When extraordinary journeys are rendered normal—or even invisible so that abstract feelings like safety or security or greatness can reframe public debate—writers have work to do. Roque Dalton knew this. The revolutionary Salvadoran poet was constantly reframing resistance in the context of love and life, and life in the terms of political upheaval. This led to a peripatetic existence, not unlike the lives of the magonistas, who resisted the reign of Porfirio Díaz. Once, the revolutionary poet was spared death by firing squad in 1959, and he fled to Mexico, where he wrote some of his most famous poems. The best of them dealt in love, like the classic “Poema de Amor,” in which the exiled poet declares his affection (in Katherine Silver’s exquisite translation) for
those farmers who grow corn in foreign jungles
those kings of the crime page
those who nobody ever knows where they’re from
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the eternally undocumented,
the do-it-alls, sell-it-alls, eat-it-alls,
the first to draw their knives,
the saddest sad people in the world,
my compatriots,
my brothers and sisters
The poem has become something of an anthem in El Salvador, and it’s not hard to see why. Rolling between sarcasm and bardic social yawp, it claims everyone who was expelled from the country during the violent buildup to its 12-year civil war, not to mention all the people labeled as thieves and whores, anyone tarnished, anyone who did what they needed to in order to survive, and loves them.
It took years for this work to gain the prominence it deserved in North America, likely because of the author’s politics. During his brief lifetime, Dalton would end up shifting bases to Cuba, even going so far as—legendarily—to have plastic surgery to reenter his country so as to fight for its freedom as a Marxist. He was murdered in 1975, and four years later, the civil war in El Salvador began with a bloodless coup of Carlos Humberto Romero’s government, followed by brutal repression of any anti-coup protesters. Over the next dozen years, the United States (under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan) poured military and financial aid into the hands of the repressive government, which murdered tens of thousands of Salvadoran citizens, largely because the rebels were being funded by the Soviet Union.
Among the policies the Salvadoran government pursued—with U.S. backing—several stand out, especially given where we are in 2024. One was targeted assassinations. Anyone, be they a journalist or a doctor, accused of speaking out against the government could be erased. The other was called “draining the sea,” which grew out of the U.S. strategy during Vietnam of attacking the Vietcong by destroying the metaphorical water in which they swam. This essentially meant ecocidal bombing campaigns of the jungle, and any area in which the guerrillas operated, as well as massacres of civilians. The idea being that with enough lethal encouragement, a population will turn on the resistance being done in its name. This strategy has never been successful, and as A.C. Grayling has written of the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan in World War II, the opposite happens.
Still, when bombs are dropping on their heads, many people flee for safety, and thus revolutions of the future are sown. For example, in the mid-1980s, one of the people who had to leave El Salvador in fear for his life was the father of Javier Zamora. The writer was merely a toddler, and he would soon after lose his mother, too, when she crossed over. Eventually, when he reached the age of nine, they sent for him, and Zamora began a two-month journey by bus, by boat, by minicab, and by foot from La Herradura, El Salvador, across Guatemala into Mexico, and finally—after two unsuccessful crossings—to Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives today, 25 years after his perilous, miraculous crossing.
The reason we know of this journey, among so many others like it, happening all the time, right now, even, as you read this sentence, is twofold. In 2017, Zamora published his debut collection, Unaccompanied, a series of lyrics and odes to the family he left behind, those who crossed with him, and the landscape of the desert, which both sustained and endangered him. It is one of the most powerful and beautiful debut collections in recent American history. Adopting the voice of his mother and father, imagining the history of his grandfather and aunt, the book also captures the long aftermath of his country’s civil war.
And then, in 2022, Zamora published an astonishing memoir, Solito, which re-creates his journey north from the perspective of his nine-year-old self. While many of the family members who animate Unaccompanied appear and then recede as he makes his way, Solito trains its sights on the adopted family with whom young Zamora travels. Whereas migrant journeys are often seen as exploitative and ill-conceived, entirely through the hardships they contain—which are many—Solito shines as a book about love and help. Time and again, in parts of the trip where such things shouldn’t have happened, there is laughter, aid, protection, care, and tenderness. In this way, Zamora has emerged as the greatest living inheritor of Dalton’s revolutionary value: love.
But Zamora is loving in different ways in his two books. Poetry adores silences, acknowledges them, gives them their music, or indeed, as Dalton did in “Poema de Amor,” their so-called names. Meanwhile, prose narrates into what is possible: it does so by imagining a story. There is no way that Zamora, in his early 30s, could have retrieved every conversation, every spongy piece of white bread, every agua fresca that was part of his trip as a nine-year-old. That’s not the point. The book exists to say, Will you imagine how it was for me with me? Will you come on this journey and meet the people who saved me—the people who were not angels but simply on the trip too? And—most radically—it asks the reader if they can imagine loving a stranger, him, the way these fellow travelers did.
In this fashion, Zamora carries Dalton’s legacy forward in the most intimate 21st-century way. You can see that Zamora is up to the task in the opening pages of Unaccompanied. The book doesn’t begin with the poet writing about himself but to his Abuelita Neli, whom we later meet in the first pages of Solito. It is the eve of Obama’s election, but all Zamora can think of is how at sea he has become. “I’ve got nothing left but dreams / where I’m: the parakeet nest on the flor de fuego, / the paper boats we made when streets flooded, / or toys I buried by the foxtail ferns. ‘¿Do you know / the ferns I mean?’”
Here in this first poem is one of Zamora’s key syntactical moves: to begin a sentence with Spanish punctuation and to end it with English, like a memory being swallowed by a language. How heartbreaking it is, too, that even if this poem were written around the time of Obama’s first election, in 2008, that would make the poet 18 years old, and yet here he is grasping at the receding tide of childhood memories, of things he did with the aunt who took care of him after his parents had left for the United States. “Last time you called,” the poem continues, “you said my old friends think that now I’m from some town between this bay and our estero.” In a way, they’re not wrong. The poet is suspended between the life he once had and the life he has begun to live.
Unaccompanied is the opening act of retrieval. It conjures life in El Salvador, as the poet lived it, but it also strobes these portraits and memories with scenes from his flight north. The effect reads like following two stories at once: In one, we see a traumatized adult population trying to get on with life during a civil war. A grandfather who drinks; a father who flees; a mother who decides it’s time she dates; perhaps her husband is never returning. Meanwhile, there is this child racing north, unsure of where he is or whom to trust, the landscape around him as fathomable as the political realities he travels in.
As a poet, Zamora writes with a superior metaphysical engineering of the line. When writing of repeating memories, he retreats into tercets so that what is recalled has the elegance of ceremony. In shards of what can be recalled, his lines break abruptly, as if the reality reel has become unspooled:
Against the herd of legs,
you sprinted back toward me,
I jumped on your shoulders,
and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.
This poem describes an incident that later appears in Solito during Zamora’s second crossing. Before they’re caught, Chino, who has come to look after young Zamora as though he were the brother Chino had lost years earlier, puts Zamora on his shoulders and runs with him. It is an image that is hard to forget: a man putting a child on his shoulders, the way one does at an amusement park when the child is tired, only this time to run to safety.
It is startling to reread Unaccompanied after reading Solito, as here are many of the key incidents of the second book, told in a slightly different register. Zamora remembers keeping his departure a secret, but he does so by imagining in a poem his father’s final morning in El Salvador and how he may have had the same homesickness before leaving that Zamora later did. “I miss our son,” Zamora writes, in his father’s voice. “I miss the faint wick / on his skin.” Later, we hear of this departure in his abuelita’s voice: “When you mist / into tomorrow’s dawns, at the shore / of somewhere, listen to this conch. / Don’t lose me.”
Unaccompanied places these sentiments in the context of the heavy cost exile has rendered on Zamora’s family. His grandfather, who has seen what the government does to people who speak out, drowns his thoughts in drink and tries to control the last daughter who hasn’t left him. Meanwhile, Abuelita Neli hides the letters that her daughter sends home to young Zamora so that he will stop asking her to read them—a devastating detail, since it clearly is an act of double preservation. In another narrative poem, Zamora describes an aunt who was raped and murdered by soldiers and the psychological devastation that wrought on an uncle he never truly met. A man who might be alive today but who is more likely dead.
Some say you still pace some street without the chain around your foot
That kept you home. You went crazy. Only the streets know.
We’re tired of looking at strangers’ left feet
To see if the big toe and the two next to that are missing.
Uncle, your brothers gave your mother the key
To the steel chain tied to your right foot,
The good one. Around her neck, the key waits for you.
What is notable in Unaccompanied is how disassociated Zamora is from himself. When he narrates stories of his family, the tone is sweeping, warm, and deep, as if what is being recalled has been experienced, whereas when he writes of his own memories, or his own journey, the camera eye retreats and it is as if we are watching the experience from above, from outside his body.
I could bore you with the sunset, the way water tasted
after so many days without it,
the trees,
the breed of dogs, but I can’t say
there were forty people
when we found the ranch with the thin white man,
his dogs,
and his shotgun.
Until this 5.a.m. I couldn’t remember
there were only five,
or seven people —
Patient and careful with this fragile record of the journey north, Unaccompanied begins the act of reassembly, not just of the past but of the instrument of past-making. It waits for details to emerge from silence, and it slowly, painstakingly descends back into the poet’s body. This poem, “Let Me Try Again,” appears near the end of the book, after Zamora has told some of the harder-to-tell stories about his family, about his trip, this one ending however with a happier conclusion, in which the border guard who arrests them, inexplicably, lets them go.
This act of kindness is one of the apertures through which Solito is tugged, not so much the generosity of guards everywhere but the capacity of people trapped in an inhumane system to do more than think of themselves. And that flinging oneself into the unknown can be—amid terror and danger—an adventure. If Unaccompanied imagines love as an act of retrieval in the face of an ongoing tragedy, Solito conceives it as acts of joy and kindness remembered when a tragedy is sometimes all that people see. They are two sides of the same act of love, indelibly linked.
Zamora is a superb prose writer, certainly one of the best of his generation. From the very beginning pages, Solito grabs onto words and rides them all the way to shore. Words like trip and nicknames, La USA and your parents. Young “¡Javiercito!,” as he is known to Abuelita Neli, is his class valedictorian, and his parents have finally decided that now is the time to send for him to cross over. Within two pages, the memoir has acquired the tiny mythic quality of childhood, in which the world is vast but what is known is small and most of everything else has to be intuited.
The entirety of the book takes place during his crossing, from the day Zamora leaves to the day he arrives. It is an astonishing chronicle made up of expert portraiture, a surprisingly detailed geographic mapping, moments of adolescent self-consciousness, and a journey toward intimacy with chosen family along the way. As the book describes, Zamora’s grandfather paid a man to watch out for his grandson. From the beginning, however, this paid guide is aloof and cruel and ultimately betrays Zamora and the others they are traveling with—although we later find out that he is the one who, upon his own arrival in Los Angeles, calls Zamora’s parents after their boy has been traveling for seven weeks (and not heard from) to tell them their son will probably make it.
How in the world do children survive this trip? In Zamora’s case, the early part of his voyage north he traveled alongside his grandfather. One of the saddest moments in Solito is when he and his grandfather part. Getting inside a bus in Guatemala, Zamora recalls thinking, “He’s taught me so much. About the sky. About my family. About maps. I can almost tie my shoes correctly. I can poop and flush by myself now, I’m less scared. He’s been on the other side of the door every single day. Everyone else is already inside the bus except for Don Dago, who waits for us, one foot on the ground, one foot on the bottom step.”
Don Dago is the first of many coyotes who take Zamora in a group north. Everyone gets sick, and the biggest man on the boat nearly loses his mind. At each stage of the ordeal, young Zamora’s group disassembles and recombines so as not to draw attention to themselves, sometimes gaining a new coyote, in other moments retaining the old one. By and large, the coyotes are kind and, in addition to delivering them to safety, often the people who bring Zamora’s group sustenance, from fresh water to—on one occasion—fresh fried fish.
It’s useful to remember here that this passing takes place in 1999, by no means easy, but before the world of human trafficking was taken over by cartels—and before the U.S. border became so heavily militarized, importing the same guard towers used in occupied Palestine that are made by Elbit Systems, the same drones, the same facial-recognition software. By comparison, the world in which Zamora was traveling was practically analogue. In several locations, the coyote simply points in the direction of “La USA,” and only at the end of the book do Zamora and the people he travels with learn that the border is also patrolled by airplane.
The frame of Solito then is close-up, and it spends most of its time describing the underground railroad of helpers who aid Zamora. In one city, an older woman in an apartment cooks the group two full meals a day, as if the greatest risk of migration was hunger. In another, the men in Zamora’s group go out and get drunk, and so he winds up sharing a room with a woman, Patricia, and her daughter, Carla, thus binding him ever more to them. When later they find themselves in a mixed room, Chino, who kept Zamora warm when their boat is crossing by rubbing his arms, sleeps by the bedside so they are safe, and because they trust him.
What Solito does is refute its title. If you had to list the cast of characters who help Zamora cross the border, it would run to three or four pages. Though it’s true he is traveling without family or his parents, he is brought closer and closer to Patricia and Chino by the fictions they are required to make—that they are a family. What begins as acting, as resistance, sticks, and in the final passages of this book, as they begin the stretch of their journey where they walk, the greatest tension comes from whether they will make it through together. Not alone.
Solito might be a version of what happens, but it does something striking, which Unaccompanied could not. It puts the poet back into his body. At one point, when they’re switching coyotes, young Zamora begins to worry about who is leading them forward, and Chino reassures him with a hug. “Besides the boat, this is the first time I’m in his chest again, and he called me hermanito. I can smell his cologne. His cigarettes. But through all the smells, his smell: dry dirt before it rains. His hug warms me. Makes me feel protected, like it’s Mali, Grandpa, or Mom here with me.”
It would be another few weeks before Zamora made it into their arms, at 9 a.m. on the morning of June 10 in Tucson. There were other close calls before that. The migrants were caught, caged, let go without money back in Mexico, and caught again. The risks were incredibly high. But there were joys and pleasures in that hard time, and Solito retrieves those amid a group of characters who are funny, complex, and deeply alive but today would be called illegals—by either presidential candidate. Were he alive today, Roque Dalton would no doubt write a poem to them, for them—or perhaps he would simply herald this great book, written in his example and spirit, which, like bread, is for everyone, too.•
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.
