When my own marido, Inés, left México at the age of 23 for all the reasons young men left México for El Norte in the 1980s (poverty, peso devaluation, colorism, family strife, the allure of the American dream), his abuelita blessed him and said goodbye to him forever. She knew she’d die before he’d be able to return. He left his brothers, his sisters, and his mother, too. He didn’t see them again for 13 years.

This is the real story of immigration. Someone is always left behind. Someone is scarred by the journey, the push-pull factors, or an uncertain future in a new and often hostile environment.

I get why Javier Zamora wrote Solito, but I wish his parents hadn’t had to flee El Salvador as a result of the civil war, and I wish that the United States hadn’t supported the military that funded the death squads. I wish that Zamora had never had to travel seven weeks from El Salvador to the United States with strangers at the age of nine, leaving his country, his abuelos, and Mali, his tía, who knew all his emotions and how to care for each one. But if he hadn’t left his extended family who raised him, it’s likely he would never have known his own parents, and they would have been left without their son. An idea, as the mother of one son myself, I cannot bear.

Zamora’s Solito fits snugly into a body of literature and film about children traveling unaccompanied from Latin America to the United States that includes Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (2006), Nazario’s investigative journalism, and the film La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) (2007). However, the book is particularly significant among those works because it is a primary source. It is written by the person who experienced traveling through El Salvador and Guatemala by bus and then riding north in a boat on the Pacific Ocean—endless hours of waiting and waiting on coyotes in shoddy motels after each leg of the trip and then trekking on foot through the desert in México. Unsure of which adults he could trust, Zamora, a sensitive and intelligent child, understood that these strangers were putting themselves in danger by caring for him, sharing their water, holding his hand, and carrying him on their backs when he was too dehydrated, hungry, and exhausted to walk. Zamora harbors complex feelings about being unaccompanied and becoming an unwitting burden—he makes the stakes of this situation visceral for readers, while also making clear the equally high stakes of keeping these feelings to himself.

Solito is not only a powerful narrative, but also startlingly told. Writing in both English and Spanish, Zamora uses code-meshing strategies, moving fluidly between two languages, often in the same sentence, to convey or emphasize emotions or to relate concepts not easily translated into English. It is this linguistic strategy, too, that makes clear Zamora’s intellectual talents: he writes a book in English, his second language, about a major life event that happened totally in Spanish; he creates tension to illustrate emotion in numerous ways; he elevates details; and he sustains his nine-year-old voice across 381 pages.

For the audiobook, Zamora reads the story himself, his lilting Salvadoran accent coloring his English and Spanish and his voice almost cracking at the hardest moments, his anguish inseparable from his riveting storytelling. Listening to him read the story helped me better understand why it was too big to bear alone, as he did for so many years.

My parents and I have only spoken a few times about what happened to those seven weeks. The first occurred immediately after.… The second happened years and years later, when I began writing poetry and started to process all of my emotions about—and the repercussions of—my migration.

So I curse the conditions that forced Zamora and his family from El Salvador, but I’m grateful he wrote about the experience, documented his journey. Similarly, I curse the conditions that forced my own husband to leave his family in México, but I often live in the fraught place of knowing that my life is better because he did.•

Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Zamora will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Ingrid Rojas Contreras to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom conversation here.