also does a beautiful job describing the value of bilingualism and translingualism.

The voice actress is a good reader of English but her difficulty reading Spanish fluently detracts from Alejandra's purposeful inclusion of untranslated text and interferes with the listener's ability to experience the author's full bilingualism.