I was lied to by an Andy McDowell movie. Welcome to you wrong about. I'm Sarah Marshall and this week we are talking about the

last few decades of immigration policy in the United States with Alejandra Oliva, whose book

Rivermouth, a chronicle of language, faith, and migration is out this month and paperback.

And I really hope that you read it. I loved having this conversation

partly because I always love learning about how the world as people want us to believe it has always been has often been made that way in the past few decades

by a finite number of people for some pretty obvious reasons and once you understand how that works, it becomes easier to think about how it could change.

We did have some technical difficulties in this episode. It was such a riveting conversation that I ran out of room on my recorder and so the last few

minutes of my end of the conversation you can hear on my backup.

If you like these episodes, if you're looking for more episodes to listen to, especially if you're about to start a long road trip,

we have bonus episodes up on Patreon and Apple Plus,

and as of this episode coming out we have just finished our four part Brittany Saga, Brittany Quartet, Brittany Odyssey Odyssey Odyssey with Eve Lindley and I'm so excited to get to share that final episode with you and I hope you have a good time listening.

We had an amazing time making it so check it out if you can. And that's it. Thank you so

much for being here. My name is Sam. but only grudgingly we will admit that it is an election year.

My name is Sarah Marshall and with me today is Alejandra Aliva author of Rivermouth.

That's not part of your name, but I'm saying it like it is.

Yeah, hi, I'm so excited to be here.

I'm so excited to have you here, and I wonder if we could start by you telling us a little bit about Rivermouth.

Yeah, so basically it came out of my work as a translator, interpreter, language worker for folks who were going through the US immigration system,

whether they were trying to fill out asylum applications or figuring out how to cross the border or stuck in detention centers and kind of trying to figure out what that meant for them.

So the book kind of came out of those experiences which started when I was 24, like pretty fresh out of college, working a job in

publishing, a friend was like, hey, you speak two languages, can you hum do translation for these folks? And I was like, hey, you speak two languages, can you come do translation for these folks?

And I was like, I have never done this before, but like, sure, why not?

...