Solito
Solito
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Javier Zamora on Solito
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Twenty years of not rememberingZamora had already written a full collection of poems, Unaccompanied, that circled the crossing. It was not enough, and he knew it. The admission that poetry had become a way to avoid the full weight of the nine weeks cost him more than the writing itself.
A lot of things, but mainly the weight of the trauma that I carried for so many years. My book of poems begins to touch on these themes, but I was lying to myself that writing poetry about something so traumatic was enough.
The Harvard fellowship year that should have produced a documentary research project produced something else instead. Zamora had spent months cataloguing New York Times headlines about Central American child migrants and watching other people build careers from those stories, and it broke something open in him.
I was angry that non-immigrant writers, reporters, filmmakers and artists were telling and profiting from our immigration stories.
He abandoned the research project and turned toward his own account. The anger was the starting pistol.
Patricia, Carla, and Chino were his surrogate family for nine weeks and vanished from his life within weeks of arriving in the U.S. He had not heard from them since June 11, 1999. The book is, in part, a twenty-year-overdue letter to three people he was afraid he could not do justice.
I owe my life to Patricia, Carla and ‘Chino.’ I wouldn’t be here without them. And for 20 years, from ages of nine to 29, when I started writing this book, I was doing the thing that survivors do, is that I tried my hardest not to remember my trip.
Before Zamora could write honestly about the crossing, a legal fact had to change. He had spent nearly two decades undocumented in the United States, and the stakes of putting his story on paper were not abstract.
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.
How he wrote it
A therapist’s question and a present-tense voiceHis early drafts were aimed at the wrong reader. Zamora was a Harvard fellow writing for an imagined American audience, and the prose showed it. His therapist Caro, who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, asked him to try a different angle entirely, and that single question redirected the book.
I was imagining an audience or a reader that wasn’t necessarily me. I’m not writing to convince citizens. I’m writing to help save and to teach that 9-year-old that he also deserves love.
Zamora had been carrying shame about the nine-year-old he had been, a shame reinforced by years of immigration coverage that rendered child migrants as passive victims. His therapist pushed him to write from inside that boy’s perspective rather than looking down at him. The moment Zamora actually tried it, something locked into place. He had reread the opening story of Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and wrote most of the boat scene in one extended session.
That became the anchor. I was like, okay, I have this, it’s in the present tense... I found my voice. I am nine years old. I am going to tell it as a nine-year-old kid. [paraphrased from audio]
Memory did not return through deliberate archival effort. It came back through the body. A reiki session with his now-wife Joey produced the first major rush of detail: he immediately asked for a pen and paper and wrote the full jail scene. The day-to-day writing process that followed was built around the same principle.
Dreaming, therapy, Reiki would give me an image, a detail or a sentence or name. I would try to capture it by writing about it. That was one day, one paragraph. A typical day, I would have therapy in the morning, then I would try to write because it would unlock a memory.
In October 2020, Zamora moved to Tucson specifically to encounter the Sonoran Desert on its own terms. He spent more than a month there with a friend who had been a border patrol agent, and the desert he found differed from the one he thought he remembered.
I needed to explore and feel the desert. I learned that there are monsoons in the desert — it floods, then flowers bloom and bushes that look dead come back to life.
That detail, dead-looking things returning to life, runs underneath the book’s emotional logic.
The Salvadoran slang that fills the book, Caliche, the language of his parents and of working-class El Salvador, did not end up there by accident. Zamora had been moving toward this choice since his first poems, and in the memoir it carried an additional charge.
When I write Caliche, when I write our slang, it’s also a subversive act.
The personal thread
What the nine-year-old never receivedZamora’s family read the book before it was published. His parents had sent him across alone in 1999, and what the book asked of them as readers turned out to be very different for each of them.
My dad finished it and cried. My mom hasn’t got past chapter one. And I think that’s very telling, of how they’re dealing with their own experiences.
Living undocumented in the United States for nearly two decades after the crossing was its own sustained ordeal. Zamora has said that surviving that period shaped his identity as a writer more than the crossing itself did.
After surviving that nine-week journey, surviving the United States as an undocumented person was perhaps the main reason why I became a writer.
The book took something from Zamora that his earlier writing had not required: a reckoning with the contempt he had absorbed from political discourse and turned inward. He describes the writing less as excavation than as an act of repair directed at a specific person.
I was teaching myself to not be ashamed of that nine-year-old, to not listen to the politicians and the news, and to really appreciate what that nine-year-old did for me and give him the love that he never received. That is the hardest part about healing, and I am so glad that I did.
What he wants us to sit with
Solito, and what the title earns by the last pageZamora has said that immigration coverage consistently makes one editorial error. When he describes what Solito sets out to correct, he is specific about what gets left out and what the omission costs.
They forget to sprinkle what actually makes us human, which is that when you are surviving, you also have to trick yourself into compartmentalizing. If you look only at the trauma, you are fucked, you freeze, you don’t move. You die.
He wrote the book with a particular reader in mind alongside the general public: immigrants who had not yet spoken about what they carried. The book tour told him the bet had paid off, with U.S.-born children of immigrants giving it to parents who then, for the first time, started talking about their own crossings.
In Solito, I hope that I have included moments of joy, of laughter, different complex moments that also occur during the act of surviving. And I can say that because I lived it and I survived it.
The title, Solito, is Spanish for alone, and it names the legal category Zamora occupied during the crossing: unaccompanied minor. He has said he wants readers to arrive at the last page and feel that word differently than they did on the first.
I want people to question the title at the end. I was literally unaccompanied. I was alone in that I didn’t have a person that I knew, but quickly it stops being a fact and becomes this emotion. But I was never alone. These adults become my family.