NEW YORK, NY.- 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.

Coming on Tuesday from 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 Hernández-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.”

In high school, Zamora interned at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing organization for young people founded by Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari in San Francisco. Zamora recalls meeting Eggers, who was “so normal and down to earth, completely showing me a different idea of what a ‘writer’ was.” As part of his internship, he received tutoring from a local poet and made his first real attempt at writing.

The effort was worthwhile. Zamora has held writing fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. “Unaccompanied,” his debut poetry collection, published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press, won the Northern California Book Award and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Eggers referred to him as an “essential American voice.”

When Zamora later returned to 826 Valencia as a guest instructor for a summer program, the students “were really listening to somebody who reflected their own backgrounds,” said Bita Nazarian, 826 Valencia’s executive director. “It was very motivating for them. He was giving back.”

Representation remains an important theme of Zamora’s work. In “Solito” and in his poetry, Zamora peppers his writing with Spanish punctuation and caliche, or Salvadoran vernacular, because “that’s how we think, that’s how I think,” he said.

Now, the likelihood of a child or teenager who immigrates to the United States “seeing themselves on the page is higher because of my work than it was for me,” he said.

Zamora has also started to engage more directly with his past. After moving to Tucson, Arizona — and reckoning with the fact that, just a short drive from his house, he can see the desert hills he walked across as a child — he started volunteering at Salvavision, a migrant aid organization that operates in the desert corridors south of the city, focal points for border crossings, deportations and cartel activity. More than 125 bodies have been found in the area this year alone, according to official figures.

The organization recently opened a resource center for migrants in Sasabe, Sonora, a small border town about 70 miles from Tucson where Zamora spent a night sleeping on the street as a 9-year-old. Deportations to the town spiked during the pandemic.

“Sending people there is criminal,” said Dora Rodríguez, Salvavision’s executive director. “Not even for the locals is there any public transportation, hospitals, shelters.”

For Zamora, at least, the immediate risks of migration have faded. With his visa, he can live without worrying about “running into Border Patrol cars.” But he continues to reconcile the conflicted emotions of a child of El Salvador living in the United States.

He recognizes the opportunities he has had in this country, he said. But he is also aware that, given the United States’ deep involvement in the country’s civil war, which raged from 1980-92, and its deportation of gang members to a devastated El Salvador after the war ended, the U.S. government shares responsibility for the realities that drive Salvadorans to migrate in the first place: gang violence, political instability, a lack of economic opportunity.

“Even under a right-wing American government there are more possibilities than any government in my country, which is why people come here,” said Zamora. “The politics are secondary; it is a life-or-death thing.”

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 super hero.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.