At only nine years old, Javier Zamora (La Herradura, El Salvador, 1990) was what is called a mena, an unaccompanied minor who crossed the border – several borders – from El Salvador to the United States with a coyote, a guide paid by his family and a motley group who called themselves The Six. They were told the trip would take two weeks. There were nine. In ‘Solito’ (Random House / Periscopi), the narration that the adult Zamora makes of that journey full of dangers, the reader accompanies that child, whom they call Chepito, feeling a certain anguish for his innocence and at the same time being grateful that keep it.
The author, in many ways a “model immigrant” (a figure he is trying to get rid of), an excellent student who studied at three of the most prestigious universities in the world – UC Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard – without yet having papers accrediting him. As an American citizen, he wrote this memory of his trip as part of his healing process after hitting rock bottom. The conversation takes place via Zoom, a few days before Zamora visits Barcelona, ??in the Salvadoran, agringado and mestizo Spanish that he is trying to preserve.
What is your relationship with your native language?
As an immigrant to this country, I went through a time of great assimilation, between the ages of 12 and 16. I lied and told people that I couldn’t speak Spanish. When I didn’t have papers, Spanish was just something I spoke inside my house with my parents. A Salvadoran Spanish, different from the one spoken in California, which is very Mexican. They discriminated against us because of how we spoke, because of our voicing. Since then, I began to rescue my Spanish at the age of 17, which is the age at which I began to write poems. Poetry was a tool that made me feel good about being a person born in the United States. That’s where the healing process begins from all the negative terms I’ve heard since I arrived.
Was this book something you were running away from or did you know you had to write it?
I ran from him for 20 years. At the age of 29 there came a point in my life where I realized that all of this was harming me. Literature has helped me but not completely. That’s when I found a therapist, who changed my life.
The book would not exist without its parallel process of therapy.
Absolutely.
To write it he had to remember his entire trip. Trauma, however, often creates gaps in memory, as a preservation mechanism.
What a reader may imagine is that the things most difficult to remember are the most difficult to read, but that was not the case. Trauma is like a HD 4k Surround Sound DVD. I had that DVD in my hand and I hid it in a closet, but when I was watching a movie, for example, and I didn’t know that they were going to talk about an immigrant in the desert, that DVD grabbed hold of its legs and flooded everything into me. That’s post-traumatic stress. I remember, for example, the smell of the dust of the Sonoran Desert, the smell of salt on the boat in the middle of the Pacific. Not everyone experiences trauma the same but for me it was like that. What was difficult to recover and what many people who have not been emigrants do not understand is that on a trip like this there are also boring times, like the two weeks we spent in Guadalajara, it is chapter six of the book. We watched football on television.
How did Chepito’s voice work? It was important not to make him more analytical than a nine-year-old could be.
I worry a lot. I wanted the voice to sound true. The other point is that many people who really know me, which are few, because I don’t trust many people, tell me that I am a child. I did not have a childhood, it has been stolen from me due to immigration. I think I stopped being a child when my mother left El Salvador but also the day my grandfather left me in Guatemala to make the rest of the trip and I was alone. That’s why I have always kept that child, Chepito, nine years old. It’s like my inner voice and now I’ve shown it to strangers in this book. He has been a way to heal. I’m putting out this inner voice that I didn’t like as an adult.
In Spain, the word “mena”, which comes from Unaccompanied Minor, is used by far-right parties to stir up fear of the migrant. You were a Mena.
Wow, I didn’t know. Even the children. It worries me, because if I had a dream for the book it was to not only teach non-immigrants to learn to have empathy, not only with children, but also with adults. A child knows nothing, his brain is still forming. If you start reading a book you realize that in a community where immigrants arrive, crime goes down and the economy goes up. It only decreases in the first years and recovers in the third or fourth year. The facts are there. They go on and on with the same rhetoric because, in my opinion, there is something that Americans feel, something more emotional, that has nothing to do with statistics. How an immigrant makes a white gringo from the Midwest feel. That feeling is a threat, it is something of danger. That has existed in the United States since Ellis Island, since the 1800s.
You were what is called a model immigrant and you wanted to get away from that…
What happened is that in 2016 the Day without the Immigrant occurred. Millions of us, with or without papers, decided not to go to school or work and some took to the streets to protest. My family was afraid and we stayed inside our apartment. That stayed with me. When the so-called Dream Act was passed [an immigration reform bill that granted documentation to those who had immigrated to the United States as children], all you heard was: “oh, I’m an immigrant and now I’m the best in my class, they should give me papers.” That stuck in my mind. Not having papers and having parents who came to the United States because of the war, who did not have the privilege of going to university, I always knew that education was going to help me and could even give me papers. I gave him everything. That’s why my resume says: Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard. It’s funny. I started writing Solito while at Harvard and having papers, two goals I never thought I would achieve. But I felt so empty and depressed. He thought: “I ran the marathon, I reached Everest, I reached everything.” I was screwing up my life. I had not analyzed the trauma that not only emigrating had caused me, but also not having papers, working like a donkey to achieve academic excellence, which also causes trauma. I exploded and it was one of the lowest episodes of my life. About that low [low point] I start writing Solito.
He has lived almost his entire life without documentation.
I didn’t have them until I was 21, I got a status that they usually give to Nepalese, Haitians and Salvadorans.
What was your experience like at those universities, bastions of privilege?
I am working on my second memoir that analyzes what happens to me from the age of nine to the age of 18. I arrive in the fifth richest county in the United States, Marine County. I lived on the San Rafael canal, we were recently arrived immigrants, only Spanish was spoken. There I see the inequality. I started playing football, soccer. I was good and they gave me scholarships. That’s how I began to understand imposter syndrome, because at age 13 I was given a scholarship to one of the most privileged schools in the United States, Branson. Of the 272 students, there were only three of us Latinos and only two students lived in apartments. All the others lived in large houses, most of them in mansions. That prepared me for everything else. Academics always came easy to me. And since it was easy, I had time to self-soothe my trauma. I started drinking at 12, smoking marijuana at 13. When you don’t have therapy, you learn to self-soothe. At 28, 29, I reached my lowest point. All the traumas, small and large, reached a point where, if I didn’t resolve them, I could end up not being here.
And everything crystallized in Solito.
If I hadn’t written that book, it would have hurt me more and more and more.
I think I imagined that I was going to arrive at a house like the one in the American soap operas.
Like Full House. My first big disappointment was my first day in the United States. One has idealized this country so much that the idea never comes close to reality, reality is always worse. My reality is that my life in El Salvador was land, trees, nature… that I could explore, I could walk throughout my town to the dock without any adults. I arrived in the United States, to a very small apartment. My world became small, it was a big crunch. It was a metaphor for what happened in the 20 years later, I no longer felt free. In the book, the boy puts on an explorer’s hat. But I get there and it’s all: “Don’t tell anyone that you were born in El Salvador,” “don’t tell anyone how you got here,” “don’t tell anyone that you don’t have papers.” I felt trapped and that was the reality of the American dream, the American nightmare.
He had to learn to live with parents he barely knew.
That is the reality that immigrant children have to experience. Here I always tell people: “And you, what were you doing when you were nine years old? Playing with dolls? Being surrounded by the love of your parents?” I also say that to the conservatives of Spain.
Now he lives in Arizona, he is close to the immigration reality of many people.
I have lived in the largest metropolises in this country, in New York, in San Francisco, in Boston and it is somewhat different to see the news in a liberal hub than to come near the border and hear the same news. It is easy to criticize and it is easy to believe journalists and politicians when you do not see what is really happening. Every time I go to the airport I see the lines of people entering the country, because Tucson is a port of entry. Immigration is seen, it cannot be hidden. 20 minutes from where I live there is a large Border Patrol station. I need it to forget. In 2024, many immigrants die at the border 20 minutes from my house and that is what even I, an immigrant, had forgotten for 20 years. The same thing happens to us with what is happening in Gaza right now. Many people have already forgotten and they are killing Palestinians right now as you and I speak, and immigrants are also dying in the Mediterranean and in the Sonoran desert. I don’t want to forget that.
We were very aware of the immigration policy of the United States when Trump governed. In reality, it has not changed substantially under the Biden presidency.
That is what many non-emigrant population does not understand. Obama was the first to cage families and has been the president who has deported the most people. There are more people in cages now than during Trump’s presidency. In centers that are for profit. Don’t get me wrong. Trump is a shitty fact, I am not pro Trump, but we must also criticize the Democrats who do the same. The government, left or right, does not want us here. Being an immigrant in the United States is being a second-class person.
Which writer felt that it gave you permission to write too, that it invited you to tell your story?
Roque Dalton. In 2006 I put in Google: “Salvadoran writers.” And he came out to me. In Latin America all writers have wanted to impress the Spanish, they write in high Spanish, but Roque Dalton was the first in my country who said: we don’t need to impress the Spanish Academy, we have to impress the Salvadoran people. And we have to use our voseo. I am not from a rich family and when I speak the way I speak they look at me as someone who has no education, that is what Roque Dalton changed in me, and that would not have happened to me if I had stayed in my country.
Does Europe make you curious?
This is my first experience there and I think it is something nice. I don’t know if this is going to give me bad press, but it’s nice to go to Catalonia and not to great Spain. In 2024 we need to revisit and give a new idea to the nation state. We have seen that borders do not work. There are other communities that also deserve to exist.