Starred review from May 15, 2023
Oliva’s excellent debut recounts her experiences volunteering as a Spanish-English translator in an immigration detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in 2016. Folding in past stints at an immigration aid center in New York City and Boston’s immigration court, Oliva shares insights into the tragedies and trials of asylum seekers, revealing that what they find on arrival in the U.S. is an uncaring, complex system that denies refuge to as many migrants as possible. “Detention centers,” she writes, “are black boxes, stuck in the blank spaces of our maps, and the people in them are meant to be forgotten, meant to be disappeared.” Oliva also explores what it means to be a bilingual Latina working on the front lines of a humanitarian crisis, whose family, situated on both sides of the Rio Grande, has a history of easy passage between America and Mexico. “I hear my own name, both first and last, my mother’s name, my father and brother’s name, my sister’s name,” she writes of her time at the detention center, where she wrestles with the gap between her family’s experience and those she’s witnessing every day. With uncut rage and breathtaking prose, Oliva edifies, infuriates, and moves readers all at once. This is required reading. Agent: Dana Murphy, Trellis Literary.
