Photo courtesy of Javier ZamoraPoet Javier Zamora took a three-thousand mile journey from El Salvador to the United States as a boy to reunite with his parents.
When Javier Zamora was nine years old, he left his small town in El Salvador and embarked on a three-thousand mile journey north to be with his mother and father in the United States. Traveling with a group of strangers and a “coyote,” Zamora traveled by truck, boat and foot through Guatemala and Mexico to cross the U.S. border.
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Zamora chronicles that treacherous two-month trip in his new memoir, “Solito,” which is already a New York Times bestseller.
“This is the mythic journey of our era, told by a hero not old enough to tie his shoes, an oracle for our troubled times,” wrote Sandra Cisneros, author of “The House on Mango Street,” of Zamora’s riveting book.
Like thousands of young people each year, Zamora left his home to find a safer life with his family in the United States. Nearly 130,000 “unaccompanied minors” – people under the age of 18 who come to the U.S. without a parent or guardian and without a legal immigration status – entered the U.S. federal shelter system in the 2022 fiscal year, an all-time high. Zamora’s parents had left El Salvador and come to the United States years before him because of the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War.
In this excerpt, Zamora recounts walking through the Mexican desert after Mexican soldiers stop their bus at a checkpoint. The soldiers and their big black boots and their long guns terrify young Zamora. After making Zamora’s group lie on the dirt and sending their bus away, the police take their money and leave them on the road.
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