Zamora lays trauma he carried to rest on page
Poet details trek from El Salvador to US that almost killed him at age 9 in memoir
Javier Zamora had a lot going for him in 2019: He had won poetry prizes, an Ivy League fellowship and an “extraordinary ability” visa that finally gave him certainty about his status as an immigrant in the United States.
But 20 years after he had walked across the border as a 9-year-old without his parents on his way to a new life, the immigration journey that almost killed him was still taking an emotional toll.
“On the surface, I was fine,” Zamora said, but inside he was struggling. He had trouble working, he said, and his closest relationships were suffering. “My personal life was falling apart.”
When, in a chance encounter at a local bar, a couple of therapists asked him why he was drinking alone one weekday afternoon, it was the right question at the right time — and a turning point for Zamora.
The couple introduced him to a student of theirs, a specialist in child migration who herself had come to the United States as a girl. She became Zamora’s therapist, and his work with her helped remove “the boulder in front of the door to my happiness,” he said. It also provided the building blocks for his new memoir about his migration experience, “Solito.”
“This book would seriously not exist, I wouldn’t be getting married, I wouldn’t be weirdly this happy, without my therapist,” said Zamora, now 32.
Recently released by Hogarth, “Solito” is both a work of personal healing and an implicit appeal for countries, including the United States, to address the hardships and danger that immigration posed to Zamora, and continues to pose for countless others.
Told from the perspective of Zamora’s 9-year-old self, the book recounts his journey from a small town in El Salvador, where he lived with his grandparents, through Guatemala, Mexico and Arizona. It’s a harrowing, often heartbreaking tale of precarious boat trips, run-ins with corrupt border guards and parched, hopeless days in the Sonoran desert. But the young narrator’s innocence — and, at times, his lack of awareness of the true danger of his journey — also allows for moments of humor, camaraderie, even delight.
Walking for hours through the desert, Zamora’s younger self can’t help but marvel at what he sees: cactuses “like big pineapples on a spike,” or trees “like giant people watching us.” He names his favorite plants: Lonelies, Spikeys, Fuzzies. He notices stars twinkling. “Why do they blink like that? Can they see the dirt under our feet? Like old newspapers. Crinkle. Crunch. Like walking on eggshells. Crack. The gallons of water in people’s hands. Slosh. We’re walking again.”
Speaking about how he coped with the perils of the journey, he said, “you have to process the fear somehow,” adding that, “finding beauty in the landscape or making jokes or really loving food, these become your new echelons of joy. I wanted to honor that aspect.”
Zamora’s narrator-as -witness exposes the inadequacy of the term “unaccompanied minor.” Here is a boy, far from his family and deeply vulnerable, experiencing the wider world for the first time. His protection — and ultimately his survival — comes thanks only to risks taken by a temporary family of strangers he meets along the way.
“I don’t expect the people who are in the book to read it. But my dream scenario
is that they open it and see just the dedication page,” Zamora said, “to see that there is this book out there thanking them, because I don’t remember thanking them in real life.”
“Solito” concludes with a final march through the desert and Zamora’s reunion with his parents after years apart; his father left El Salvador in 1991, fleeing civil war, and his mother joined him four years later.
But even once he was with his family, growing up in Northern California, Zamora found that life as an immigrant came with its own challenges. He bottled up his past, assimilating to the point that his best friends didn’t know he was from a different country, he said.
He was a bad student
“not academically, but behaviorally,” he said, “because I was holding this
thing inside me.”
Because of his immigration status, Zamora couldn’t visit El Salvador in high school, but the country spoke to him.
He came across the work of Roque Dalton, a Salvadoran poet and activist who wrote unflinchingly about oppression, class struggle, freedom and love. He found the spoken word of Leticia Hernandez-Linares, a Salvadoran American poet. He started to realize that he, too, could have a voice and took heart in Toni Morrison’s exhortation that if the book you want to read hasn’t been written, “you must write it.”
“Everybody talks about that quote, but it’s a great quote!” Zamora said. “That and reading Roque Dalton made me realize that there were no Salvadoran immigrants who had written poetry, who had lived that experience. A whole new world opened up.”
Zamora continues to heal, although he still hasn’t spoken much with his parents about all that happened to him as a child. His mother tried to read “Solito,” but she couldn’t get through the first chapter, seeing what her son had gone through trying to reach her.
Zamora addresses his parents in the book’s acknowledgments, writing that he hopes they “carry no guilt, because I’ve long forgiven you.”
More than anything, Zamora says, it has taken willpower to face his trauma.
“My 9-year-old self, I felt was always following me like a shadow. I had never stopped to look at him or honor him for who he really is,” he said. “A superhero.”