Solito, by Javier Zamora (La Herradura, El Salvador, 1990), is a moving and exciting testimony about the author’s journey when as a child he left his country to arrive in the United States – “La USA” – where years before his family had settled. parents. It was five thousand kilometers of a journey full of difficulties with a group of unknown people.
There are life experiences that in themselves have great power, but that consolidate their magnitude when they are well told. The story of the survivors of the Andes – collected in ¡Viven! , by Piers Paul Read, and again in the foreground by the film The Snow Society – or the heartbreaking story The Flap, by journalist Philippe Lançon, who saved his life after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, are examples of unforgettable books. Solito is also called to remain in our memory.
Javier Zamora had already used writing to delve into the impact that migration and the Salvadoran civil war had in his poetry work Unaccompained. What he has done now is rewrite the Journey – that’s what they called it – to reunite with his parents, who had abandoned their country because of the war. Zamora puts himself back into his own skin from when he was a child to tell this story where the heart so often comes out of the mouth – to the protagonist and to the person he reads.
It is not easy to achieve the right tone for a children’s narrator, but in these pages it is more than achieved. This is the voice of a special child. Javier, Chepito, conveys in his story the innocent look of someone who does not know about duplicity or deception, of someone who learns to overcome insecurities by using what he has heard and learned in the family – he has grown up with his grandparents and his aunts -, of who feels shame and shame because he has not yet emerged from his shell. This little being will detail in detail the journey from when he left his hometown with his grandfather – he accompanies him to his first destination, Tecún Umán, in Guatemala – until his arrival alone in Tucson seven weeks later. .
What happens between those two points is an adventure full of suffering, uncertainty and pain. It is the odyssey of a group of migrants guided by the coyote – that is what they call those who are in charge of the procedures to cross the border for people without papers, charging for it – Don Dago – later others will follow -, who will set the guidelines for how Act. In the different phases of the long journey we will have to learn not to seem like what we are, to talk like the locals, to distance ourselves from each other, to ration food, water or hours of sleep (“I’m already an expert. I know what questions are on the exam.
The text originally written in English reflects in the Spanish translation a variety of idioms and expressions typical of El Salvador, Guatemala or Mexico, which highlight the authenticity of what is told. Zamora has also known how to mark the times of the Trip, dating, detailing the routines – the grooming, the meals at the different stops, the conversations -, the waiting periods – hidden until being told to leave -, the different Mexican states through which they pass (Oaxaca, Guerrero, Jalisco, Nayarit, Sinaloa).
Zamora has epically recounted the moments of maximum tension – on the boats, the La Migra raids, in prison, the helicopter night passes, the days in the desert -, the few moments of relaxation – in the nuns’ shelter. – and has captured the violence in the actions and in the expressions that name them, which stab like spears – “Indian”, “rabble”, “migrant” -.
In this journey, Javier ends up being part of a “lie family”, a unit of warmth and support made up of a young woman named Patricia, like his real mother, and her daughter Carla, and a young man they call Chino, who will act as father. The bonds they establish between them reveal the strength of humanity in extreme situations.
This text arises from a therapy process that the author began twenty years after that experience of which he had barely spoken. He currently lives in Arizona and is a volunteer for the Salvavisión association. Alone, it constitutes first-hand material to understand the tragedy of migration in our days. We knew stories like this through news or reports, but no one had told it to us like this.
Javier Zamora
Usual
Pure translation. by José García Escobar, in cat. by Marta Marfany
Random House/Periscope Editions
424 /530 pages 23.90 euros
