Read an Excerpt
Preface:
The River, The Table, The Wall
I am sitting in a church basement just off Washington Square Park, across the table from a woman who’s only been in the United States for three weeks. Between us sits an I-589 form, the Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, and we’re surrounded by a handful of other people, pens poised, hands hovering over their keyboards, ready to take notes on our conversation.
”¿Lista?” I ask. She nods. “We’re ready,” I tell the group, and we dive in.
It’s the last day of January 2017. Eleven days earlier, Donald Trump was sworn into office, and in the next four years, the United States immigration system, especially the asylum system, will be systematically dismantled, rule and regulation by rule and regulation. One attorney general after another will step in to review and reverse the Board of Immigration Appeals rulings, restricting asylum categories one by one; entire nationalities and religions will be banned from entering the United States; the Federal Register will become cluttered with proposed rules limiting asylum, raising fees for application processing, cutting off immigration; the various tentacle branches of the Department of Homeland Security—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol—will grow and extend into quasi-paramilitaries at the presidents’ beck and call, deployed into too-welcoming sanctuary cities; the premise of birthright citizenship will be questioned; parents will be separated from their children; tent cities to house migrants will be erected in the desert and then eventually pushed back across the border into Mexico; miles upon miles of a “big, beautiful border wall” will actually be built up across parklands and ground sacred to the indigenous.
But at this table, at the beginning of 2017, none of that has happened yet. Today, I’m sitting across from a woman—Mayra, let’s call her—and we’re filling out an application so she can stay in the United States. The question of where Mayra will be allowed to call home is so critical because the answer is a matter of life or death. Back in Honduras, where she had lived her whole life up until a few weeks ago, her brother was shot in front of her, and the guy who did it told her that she would be next. This asylum application is her best shot at convincing the U.S. government that her survival is dependent on staying in the country.
Even though we are all here around this table, ready to fill out this application together, all of us wish we did not have to be. I, and the team of volunteers around me, wish that Mayra’s presence in this country was not, to some extent, contingent on the strength of my translation for this application, on the tear-jerkiness or trauma of Mayra’s story. The U.S. government appears to wish Mayra was not here at all. Mayra wishes that this translation we are working on was unnecessary—she would rather her life had continued in its familiar way—her brother alive, her family together—in Honduras. And yet, here we all are, Mayra, a tableful of volunteers and the U.S. government, collaborators on this translation that no one really wants.
While the task at hand may seem simple, linear even—figuring out how to best explain to the United States government that Mayra is afraid to return to Honduras because her life is at risk there—trauma often complicates the telling of a story like Mayra’s. If you’ve experienced deep grief, if you’ve lived through any kind of event with an aftermath, you know the way that time fractures and splinters, the way true things take on the sheen of unreality while dreams feel vivid and visceral. You also know how talking about any of it can sometimes feel like reliving it, your pulse thundering in your ears, time shattering all over again, your breath stuttering out of you. My job, sitting across the table from Mayra, is to let her talk, to ask clarifying questions and see if, through the interview, new information can be shaken loose, placed in a chronological order to form a cohesive narrative with cause and effect. My job is also to take her words and carry them across, from the Spanish she has spoken her entire life, into English, the language spoken by most people in the United States, and critically, the language spoken by the government officials at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services that will read and judge her application.
Mayra is just one of thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants who have come to the United States from the entire spread of nations to the south, often fleeing the results of American intervention: gang members deported from overpoliced, under-resourced communities in Los Angeles full of refugees fleeing the dirty wars in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador that were in turn caused by CIA destabilization of the region, Chilean and Argentine refugees fleeing U.S.-installed dictators, Mexican farm and factory laborers left hungry after the U.S.’s extortionary trade agreements. There are Tejano families in South Texas that never moved, just had the border pass over them until their language was the wrong one. Spanish speakers of the United States have little in common as a group—they are of different races, religions, nationalities, political alignments, economic classes, immigration statuses. The things they do have in common are a shared language and the shared misfortune of proximity to a world superpower. I wrote this book because our shared language reminded me that the stories we tell are a foundation for change.
I refer to the thing I did for Mayra, the way I helped her fill out the form, the conversation we had that evening, as “translation.” It both is and isn’t that—it’s a constellation of many different acts, one of which is translation, yes, but also includes interpretation, or the verbal translation of someone’s speech for an audience, interviewing, advocacy, diplomacy, care. All different skills, all different ways of trying your best to understand someone, and to help make them understood. I talk about the work I do with immigrants in a variety of different ways, but most often as a translator because it was through translation theory that I began to understand the work and the context I did it in differently. Translation theory—learned in classrooms and through texts by authors as various as ancient saints and nineties Quebecois feminists—helped illuminate the space I was occupying as a translator, helped me clarify my conflicting allegiances and emotions, provided a framework within which my experiences might rattle the bars, carve out escape routes.
The written word that a translator engages in is static and fixed, however much the prolonged stare translation requires makes it feel as if it is dancing under your eyes. Working with people is different—they change their words, walk things back and then send them out again, have tone, inflection, nervous tics and take calming breaths. When you’re interpreting with someone, you’re engaged not in a one-way transportation of their words, but in a repeating feedback loop that requires consideration and care in both directions. When I talk about translation, know that while I’m taking the theories of people who wrote about translating the Bible or a novel, what I’m most often talking about is this constellation of other activities that, for me, are a part of translating, that come along with the territory of engaging with the texts and talks of someone else.
This book is unapologetically bilingual. It is written for an audience of largely English speakers because that is where the power and the fault in much of our immigration system lies. If you are a monolingual English-speaker, you may come across longer sections of untranslated, unexplained Spanish than you’re used to. That doesn’t mean this book isn’t for you—it is—but it does mean I’m trusting you to figure it out, the same way so many immigrants do with English.
I know that in writing this book I might be speaking for a cause other than my own, eclipsing the voices of those directly affected by dangerous and deadly immigration policies. I hope that publishing this book will open the door to others like it—that reading this book will help someone make sense of a life lived between two languages. I hope that this book will awaken someone to the politics and the ethics of being in-between, helps them find strength in the middle places. I hope that in these pages I show how common cause can be drawn from the points of intersection in our stories. While I believe that my proximity to the people who are the subject of this book doesn’t authorize me to speak over them, I also believe that proximity has enabled me to listen more closely.
Living between languages allows me to do the work of the translator: that is, to meet people where they are, on either side, and bring their meanings to meet in the middle. This book acts as chronicle and testament of a life between these languages at a moment in time when their meanings, and the meaning of living in and within both, is being contested on stages both intimate and public. It’s an archive of the things I’ve seen and experienced as someone who became a part of the immigration system without actually going through it myself.
I have never gone through the immigration system. Because I want to center and reflect the experiences of people who have, this book is structured not according to the chronological order of my own journey, but in the order that someone applying for asylum or attempting to defend themselves from deportation might experience each of these steps: the border, the legal clinic, the courtroom, and the detention center. I’ve spent time in each of these places, usually as an advocate or interpreter, but sometimes as an observer, as accompaniment to someone worried about going through it alone.
In the same way that the theory of translation gives us a variety of useful metaphors to understand the role and task of the translator—bridge, spy, traitor, general, diplomat, hostage negotiator, ambassador—the whole dizzying, byzantine span of immigration into the United States might also be better understood through metaphor. This book is divided into three parts, each one organized around a central metaphor, and largely taking place in one “zone” of the immigration system: a river and the border, a dinner table and an asylum application clinic, the wall and an immigration courtroom.
Part 1, “Caminante No Hay Camino,” takes as its metaphor a river—the Rio Grande, the Styx, the river of meanings translators are said to bridge in their work. Largely set in Tijuana in January of 2019 in the aftermath of the migrant caravan, this section is focused on the idea of border crossing. I contrast my parents’ immigration stories, the people in Tijuana attempting to present themselves to ask for asylum who face bureaucratic violence, and the crossing between two languages and ways of being required for all immigrants.
Part 2, “Sobremesa,” is set around a table. My family dinner table, a table in a church basement where people are filling out asylum applications, an imaginary table of everyone who has contributed to the translation of that application. The experiences are based largely around the pro se asylum workshop where I met Mayra, run by the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York City and where I volunteered in 2016. This section will lay out some of the utopian promises of translation, even under the abridged, violent setting of the I-589 form needed to apply for asylum, and the ways in which actual translation often falls short. I’ll also be using the table to think about the ways that immigration and the exploitation of people and resources are intertwined with our foodways: from the journey of an avocado in a grocery store on Super Bowl Sunday, to the ways in which the migrant farm worker movement began a lot of what we consider contemporary immigrant rights today.
Part 3, “El Azote,” is about walls—the border wall, the walls of a detention center or a jail cell, and the ways in which the carceral system interacts with the immigration system. The central scenes are the two sides of the detention coin: a Boston immigration courtroom where I did accompaniment work in early 2019, watching one person after another defend themselves against deportation on trial via video screen, their translator’s voices piped in via speakerphone; and the detention center in Mississippi I visited later that year with a cohort of civil rights attorneys, surrounded by cotton fields and full of recently arrived immigrants. I discuss the fundamental injustices inherent in the immigration detention system, and about the criminalization of legal asylum seeking that has been going on since the Clinton years and before. Based on a bilingual joke my father likes to tell, “El Azote” is also about finding limits—to understanding, to language, to the aid one can provide. But this is a book about bearing witness and learning how to create change from within those limits.
To be an immigrant is to belong to two worlds while also belonging to neither. Solid land is hard to come by and what is left to the immigrant is the watery dreamworld of the river, which sweeps them along in ways you can only half understand. Language anchors you to home and allows you to cast about for a way to the other side of the river. Language helps you identify your people in a new place, it fills your ears with familiar warmth. Working in two languages is a way to claim this both-and-neither identity for yourself, a way that parents pass it down to children, a way to call down the ages of a lineage and root it in a new place. Let this book serve as an invitation to step into the river with me.
