Immigration activist Alejandra Oliva on the art (and pain) of filling out an application for asylum
The first 75 or so arrivals stepped out of buses at Union Station clutching clear plastic bags that held few possessions. This was almost a year ago. Each had been to the United States-Mexico border with the hope of immigrating to this country. Once there, they were put on buses bound for the self-styled sanctuary city of Chicago. Many did not speak English. Some spoke English, but felt more comfortable speaking Spanish. Most came from Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba. They were mothers and children and fathers and single men and single women, and they shared two things in common: They had become participants in a political protest by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against federal immigration policies and, after arriving in the Loop, they would be filing out lots of paperwork.
Paperwork primarily in English.
Katarina Ramos, managing attorney for the National Immigrant Justice Center, based in Chicago, thought immediately of Alejandra Oliva, who was in her late 20s yet preternaturally assured. Oliva had been promoted recently at NIJC and was working on policy, but Ramos required a pragmatic, efficient hand. The situation was fraught and chaotic. She had heard the buses were coming; then she had heard they weren’t coming. Then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot had asked advocacy groups to handle what Ramos calls “the Legal Immigration 101 walk-through.”
“Plus Texas wouldn’t even say when buses would be here,” Ramos recalled, “and whenever we tried to make a deal with the bus company to get a little notice, Abbott’s office would push back.”
Oliva, who is now 30 and lives on a quiet Sauganash neighborhood street in a classic Chicago bungalow, was among the first to greet the migrants. She is an essayist and immigration activist and author — her memoir, “Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration,” was published earlier this summer by Astra House — but Oliva has become particularly appreciated for her role as a translator.
Working overnight in the days before the first bus came, she put together a website for the new undocumented arrivals, all in Spanish. Before anyone reached the paperwork stage, she streamlined the greeting process. “One by one,” Oliva said, “you would meet these couples, many with the same questions, which had not been answered yet.” Questions as basic as “What is asylum?” And what did it say on this form (usually in English) about Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Sometimes it was a question of how to check in with ICE or simply how to change an address.
Eventually, inevitably, there is paperwork.
Applications, statements, histories.
It’s such an obvious detail, yet, in our bottomless debates about immigration, we forget a frequent truism: Though the U.S. government does not have an official language, most of its applications and forms demand a degree of fluency in English for prospective citizens. Oliva, who writes in “Rivermouth” about working on the U.S.-Mexico border and helping migrants tell harrowing histories in the narrow boxes of government forms, has since become an outspoken advocate for “language justice,” a concept developed by educators Alice Johnson and Roberto Tijerina with a pretty straightforward premise: Everyone has a right to communicate — and to be understood — in their own languages, in ICE meetings, on applications, at town halls.
“In a strictly practical sense, as a historian of immigration myself, that paperwork (being filed by migrants who enter the U.S.) is a transcript for any historians 100 years from now,” said Rachel Buff, chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. “It’s almost our sacred responsibility to get their stories right. What a person had to do to get here, what it took to leave — all of that only enters the records through these very moments of translation. ‘I have walked for five days and I am worried about gangs in my village’ — that’s not going to cut it. What Alejandra is calling for, in a broad sense, is cultural bilingualism as a kind of responsibility.”
What Oliva does — and she is quick to point out — is far from unique; she is one of many such translators across the country helping migrants complete paperwork to explain their life stories.
“But Alejandra is particularly patient and able to step back and calm a situation,” Ramos said. “All without losing focus on who she is doing this for. In this work, you get people who want to ‘save’ migrants. Alejandra works with, not helps, them. She takes a person’s fear and every reason they may be afraid to return to their home, then she recognizes something that a lot of people tend to forget about all this: This person will get one chance to get this paperwork right.”
As Oliva writes in “Rivermouth”: “The U.S. government is not the Catholic Church, but it does require asylum-seekers to be saints.” Translating a migrant’s story into government parameters takes many shapes, but without help, the result often drifts “away from the messiness of real life and into the beats of a known and understood narrative.”
By the time Johannes Favi worked with Oliva, he had left the small African nation of Benin and had been living in Indiana for nearly a decade. He already had two children and a wife and was going through the process to receive a green card, but ICE held Favi in 2019 and sent him to a Kankakee detention center for 10 months.
After he sued the government for violating his right to due process and not supplying proper protection during a pandemic, he was released and then asked to speak about his experience for a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on immigration and citizenship. “Alejandra has no legal power,” he said in an interview. “But the time she takes to help prepare your story — you always hope you know someone who can bring change to your life, you know? From a language standpoint, when you’re telling your story as an immigrant, you can get confused. You’re probably still traumatized. I was still living here and adjusting to this life. Then you get arrested in front of your kids; you don’t know when you will be released. On Fridays at 5 a.m., they call out names and you don’t know where you are going next or even if you may be out of the country in 48 hours. People get desperate. I have seen people (in detention) use bedsheets and hang themselves.
“Alejandra helped me focus my story, in a way so you are not unknowingly harming yourself. She will tell you the truth even if it hurts. I like that opinion. To have someone like Alejandra in front of you, it made me what I am today and inspired me to be more like her. Which is what I do.” Favi lives in Chicago now and works as the deputy director of Illinois Community for Displaced Immigrants, a nonprofit that advocates for housing and human rights for asylum-seekers.
On a recent weekday morning, Oliva sat in her dining room with a hand below the table steadying her dog, Chico, and the other signing onto a Zoom talk that she was leading. It was about trauma and translation workers. About 100 participants were allowed and 150 signed up. Her long black swoop of hair streaked with blonde fell across her face, which stiffened in concentration yet somehow also exuded serenity. A water bottle and notebook sat off-camera. When the talk began, she offered advice for not looking judgmental during translations. She fielded questions about the ways translating emotionally draining stories can affect the mental health of a translator. Someone asked if it’s natural for translators to feel anger toward those in their personal lives who complain about petty things. (“I have definitely known that feeling,” she said.) She talked about when a translator, a neutral party, should convey emotions.
Then someone described a heated situation when they felt caught between lawyer and migrant.
Oliva said it’s important to remind everyone they are not talking to her but to each other. Still, it’s understandable if a translator working with migrants finds themselves in “an uneasy place.” She said, “We are expected to walk this line between being an interpreter and being an advocate for whomever is talking.” It’s not unusual to find yourself saying: I am not the one saying these things. On the other hand, an interpreter should not expect to “hold themselves to a robot calm.”
An uneasy place, indeed.
When she arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, during the so-called migrant caravan situation of 2018 and 2019, she immediately found advocates who wanted to do good but held romantic notions of humanitarian work. Paperwork is not romantic. At her dining room table the other day she explained in a single gesture, spreading her arms wide and saying with a beatific smile:
“At last! Here I am everyone!”
Except, bureaucracy is not romantic.
There are government immigration apps that presume a migrant owns a smartphone. Humanitarian volunteers who don’t speak Spanish. Migrants quickly lose whatever hope they came with. Buff, who volunteered at the border during those caravan days, met Oliva there. She recalls sitting around with volunteers in San Diego after a long day on the border: “This woman said the next time she does this she would stay in Tijuana because it was more of an ‘authentic experience.’ Alejandra said something like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I also like there to be toilet paper in a bathroom.’ You can get some very naive people who want to help, who virtue signal, and they are not necessarily the ones who stick with it. If you want to do this because you are a good person and that’s it, you do not last. Alejandra comes at it from a deep spiritual and political motivation. She can be skeptical of things since there is no question she’ll be back tomorrow.”
Oliva first went to the border while she was a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, though she was more interested in becoming a writer than a preacher. She frames her work with migrants in near-religious tones. She does not “take on their pain,” but believes in honoring it, she says. Her relationship with organized religion itself is strained. She grew up evangelical but found her own moral foundation “different from the morals the church wanted to install in me.”
She moved to Chicago in 2019 to work with the NIJC, but grew up in Massachusetts and Texas. Her mother was born in Brownsville, Texas, at the border; her father is from outside Mexico City. He earned a doctorate in business and worked for Harvard Business School; the family was well-off, she said. “So there was never difficulty with their paperwork.” Money, of course, buys good lawyers.
She began volunteering as a translator while still enrolled as a student at Columbia University in New York. At first, she stumbled her way around I-589s, the government application for asylum.
“An attorney can explain (a migrant’s story) more, which could lead to an appointment with a forensic specialist who can get into the specifics of how someone was harmed. But for a lot of people, it’s a much different process. You get these tiny boxes to explain what bad things happened. It has to fit in there. ‘What do you fear? Have you been harmed?’ You have like 200 words, and so it gets boiled down to awful declarative sentences. So it can be comforting (for the asylum-seeker) to have someone there with eyes on them. At the border, there were not enough volunteer Spanish speakers, so you would end up accompanying people, doing this weird very specific direct service. Everything is uncertain, they’re scared; they just want to know if everything will be OK. But I can stand there and explain the process. Which is just nonstop.
“And it’s not just that their story needs to be compelling, it needs to be consistent. If I asked you what you had for breakfast last week, your memory might change. But you’re helping someone who probably has just gone through a lot of trauma and you are helping them fill out paperwork and prepare their narrative, which is not just a memory but the memory of what happened.”
Oliva sits back and takes a breath.
“Rivermouth,” which is focused on her work with migrants, gnaws and gnaws at unsettled feelings of how much help is accomplished within a system so deeply arbitrary. She writes about the fallacy of believing you can cross a border “the right way”; the lines of people waiting to be processed when some days no one is called and others 600 are called; credible fear interviews conducted by law enforcement who don’t require evidence yet scrutinize “every inflection.”
“You realize you have to be open to messy feelings,” she said in her dining room, not long after she quit NIJC to focus on writing. “You have to realize none of what you do feels special. It’s hard to figure out a way of doing it that doesn’t feel self-serving. I’m guilty of it myself. It’s boring, but it’s also important to know this, that you can’t go in and hand out sandwiches and fix things.”
She pets her dog a moment.
“Again, I am not the only one who does this, but these documents are important, at least to journalists. We forget that. We don’t give someone’s story the right level of care. We think of a good story as one that fits a government box. Look, when I work on an asylum application, I care more about filing it out correctly and keeping you safe than doing a story justice, so to speak. When I help storytelling, it’s often because (the immigrant) needs a certain audience, like a politician, to care and empathize. But in general, you give your full attention and presence. You show the person going through all this, no, they might not have any control over (some things) right now, but let’s at least make sure they have control over this part of this process, which is their story.”
