Javier Zamora’s journey from El Salvador to the United States as a nine-year-old boy, recounted in Solito, happened 25 years ago this spring. California Book Club host John Freeman began the gathering by calling Zamora’s memoir an “astonishing act of retrieval.” He asked the author about what happened in the years between publishing his poetry collection, Unaccompanied, and Solito to prepare him to write an “epic” but also “intimate” account of his migration.
Zamora remarked that the book wouldn’t have existed without two things. He said of the first thing, his green card, “I don’t think that I could have been as honest or gone as deep into my trauma if I didn’t have the privilege of not having to look over my back, or for fearing if I write something that I would get deported or put my immigration at risk or my family at risk…. The other thing is that I finally found a therapist that worked for me.” He said that it took 13 tries at therapy over a 20-year period for it to finally work and for his therapist to say something that clicked and allowed him to go inward.
In either their first or second meeting, his therapist, upon learning that Zamora was a writer, asked what it would feel like for him to go back into his nine-year-old body and write from that perspective. “It was her idea that I write this book from that perspective,” Zamora said. He was reminded that he was not writing to convince citizens of his perspective but to “help save and to teach that nine-year-old that he also deserves love.”
Speaking of the fellow migrants with whom he traveled and who helped him on the journey, he continued, “I wouldn’t be here without the tenderness and radical love that these strangers showed a nine-year-old.” It’s this sense of radical love, he concluded, that has motivated him to talk about Palestine since October. “Your everyday individual human being in this world—we need to be reminded of love and of empathy.” In his view, the killing of Palestinians has continued for more than six months because we lack the care that he experienced from his companions. “I think those small acts are what make us human.… And we need to be reminded of more acts like that. And that is the point: I wouldn’t have survived without love.”
Freeman noted that it wasn’t surprising that Zamora was active with regard to Palestine, since El Salvadorans have one of the highest percentages of populations who’ve had to leave their country because of a violent conflict.
Special guest Ingrid Rojas Contreras joined the conversation. She commented that she had been struck by Zamora’s idea of radical love and that throughout the book, there were so many scenes that made it feel as though the people who were crossing with him had become family. “Books sometimes lead us into…that feeling of, everybody can be your family,” she said. She elaborated that borders keep us from the realization of kinship and radical love toward other people.
Contreras asked Zamora to talk about how he’d gone about reconstructing memory and going back to places that were hard to visit. Zamora noted that he had tried everything that people typically recommend in order to address his trauma—from turning vegan to doing yoga and Reiki. But what helped him the most, he said, was coming to understand himself as an Indigenous man. He said that when he couldn’t travel back to his country for 19 years, he thought he was missing the country itself, the people, but he later realized that what he was truly missing was his family—his people, his grandma, his grandpa, his cousin. He noted, too, that he remains disheartened by what’s going on in El Salvador, saying, “We are distancing ourselves from who we truly are.”
Contreras commented that she had also gone through a reclaiming of her Colombian roots, after initially assimilating in the United States. She observed that perhaps the “rupture of place and time” they both experienced made them outsiders to what was going on in their countries, which may have made it easier for them to see what was going on there and write about that in a clear way.
Later in the conversation, Freeman asked whether Zamora had reconnected with the fellow migrants who’d helped him on the journey. Zamora said he hadn’t heard from them since August 1999 and that he doesn’t know if they are in the United States or alive. He said, “When they’re ready, and if they’re still alive, and if they find out about the book, we’ll be reunited. I am hopeful that will happen.”•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Venita Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
