ARTS & CULTURE

the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, Oliva’s work in the immigration world began in January 2017, fresh into Trump’s presidency. Wanting to focus on something new and to make herself useful, she accepts a friend’s invitation to do translation work at a pro se asylum application clinic in New York. A “heritage speaker,” Oliva is often working in groups of three “well-meaning” volunteers, asking strangers to recount traumas and condense whole lives into the 150 words allotted by the I-589.

with a warmer Spanish, calling people cariño, or with a truncated Spanish obviously learned in English-language high schools.

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 a ection 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.