For olivalejandra_, translation is a “constellation of many acts” that includes interpretation, interviewing, advocacy, diplomacy, and care. Her work cannot be divorced from her own upbringing, growing up “between two languages.” | ✍️ maiittran
. She follows migrants’ paths chronologically and geographically, from places as varied as the bordertown of Tijuana to a church basement in New York, immigration courts in Boston, and prisons in the rural South.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. immigration policies, her personal politics, and those of her fellow translators.
A 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.
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. Interpreters are neutral and translate everything in a room, while advocates take a side and act on behalf of someone. When done well, interpreting should empower folks to advocate for themselves.
In translation settings, she finds that the way she gives care mirrors how her parents care for her when they converse. Giving attention to people feels like inviting them into a familial language, welcoming them into the bounds of her own awkwardness and limited ways of using Spanish and “hoping they felt the affection at the heart of it.” Oliva’s book is similarly open, offering up her own motivations and not shying away when they are at times flawed, as human lives are.
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