Solito, A Book Review

This is a repost of a piece originally published by the CFD (Center for Forced Displacement) magazine by Boston University.

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Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora arrived in the US in 1999 as a nine-year old, crossing into Arizona from the Sonoran desert in northwest Mexico. It was a journey he made without his parents – both had emigrated to the US before he turned five. Solito is Zamora’s moving memoir that follows his 3000-mile journey across El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, through dozens of towns and cities, by bus, boat, and on foot to get to ‘La USA’. This book is a tender and shattering portrayal of forced displacement–its conflicting emotions, impossible choices, harrowing journeys and enduring scars.

The book opens in El Salvador and draws us into the daily life of nine-year old Javiercito in his hometown of La Herradura. As we come to know the characters in his life–Javier’s beloved aunt Mali, his Abuelita, his Grandpa, his school friends, his dog, and his parakeet–we also learn that soon, he will leave them behind to embark on a trip that will reunite him with his parents in San Rafael, California. Rates and logistical details are discussed between his grandparents and Don Dago, the coyote who will take him. “I hope they don’t still think I’m too small. I’m not,” reflects Javier. “I can already jump the fence that separates our house from the neighbors’ pretty fast. And it’s made of barbwire.”

Javier’s expectations of America are both innocent and heartbreaking, given what lies ahead. He is excited to eat pepperoni pizza, “like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” watch the new Star Wars movie inside a theater while having popcorn with butter, and make a snowball, “like in the movies.” He wants to see San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge which, his mother has told him, is “the biggest bridge anyone has ever built.”

From the very first chapter, the book asks us to consider the life-threatening conditions that migrants face in their home countries, as well as the legal options and safe migratory routes that are closed off to them by restrictive visa regimes, forcing them to undertake perilous journeys. Zamora mentions ‘the war’—a reference to El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, and we learn about his family’s repeated, failed attempts to attain a US visa. At one point the embassy officer tells them there is “no way any of you are getting a visa.”

One thing this book does incredibly well is to deepen the reader’s understanding of the physical and psychological trauma of the migratory journey, particularly for a child. From a dangerous sixteen-hour boat ride to Oaxaca that leaves Javier with an aching body and the smell of vomit and gasoline stuck inside his nose, to multiple risky border crossings, to getting dragged off a bus and robbed by Mexican soldiers with guns­­— the journey diverges quickly from the trip he had imagined. Violence is a recurring theme throughout the memoir, and the most dangerous part takes place in the Sonoran desert, where the journey stretches into days on foot, in temperatures crossing 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the longest Javier has ever walked. The group runs out of water and food, and many get left behind in the desert, with an unknown fate that haunts little Javier. The US border patrol, with their sophisticated surveillance—“La Migra have night binoculars. Helicopters. Infrared cameras,” the coyotes warn the group—are a constant threat to the group. Stricter border policing creates a demand for dangerous smuggling, such as the one that facilitated Javier’s journey.

Zamora’s memoir humanizes the migrant journey by revealing not only its hardships, but also the beautiful encounters along the way. It is brimming with vivid recollections of experiences and natural surroundings—eating Mexican tacos in Guadalajara, belly-laughing with a woman who reminds Javier of his mother, how the color of water changes with depth in the Pacific, his friendship with Chino, a man in his group who takes on a fatherly role, the cacti and roosters near the border, his first “new country”, Guatemala, and his first time seeing helicopters, lizards, a migrating beehive, a desert sunset.

Halfway through the story, Javier’s group—which has been successful at crossing into Arizona— is intercepted, detained and deported to Mexico. The account of US border patrol detaining Zamora is hard to read, and lays bare how officers dehumanize migrants and strip them of their rights, as well as the squalid, unsafe conditions at detention centers. “I’m in a zoo. A cage. I’m a monkey with at least twenty-one other monkeys”, he tells us of the detention cell, where he is the only child. “Everyone wears a long face. No one smiles.”

From here on, the book takes on a distinctly somber tone. Chino tells their group, which has whittled down to four: “We try and try until we make it, doesn’t matter how many times.” On their second attempt, the group is caught by a border patrol officer, who they come to know as Mr. Gonzalez. He handcuffs them, but instead of driving them to a detention center, he drops them off on the Mexican side of the border in his truck. The adults in the group call him “un ángel” and when Javier inquires why Mr. Gonzalez didn’t take them to ‘the cage’, they tell him: “Because he’s one of us.” They try a third time, with another set of coyotes, and this attempt is successful.

That Zamora’s story is that of a nine-year old, and that it took place a quarter century ago, is important to consider. Javier crossed during the Clinton years, when children under sixteen could not legally be detained for longer than forty-eight hours. Today, the US southern border is heavily militarized. Conditions and outcomes for child migrants are much more severe, and border policies are even more inhumane. In a piece for Granta, Zamora recalls a 2019 visit to the Arizona-Sonora border which he had crossed as a child. At the privately-run Eloy Detention Center, he sees migrants wearing jumpsuits in either orange, blue or brown, and being held behindthree types of fences: electric, chain-link and concertina wire. “The chances of me surviving now would have been slim”, Zamora tells The Guardian in an interview.

In Solito’s afterword, we learn that for seven weeks in 1999, no one in Javier’s family knew where he was. ‘My parents became insomniacs’, he writes. ‘Three countries away, Abuelita Neli lit a candle every single night.’ The guilt of Javier’s family at endangering his life bring to mind these lines from Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’:

you have to understand,

no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land.

Zamora’s book stays with the reader, forcing them to consider not only the perilous migrant journey itself, but also the political forces and foreign policies that create displacement. Zamora’s official author bio says his family fled “the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War”—a recognition of the fact that the U.S. financed and trained El Salvador’s military, as well as paramilitary groups that were central to the country’s death squad apparatus, in order to aid its own fight against communism in South America.

Through the eyes of a nine-year old, this book is a searing indictment of the impossible choices migrant families like Javier’s face as they flee for survival, only to be confronted with another war—the xenophobia-fueled war on migrants—with its accompanying violence, militarized surveillance, and counterproductive use of public funds. As experience and migration research has shown over decades, the militarisation of borders is ineffective, and makes migration less, instead of more, orderly. Far from stopping asylum seekers from crossing borders, it makes their journey more dangerous—increasing suffering and death tolls for families like Javier’s—and more dependent on professional smugglers like Don Dago. It also engenders a multi-billion dollar market for military-grade technology, whose prime beneficiaries are private companies.

Solito is a powerful and timely read at a time when U.S. politicians on both ends of the political spectrum rely on fear-mongering for the expansion of militarized border zones that strip human beings of all their rights, for crossing what 9-year old Javier wisely called La Linea, the line.