itics, but today's guest tells the story of his own entry into the United States, a journey and a story that put a human face on the issue.

He's Javier Zamora this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Javier Zamora, an award-winning poet whose bestselling memoir "Solito" tells the story of his journey to the United States from his native El Salvador as a nine-year-old little boy.

Javier joins us today from Arizona.

Javier, thank you so much for being with us, and congratulations on "Solito."

- Oh, thank y'all for having me.

- For folks who maybe have not yet read the book, why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

- Well, the book is my story, and it's told from my nine-year-old perspective.

And it begins a few weeks before the day that I leave my country of El Salvador.

And that date was April 6th of 1999.

And no spoilers, I make it, but it ends on June 11th, 1999, when I finally am reunited with my parents.

But along the way, you know, my parents paid somebody to bring me here, a human smuggler or a coyote, and then that person abandons the group of myself and six other individuals.

And over the week of, over 10 weeks, these strangers sort of become my second family.

And it is these individuals that helped me survive and eventually make it.

- It's an incredibly powerful story, and it was selected by our friends at the Rhode Island Center for the Book as the statewide read for reading across Rhode Island this year.

It's not the only accolade and honor that the book has received, that you have received.

What do those sorts of, or what does that kind of recognition mean for you set against the backdrop of your memoir?

- Well, you know, it took me, I wanna say, 20 years for me to even tell this story to myself.

You know, over those 20 years from 1999 to 2019, I felt like my story didn't really matter.

I felt like stories like mine were either erased or silenced from the general public and the zeitgeist of the United States.

And to see people care not only about nine-year-old me, but 19-year-old Chino and 29-year-old Patricia and 12-year-old Carla and Marcelo and all the other individuals that I describe, it means something.

It means that maybe Americans are beginning to have more empathy towards immigrants like myself.

- You know, so you said that for 20 years you weren't sure that your story mattered.

What changed?

What inspired you to actually share the story?

- A lot of therapy.

(Jim and Javier laugh) But no, I think therapy is the reason why I eventually had the courage and the support and the love around me in order to... How I like to describe those years is that every single time that I heard a microaggression or something negative being said about immigrants, it felt like somebody stuck a hot sticker on my skin.

And 20 years after being in this country, I had so many stickers all over my body.

Therapy and my now wife and reiki meditation, I tried all the things.

I even became vegan for a little while.

All those things allowed me to begin to take some of the stickers off, and now I feel lighter.

And it allowed me to enter my nine-year-old body in order to really have empathy and to not feel any sort of shame about what I did because not only journalists, but also at that time, even presidents were saying that what I did should be something shameful.

And so that also didn't help me heal and begin to look at my life in a different light.

- So can you start at the beginning and tell us about the journey north, who you traveled with, how it unfolded, and where you wound up?

Give us some of that detail.

'cause that obviously is a critical beginning of the book.

- Well, for the big context that you must know is that from 1980 to 1992, there was a civil war in my country, and that is the reason why my dad left in 1991, when I was one years old.

In 1995, in the aftermath, my mom also had to flee.

I was only five years old.

And so for four years, I wanted them to return.

The situation in my country hadn't changed.

And so the conversations began to change from, "We're gonna come back to be with you in El Salvador, (speaks in Spanish)," to, "We're gonna send you for you to be with us in San Francisco."

And so they paid the same person that brought my mom over.

Her trip took two weeks.

He had promised the exact same service.

And we're two weeks in, and the group of six plus me were still stuck in Guatemala.

And by that point, my grandpa was still with me.

He accompanied me for the first two weeks of the trip.

And then the two weeks turned into eight more weeks.

And by week three, the coyote, the smuggler that brought my mom over, he had left the group of us.

So that group of six, who in the book I called the six, we had to figure out different routes and meet different people in order to finally make it to the US-Mexico border.

- So the book is a memoir.

How were you able to specify dates of what happened?

I mean, this must have taken a combination of recollection, research.

How did you do that to make- - [Jim] You were nine, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

- Well, all of the above.

You know, for the most traumatic scenes in the book, you know, I describe being in the middle of the Pacific boat for 20 hours.

I describe running away from helicopters in the Sonoran Desert, running out of water, being in a detention cell with border patrol.

All of those things I remember.

You know, my body remembered.

I would have nightmares, what you would call PTSD.

So that seemed very clear to me, and it was almost easy to get out of my system and out of my body.

For the other, like the boring, what I like to call the boring parts, you know, I spent two weeks just watching TV in Guadalajara, two weeks in Guatemala.

For some of these things, I had the privilege of still having my grandpa alive.

He's still with us.

And so I could just pick up a call and ask him, you know, when exactly did we leave El Salvador.

And he was the one who gave me the date, April 6th, 1999.

What did we do in Guatemala?

And he told me what we did.

For the other things, like in Guadalajara, I have Google, and I could, you know...

I knew that we watched TV all the time, so I could Google what the TV calendar was like.

I remember the men, Marcelo, Chele, and Chino, watching Liga MX, so the Mexican Soccer League.

So I could go back and remember and play some of the footage of those soccer games and reconstruct, you know, those two weeks.

So it took all different levels and different research tricks in order to get to the narrative that we have now.

- So Javier, you mentioned the trauma of living this.

You mentioned that therapy has helped you since then.

Talk about the actual writing.

You know, this is not writing fiction when you are going into an imaginary world.

You're writing about what happened that was so traumatic.

What was the actual writing like?

Was that also traumatic?

Was it liberating in some way, a combination, something I haven't mentioned?

- Both again.

(laughs) At the beginning, it was very difficult.

You know, I started writing the book on April 2019 without a therapist.

And for those bouts, you know, I'll be honest, after writing, sometimes I would step out of the desk and be shaking.

I would cry, and then I would self-soothe.

You know, I would drink a lot.

By October of 2019, I met my current therapist.

We've been working together for five years, and with her help, I shifted the point of view to, I was writing it from my third, by then I was 29, my 29-year-old perspective.

And it was her suggestion to write it from the child's perspective.

And with therapy, it became easier to write.

But then you throw the pandemic that begin in March 2020, and in the book, it didn't begin linearly, but then I gave myself the calendar.

So I was writing the book from Manhattan during the pandemic, and I hadn't made it to the desert yet.

And so by August of 2020, when I was about to make the desert in my nine-year-old story, my now wife and I, we traveled from Manhattan all the way to Tucson, thinking that all I needed were one month to complete the book.

And of course, I couldn't complete it in one month because it was re-traumatizing to live and be and exist and even have fun in the same landscape that almost took my life not once, but twice.

And so from that point on, once we finally moved to Tucson, I think the writing got quicker, got faster, but only after I had allowed myself to feel everything and to allow myself to really experience the elements.

You know, Tucson in October is not the same thing as Tucson in May or June.

And so I finished the book, the first draft, I think on June, July of 2021 which is ironic because that is around the same time that I actually crossed the border as well.

- So was there a point in the writing, I mean, you're writing a memoir.

Was there a point in the writing when you began to think this is more than a memoir, as important and powerful as that would be?

This is speaking to larger issues.

It's speaking to the country, America, and actually the world today.

Was there, you know, an epiphany, a moment when you went, "Yeah, this is another reason I'm doing this"?

- Not really.

You know, I was so afraid that nobody was gonna care- - [G. Wayne] Wow.

- And that nobody was gonna read it, even to the point of publication, up until September 6th, 2022, when the book is published.

And my therapist and I did so much work about this anxiety that I had, because my first book, you know, this is my second book.

I have a first book of poems that came out during that presidency.

And I had a terrible time because I felt that nobody cared about what I had to say, and it really messed me up mentally.

And so I think now, I like to say that my therapist and I did too good a job.

(Jim and George laugh) I feel so detached from the good and the bad that has happened with this book.

And a metaphor that she gave me, my therapist, is that publishing a book should feel like walking, ironically or not, a kid to the subway station.

And then you have done so much to raise your kid and to give him all the skills that that kid should have in order to navigate the subway system on his own.

And then you stay in the platform, and they get into the A train, and you don't know where they're gonna get off.

It'll be really difficult for you to really help that child and to really time it so you are wherever they get out.

And so that's how I feel, you know?

And in the writing of it, I don't think I allowed myself to dream, to envision.

I don't think what has happened... You know, Jenna Bush selected this book.

I was on national TV.

I'm on national TV again.

These things I didn't really allow myself to dream about because if I didn't get those things, it would've been very difficult for me because, again, it would've proven to me that nobody cared about stories like mine.

But now, if I allow myself to not be so detached, this gives me hope because now I wish that there was a story like mine when I was nine, 10, 11, 12, in those formative years, that would've allowed me and told me to continue and to not be ashamed of being an immigrant and to not be ashamed of crossing the border and coming into this country the way that I did.

- Yeah, Javier I think I said this to you when you were in Newport, but for me, this is more than a book.

This is literature, and it's a fancy word, but to me, it's because it invites us to see the world through your eyes.

It imbues the reader with tremendous empathy.

And it's powerful.

It's a powerful story.

I'm curious, though, when you look back at it, one of the things that leaps out to me is just how young you were.

Looking to the adults to judge whether or not how they were reacting, it was an indication of whether or not you should be afraid.

You were afraid to use an indoor toilet for a while, right?

Those details are so grounding.

I wonder, though, looking back on it now, were there things that you went through that in retrospect, you realize now were even more dangerous than you realized at the time?

- Absolutely.

I think my PTSD was overly focused on me crossing the desert.

A lot of my flashbacks were about running out of water.

I had almost forgotten, or my brain was too good at making me forget the 20 hours on a boat, you know, in the middle of the Pacific and me being nine, not being able... You know, I didn't know how to swim, and I was afraid of the dark.

And I think I was so afraid, that my brain hadn't really processed that.

And ironically, those were the first words in like the first chapter that I completed as an adult, you know, leaving Guatemala, crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border through the Pacific Ocean and just writing that.

And for those words to be the first that I wrote really upped the antes into what I was doing.

I was like, "Oh, I almost died multiple times."

And as a grownup, as an adult, I think from 1999 until 2019, I hadn't really processed that.

And it is the reason why I like to use this word, and I didn't really consider myself a survivor and acknowledging that people who, not everybody, but I wanna say most immigrants who come into this country the way that I did, most of us are survivors of something similar to what happened to me.

We are survivors of the machine that immigration has become, a traumatic machine.

- Yeah, Javier, you said when we were at Salve for the event with the folks from the Rhode Island Center for the Book that you thought this was the most political thing you'd ever written.

What did you mean by that?

- Well, political in a way that somehow I have tricked Americans into empathizing with a nine-year-old, you know, political in a sense that I feel that it is easier for the average adult to listen to a child instead of an adult, and because they're listening to this adult, maybe, just maybe, they might have a chance at changing their hearts and their political views.

By that, I mean that I hope that Americans can see us as full human beings, and us are immigrants from all over the world.

And so I hope that I have done just a tiny bit of that.

- So in the process of your journey, you created a new family made up of other people making the same journey.

Tell us about Patricia, Chino, and Carla, please.

- My trip began not only with them, but with three other individuals, Marcelo, Chele, and Marta, and all of us were from El Salvador, and all of us were supposed to be with our coyote Don Dago all the way through the US-Mexico border.

Don Dago and Marta leave, and they leave me with Chino, who couldn't have been older than 19, you know, he was a teenager, a mom by the name of Patricia, who's 30, and her 12-year-old daughter Carla.

And it is these three individuals that really protect me, that feed me, that clothe me, bathe me, that provide, you know, comedic relief.

And they are the only three individuals that know exactly what we went through.

And I owe them my life, and I dedicate this book to them because I wouldn't be here talking to you if it weren't for their huge, huge empathy and love that they showed this nine-year-old stranger.

They knew each other.

They were from the same block in Soyapango, outside the capital of El Salvador.

And so they didn't have to help me.

They chose to help me, and I am forever grateful.

- You know, one of the, I think the question that when people knew I was gonna interview you in person, there was one question they wanted to ask, they wanted me to ask you.

And when they knew that you were gonna come on the show, they said, "You've gotta ask him again."

I think you know what the question's gonna be, but people want to know what came of Patricia, her daughter Carla, and Chino.

What can you tell us about them now?

- I don't know.

You know, and I love that if you google, you know, "Solito," the question that comes after that, it's like, "Where is Chino?"

or "What happened to Carla?"

which I love because I was so worried that I wasn't gonna make people care about them, not only about me, but about them, you know, the adults around me.

And whenever people are curious, to me, that shows me that they have empathy and that they care about these people just as much as I care about them.

I haven't been in contact with them since 1999.

You know, they changed their phone number.

They never called again.

I don't know if they're still in the DMV.

You know, they were coming to somewhere in Maryland and Virginia.

I don't know if they stayed in the United States.

I don't know if they're alive.

I don't know many things.

I do know that Carla is only two years older than me, or three years older than me.

And so if there's anybody that might know about the book, it would be her.

But then again, I'm reminded that I myself didn't wanna think about this trip, you know, what happened to me for 20 years.

And I can only afford to remember all these things because I have access to therapy, and my life is different now.

And so I'm very aware if they know about me why they wouldn't come out and speak to me.

But I just hope that they're well, that they're alive, and if they're not alive, that they had a great life because they deserved one.

And if they're watching, I just wanna tell them that I love them and that I'm forever grateful for what they did for me.

- Yeah, you know, you mentioned empathy, and we've had different conversations with different authors, poets, musicians, storytellers, about the power of empathy.

You use empathy.

It exudes from this, from your memoir.

Are you conscious of that as a writer?

It's a little bit more about craft now than about your actual journey, but are you conscious of the power of empathy to move people when you're writing something like this?

- Hopefully.

I think what you're asking is the shift from, you know, my adult narrative voice to a child's voice.

I think I shifted that not only because my therapist told me to, but I knew that the chances at empathy were higher because I know, I've seen this happen, that when somebody considers you a child, they're more likely to listen than when you're an adult because then there's like this weird fake equality that people think is happening.

But then if you shift the dynamics, people will listen, and people are listening and have listened to nine-year-old Javier-cito.

And I don't know, I think that is the only awareness, and I hope that people's hearts are changing, have changed, will continue to change.

And my only aim was to show people that immigrants, whether they came here by plane or by land and immigrants from anywhere in the world, not only Latin America, are just as human as you are, the reader or the viewer.

- How have you found students responding to the book?

And obviously a whole lot of students have read it by now.

What have you heard?

What do they tell you?

What do you know?

- You know, I've had the privilege to travel all over the country and to speak to all types of students.

What moves me the most is that there are so many recent arrivals all over this country, and a lot of 'em are sometimes even younger than I was when I entered the country.

And it's like the cycle hasn't stopped.

You know, there are a lot more Javier-citos than I expected to encounter, and not only as children, but as adults.

You know, the coolest thing that has happened is that I have met not one, not five, but around 14 other Salvadorian nine-year-olds who were crossing the border in 1999.

- Wow.

- The same patch of land.

So I literally wasn't alone while crossing in 1999.

And meeting these students now in 2024, they also weren't alone, but now they know that somebody just like them has done and experienced everything, not everything, but something similar to what they have.

And I hope that that gives them strength, the strength that I didn't have, in order to look in the mirror and to think of themselves as superheroes and as powerful for having done what they just did.

You know, I was nine.

What were a lot of American kids doing when they were nine?

They weren't crossing the border.

They weren't surviving.

And I just want to remind people that these students in 2024 have also survived the unimaginable.

And so let's be kind to them and let's give them love and let's give them patience and empathy.

- Javier Zamora, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

The book is "Solito," and it's a remarkable read.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne.

I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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