Poet Javier Zamora on immigrants who roll their dice at the American Dream

Javier Zamora, 32, is an award-winning Salvadoran American poet, author and activist. His memoir, “Solito,” chronicling his nine-week journey at the age of 9 to the United States from El Salvador, by boat, bus and foot, to join his parents in California, was released in September. He lives in Tucson with his wife.

When you were 9, you made a nine-week, 3,000-mile journey — without your family — from your home in El Salvador to join your parents in the United States. In “Solito,” you write about the experience and processing it, and you dedicate the book to Chino and also Patricia and Carla. Can you explain who they are and what they meant to you on that journey?

The journey wasn’t supposed to be that long. The journey was supposed to be two weeks at most, and this coyote smuggler, who brought my mom over, was supposed to be with us every step of the way. But the coyote left us. And “us” was me, a 9-year-old kid; Chele, a 33-year-old man; Marcelo, a 28-, 27-year-old man; Patricia, who was probably 29 or 28, with her 12-year-old daughter, Carla; and this young man who couldn’t have been more than 19 named Chino.

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At first, I was supposed to be taken care of by Marcelo — only because my grandpa knew him and had paid him money. Me and Marcelo were from the same town. But he didn’t. He uses me as his little, I don’t know, servant. I go and get his cigarettes or whatever. He was a scary-looking guy. I guess when you’re a kid everybody’s scary. Chino was scary because he had a buzz cut, almost a shaved head and tattoos, and Marcelo had tattoos as well, and at that time tattoos were rare and bad in El Salvador, and so I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust anybody. But then Patricia is the first person who’s nice to me, I guess because she’s a mom, and I room with her and her daughter. And I think after the boat, Chino takes care of me when no one else is; he literally provides warmth.

And Chino carries you on his back in the desert and would not leave you — that’s sort of the very best of humanity, right? Even amidst all the stress and deprivation.

And they didn’t have to. You know, they didn’t have to, which is the thing that, as an adult, really blows my mind.

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I imagine that that is something that shapes you, knowing that people would do that, that people who don’t know you are good enough that they would sacrifice and put themselves at risk for you. Is that something that you have carried with you, or has kind of helped define who you are?

Huh. Wow. I’ve always thought that it was my dad and his leftist upbringing, which is why I gravitated to Che Guevara — because when I read about Che Guevara, it really unlocked something. But I think it’s what you just said: that it was these people, these strangers that could be so kind and showed me that you could care about strangers, which is probably why I gravitated towards that -ism, which is socialism.

I’m having a moment. I hadn’t put it that way because in my head, because since I came here when I was 9 up until I was 29 and sat down to write this book, I avoided thinking about them. It’s not like I didn’t think about them — it’s just that I did not want to, because I knew that just saying “Patricia” or “Carla” would break me. And the only name that I could utter in the writing of my first book, “Unaccompanied,” was “Chino.” In a poem, I say, “Oh, I hadn’t thanked you,” but even when I read that line, I would always choke up. I’ve always wanted to help [others], but always thought that that was because of my dad, not because of these individuals that were very real, but that I actively tried to not think about for years.

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And you’ve said that you hoped that they would see that the book is dedicated to them. But they haven’t yet, as far as you know?

Do you think they will?

This is telling to how I process things: I just don’t think about them. That has been my superpower as a little kid; that’s when I learned to just dissociate, like, I’m not going to go there. But I’ve let my mind wander, especially before the book came out. The scenario that I think about is that they’re at Target, they’re at Walmart, or they’re just walking in the streets and they happen to see this book, and they see a name, “Javier.” They’re like, “Oh, I know Javier.” And they just open the book and see that it’s dedicated to them. That that kid that they helped created something and is thanking them.

What do you hope people reading this who don’t know trauma like what you went through as a 9-year old crossing the desert — you couldn’t even tie your shoes and yet were setting out on this epic journey — what do you want them to come away with?

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Bottom line: that we’re human. That we are — but at the same time that we’re more than our trauma. We all know those pictures of immigrants as they’re trying to cross the border; photographers just take a snapshot of perhaps the worst second of that person’s life. And us, as viewers, that’s how we get to know that stranger. That’s it. We don’t hear anything else.

This book is attempting to expand on that picture. It’s adding one or two more layers. That we — and that’s everybody that’s in the book — are not only our stories of the literal crossing of the Sonoran Desert. I am not only the 20 hours that I was on the boat. I am not the minutes that I was facing down in Oaxaca while guns were pointed at me. I am also what’s in between. And what was in between were these beautiful moments. These moments that perhaps if a stranger were to be looking at us in 1999 as we were eating fish in Acapulco, perhaps they’re like, “Why are they tripping that that fish is really good? I have it once a week. It’s not that good.” But to us, after just being so close to death and being traumatized by guns, that fish was the best fish of our lives. Because it had to be for our momentum to continue to go forward and for us to stay positive. And I think that’s why we survived: Because we had to.

Having said that, this is only nine weeks of my life. I am also not this trauma. I am more than it. And that these people coming across the border are as human as me and you having this conversation, and they deserve everything that has happened to me after the writing of this book of those nine weeks.

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How do you feel when people say you’ve lived the American Dream: You came across on your own, and now here you are a celebrated poet, celebrated author, with degrees and recognition and fellowships from all these prestigious universities?

If I hadn’t seen people run into the desert and never see them ever again, and to this day I don’t know whether they survived, perhaps I would be a believer in the American Dream. It’s a very real thing that happened, but it has become this metaphor that has haunted me. If I am put on this pedestal and if they can’t get it, the dream is not a dream. It is a nightmare. We, meaning us immigrants, are constantly made to be believe that we all have access to this [dream], and on paper, yes, I was born in a rural town and then Harvard paid me to be there and gave me an office and gave me a fat stipend. On paper, you’ll be like, “Oh, wow. That happened in a lifetime. That’s a trip.” Yes, it is a trip in and of itself, and yet I know hundreds of more qualified people that could have also held that position, and for X, Y and Z reasons they don’t get there. And that means that the system is broken, if the system is only supposed to work for the less than 2 percent, or less than 1 percent. If that is the dream, I don’t want any part of it.

Back to Che.

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Yeah, back to Che. But also back to Chino, Patricia and everybody that was with me.

It is difficult because I have survivor’s guilt. But a lot of it, too, is growing up as a child of immigrants or as an immigrant yourself, working your way towards this dream, you are faced at multiple times with being the first in your family or being the first blah, blah, blah. The first Central American, or the first previously undocumented person to get an NEA. It’s like the “firsts” weight you down and rip you apart because you are saddened that you are the first of a lot of these things. Or that you’re one of five Latinos or one of five Black people to get this, or one of five Asian people. That is not a badge of honor but a slap in the face of all the other people in your family and all the other friends that you grew up with, and all the people from X, Y, Z country. You know?

I think that also leads to my wanting to not remember where I came from and not remember Patricia, Chino and everybody I describe in “Solito.” It is the dream that also makes you reject, and, for me, has taken me to a darker, unhealthy mental health journey that has been difficult. Luckily, I’ve gotten out of that because of another person who’s riding the same wave: my therapist. She’s a child immigrant from the [Dominican Republic] herself. And because of my wife, as well. Her grandparents were immigrants, and she also didn’t grow up in the best side of town, the first person of her family to go to college. So this idea of we don’t really talk about regarding the dress of dream. It’s heavy. It’s a heavy dress.

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You talked about the images of the United States, “la usa,” while you were still a kid and your parents were in the U.S. When you got to California, what it was like for you when the reality and the dream collided?

I really expected the United States to be the United States of “Full House,” of “Baywatch,” of “Saved by the Bell,” of “90210,” of “Friends.” I really thought, in my 9-year-old brain, that all these things happen in California and all these people were neighbors, and they were not a fictitious show, but they were documentaries. And when I was going to come here, my parents were going to have a house with a front yard and a backyard with the same — this is how erroneous my dream was — with the same flora and fauna of El Salvador in San Francisco. And I was going to run to the backyard and pick a mango and eat it like I did in El Salvador because, of course, life in this country must be better than life in El Salvador. Because if it wasn’t, it didn’t make sense why my parents left me and why everybody keeps on leaving. It just doesn’t make sense.

But then you get here, and this is another thing that broke my parents’ hearts. After they picked me up from the desert and we make it to San Rafael, California, we’re driving. If you’ve ever been to San Rafael, it’s beautiful; you can see all the houses on the hill. But we’re not going towards the hills, and we’re not going toward the houses. We’re going to less and less trees, more and more concrete, these huge buildings that are apartment complexes. Finally, we make it to this 12-unit apartment complex, double-decker, and we get to a door and my parents open, and they’re fumbling the keys, and I’m like, “Where’s the house?” Like, “What are we doing here?” And my dad and mom start crying because this was their apartment that they didn’t even own, or they didn’t even have for themselves. They shared with two men who rented. It’s a two-bedroom apartment that they rented one bedroom and a couple was sleeping in the living room.

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There’s a lot of talk about the problem at the southern border. Obviously during the Trump administration there was a lot of focus on the policies there, but this has been going on for many administrations, as you well know. What hope do you have for a more humane solution?

Well, yes, thank you for saying that. This has been going on forever, and it’s on both sides of the aisle: Democrats and Republicans are equally at fault of letting the situation get this bad. And also, international policy rarely gets talked about in debates. It’s like you can’t talk about what the United States has done abroad because if you do, you’re automatically considered a socialist or a communist. “Why are you doing that? We’re the great American democracy.” But in reality, it’s the great American empire, and these are the vestiges coming at the footsteps of the empire.

We have survivors at the border, people who have fled and survived something terrible in their homelands. I think that’s what people don’t understand: that people don’t want to do this. Why would you want to leave everything and everyone you know in order to roll your dice at the American Dream? It doesn’t make sense. And maybe if we consider these people as survivors, like we do people who are fleeing a war, like, say, Ukraine, maybe we’d have more empathy for them. And I think it’s an empathy problem. And statistics are not doing it for us. Very shocking images are also not doing it for us. And I just hope that my narrative, my story, is adding some humanity and putting a face to somebody who has survived that. If you don’t know somebody who has gone through X, Y and Z trauma, you’re less likely to care. But now you know Chino. You know Patricia. You know Carla. You know me. Maybe you can care more about this kid, these teenagers, these young adults, these adults, trying to survive and just live.

This interview has been edited and condensed. KK Ottesen is a regular contributor to the magazine. For a longer version, visit wapo.st/magazine.

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