As a 9-year-old boy, Javier Zamora traveled over 3,000 miles to be with his parents, who had fled El Salvador to live and work in the United States. Zamora traveled with a group of people who were initially strangers and the various people they paid to help them survive the two-month journey.
Zamora’s memoir about the experience, “Solito,” is the choice for Multnomah County’s ‘Everybody Reads’ program in 2025. We talk to Zamora in front of students at Portland’s McDaniel High School.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you in front of a student audience at Portland’s McDaniel High School. It is an hour with the writer, Javier Zamora.
[Audience applause]
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. Javier’s father fled their war-torn country before Javier turned 2. His mother left when he was 5, so he was raised in the years that followed by his loving extended family, his grandparents and his aunt. Then at the age of 9, it was his turn to take the 3,000 or so mile trip by boat, by bus, by van, and on foot. It took nine weeks of terror, tedium, beauty, camaraderie and luck, but Javier made it to the U.S. For most of that migration, his family had no idea where he was or if he was even alive.
Zamora is now a bestselling author. His debut poetry collection is called “Unaccompanied.” His memoir, which came out in 2022, is called “Solito.” It’s a story of his migration told from the perspective of his 9-year-old self. And it is this year’s “Everybody Reads” selection for the Multnomah County Library. We have students here from McDaniel and Centennial high schools. They’ve read the book, and we’re gonna include a bunch of their questions today as we go.
Javier Zamora, it is a real pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.
Javier Zamora: Thank you. It’s an honor being here.
Miller: I want to start with a little bit of historical context … context that I’m not sure how much your 9-year-old self knew, but it’s really important to understand everything that follows. Your parents – first your father and then your mom, as I mentioned – left the country to come to the U.S., largely because of what the U.S. had done, spending a billion dollars in military aid in just one decade, in the 1980s, fighting what they called leftist insurgents. What effect did that war have on the country?
Zamora: I was born in 1990 and I had no idea, like you mentioned, that we had gone through a 12-year civil war that began in 1979 and 1980. The toll that it had on the population of just 5 million people was that, at the end of the war, one of every five Salvadorans had fled, most of them to the United States, others to Spain, Australia, even Sweden.
My family, my dad specifically, was one of those. He was left leaning, he’s the last of 17, so as you can imagine, half of the family was on the right wing and half of his family was on the left. And because of that, he had a brother, my uncle, who was murdered, and my aunt was also murdered because of their ideology.
Miller: How much of this did you know when you were 9?
Zamora: Zero.
Miller: Zero?
Zamora: I had no idea. I just knew that I wasn’t the only kid in my elementary school that didn’t have at least one parent still in El Salvador.
Miller: You say, I think, that when you started first grade, you were the only one both of whose parents weren’t there. But then as the years went on, basically by the time you left, that was more the norm. So every month or year kids would just not show up to school?
Zamora: They would just disappear. And then you wouldn’t see them again because nobody says goodbye, even myself. In the book, the closest thing that came to saying goodbye to my friends was inviting them over one afternoon and giving them my third-rate toys.
My parents, my grandparents and the coyote, this person that was supposed to bring me here, told everybody not to tell anybody because we had this fear that the nuns at school were gonna tell immigration in Guatemala or something like that, which I don’t think was a real thing.
Miller: You were giving those toys away, these beloved toys that you say you really kept private. These were expensive toys that you’d been able to get because your parents were already in the U.S. …
Zamora: And my mom worked at Toys“R”Us.
Miller: Right. Did you think that your friends knew what was happening?
Zamora: No. I have the privilege of going back to El Salvador. I’ve gone back, I think, 10 times since I got a green card in 2018. And just recently I’ve made contact with some of those friends.
And it’s strange how Alejandro – I think I call him Alejandro in the book as well – how he remembers this. He didn’t know that I was leaving, but my departure, because we were best friends, really affected him. And when I immigrated here it was before Facebook and Instagram. There was no way for us to stay in touch. I think he wrote me a letter and I wrote him a letter or two, but then we didn’t talk. But as a 35-year-old man, it surprises me how big of an impact it had on him as a 9-year-old back in 1999.
Miller: It wasn’t just toys that you got from your parents. You also got access to American media: TV shows and movies. What were you watching when you were 7, 8, 9 years old?
Zamora: Well, I liked everything. But regarding American shows, I particularly loved “Full House,” “Saved by the Bell,” “Friends” and “Baywatch.” I shouldn’t be watching “The X-Files,” but I loved “The X-Files” and “La Femme Nikita,” which I also should not have been watching.
These shows really, I thought, showed me the life that my parents had in the United States.
I really thought that my parents lived right next to the “Baywatch” beach that I had no idea was in Malibu. And I thought that they lived in the fancy houses in “Full House” that are million dollar houses. But as a 9-year-old kid, I genuinely thought that was gonna be my life. I don’t get into this in the book, but it wasn’t. That wasn’t the life that, as a 9-year-old kid, I had signed up for or [was] the truth of my life in Marin County, California.
Miller: Some of that has to do with consumerism and geography. But I’m wondering about the lessons, the broader lessons you took from those shows, idealized versions. I mean, even in American culture, those are all, in various ways, not available to the majority of people who are watching them. But they were, I imagine, even more different and distant for you in El Salvador. I’m wondering what messages you took from that American culture?
Zamora: Oh, I’m trying to think back as a 9-year-old. I think that the shows showed me the country that, by definition, had to be the best country, or at least better than me because my parents chose the country over me. So as a 9-year-old, I think I was trying to understand that decision, or trying to almost excuse my parents because, of course, look at the “Baywatch” beach or look at the “Full House” house. That’s better than having stayed in San Luis La Herradura, El Salvador. So that is the psyche of this 9-year-old protagonist, which is weird to say because it’s me. And that’s what you enter into, in the world of “Solito.”
Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: I’m Julia. [Asks a question in Spanish]
Zamora: [Answers in Spanish then translates] So the question is, “Why did I choose to write it from the perspective of a 9-year-old kid?”
In short, I think I needed to learn to know that 9-year-old kid. Because for 20 years living in this country … I started writing the book when I was 29. I immigrated when I was 9. For 20 years, politicians, news outlets pretty much told me that I should be ashamed of that 9-year-old kid. And by embodying or speaking through my 9-year-old self, I think I genuinely learned, for the first time, to love that 9-year-old kid, meaning me.
Miller: Am I right that you didn’t initially plan to write this from the perspective of your 9-year- old self though. You started with your adult awareness of the decades that followed and the decades that preceded it. What changed?
Zamora: I have a book of poems that came out in 2017. I wrote most of those poems before the first Trump presidency. And I was genuinely expecting Hillary to win. And I thought that my poetry was going to help convince Democrats that I mattered. So for most of that initial writing, in hindsight, I think I was trying to convince citizens that immigrants like me are human. And that is draining work.
So when I thought of writing my memoir in 2019 at the height of the “unaccompanied child immigrant crisis” at the border, you heard these news lines all over, 24/7 – that was also draining to receive. There were a lot of books, movies, documentaries being produced by people who weren’t immigrants themselves. So I thought that I could do it better.
But when I began to approach it and tell my story, I realized that I was doing the same thing that I was doing in poetry. I was thinking not of myself, but I was thinking of citizens, people that don’t necessarily look like me. I was still trying to convince them. At the time, I had gotten a fancy fellowship at Harvard. And I was like, “Look at me, I have a green card now. I’m at Harvard. Aren’t I deserving of being treated like a regular citizen?”
Miller: I’m a gigantic American success story?
Zamora: Exactly. And that was also draining, and I was utterly tired. I had just begun to go to my 13th therapist, who I’m still with now. And it was her idea to center, not on the white audience or citizens, but on that 9-year-old kid, for the very first time. It was just an activity I guess therapists suggest to their patients. And she said, “Why don’t you try to put yourself in that 9-year-old kid’s shoes?” And everything shifted from that moment on.
Miller: I should say, in case it’s not obvious, that we’ve invited the students here to ask questions in English or in Spanish, and we’re gonna get questions in response, in whatever language they come in.
I’m wondering, maybe it’s hard to even know the answer to this because that book never happened, the original book … but let’s say you had just persevered with that, how would it have been different, do you think?
Zamora: I don’t think many people would have read it.
Miller: OK, we wouldn’t be talking now?
Zamora: I don’t think it would have sold as well because people have heard that story before and clearly, it’s not getting anywhere. I am not the first immigrant to write a memoir. I think there’s a genuine problem of empathy. Because it is easier to ignore an adult telling you something. I generally think so. And people have tried to tell it from the premise of “look at me, I’m a success story.” But everybody should be a success story.
The shift here is that it is harder to ignore a child telling you something because then you look like you’re a terrible person. And I didn’t mean it this way, [as though] I tricked everybody on purpose. I did not mean it that way. But I think that little 9-year-old kid, his voice, we all know him. And we all want to listen because he doesn’t have a political “agenda.” He’s just telling you how it was, how it felt and what it still feels like to immigrate to this country.
And all he wanted to do was be with his parents. What kid doesn’t want to sleep in the same bed as his parents. That’s something that was robbed of him and he really yearned for it. I think we’re talking about something very simple, and it’s just love. I think when you tell it from that childhood perspective, it is easier to listen and to receive and to open up your hearts.
Miller: It reminds me of cars with little signs that say, “baby on board.” And the implication is there’s a human or there’s an adult driving, but don’t drive safely because the adult is there. There’s a kid or kids are playing, so slow down in this neighborhood, as opposed to there are humans here whose lives are at stake.
Zamora: It shouldn’t be like that. We should care about everybody, but I generally think that Americans have an obsession with helping children. But the moment that child turns 18, we can see that in legal work and also in the immigration system. If you immigrate here and you’re 17 years, 364-days-old, you can have a path for citizenship. But if you enter here and you’re 18 years and one-second-old, you can’t. You’re an adult. You have graduated from adolescence. You’re no longer a kid. So the government is telling you that we don’t care about you. But it shouldn’t be like that.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: [Asks question in Spanish]
Zamora: [Answers in Spanish then translates] The question was, “What was the hardest memory or scene that I had to remember and describe in the book?”
For me, I only spent less than 72 hours inside of a detention cell in border patrol. And those 72 hours really had a deep, deep impact. Because trauma, how it worked in my brain, I remember being out in the ocean for 20 hours. I remember running from the helicopters in the middle of the desert. I remembered so many things that, to somebody who hasn’t lived it, might have not felt … or it might feel re-traumatizing. But it was like, I felt them and whenever I watched the movie, I had PTSD, and I could easily access those vivid memories.
But one that surprised me that took me, like I mentioned, 21 years to really reveal, was those 72 hours inside of the detention cell. I was the only kid, thrown inside there with adults. That doesn’t happen anymore, or it shouldn’t. But those were, I think, the most traumatic hours of my story.
Miller: We got another question from a member of the audience here, which I think [is] good to put in here: “What was the process like of reconstructing memories of your journey being so young at the time?”
Zamora: You know, I kind of … not cheated, because it’s my story. But when I got here, I crossed June 11, 1999. I started school the last week of August of 1999. In California, the school district that I went to, luckily, demanded that recent arrivals meet with a therapist for 10 weeks. So I had 10 sessions when I got here. And the work that I did with that school counselor therapist was that she would ask me questions in Spanish, and she would just have me draw. And I drew.
My most cherished possession is that book that we made together. It was literally the first book that I ever wrote. And in it, I captured those 20 hours on the boat. I captured running away from the helicopter. I drew myself inside of the detention cell. I drew a decaying coyote, the animal body, in the desert. And I think what all of those things did is that it cemented or made my memories almost into a painting that I could just open, relive and rewatch.
Miller: You could …
Zamora: I could.
Miller: But did you?
Zamora: I didn’t. I think the first time that I opened that book since I wrote it was when I was 19. And the second time was when I was 25, and that was it.
Miller: Twice in 15 years?
Zamora: In 15 years. Then when I began to write this book, I was opening it all the time because I wanted to remember, for the very first time. So there was that. That was one aspect of it. Another part was that, at the time when I began to write this book, I was living in Boston and then I moved to New York City. I was trying to describe the desert from 3,000 miles away. That wasn’t doing it. So in 2020, during the pandemic, my (now) wife and I drove cross country.
We moved to Tucson for what we thought was gonna be three months. Because it was only gonna take three months to finish this 400-page book. It took much longer. But we’re still in Tucson. There’s something about reimmersing yourself in the landscape. Other people might call that exposure therapy. So I had to expose my body to the landscape that hurt it, in order to heal. And being there, dreaming, sleeping, having fun, drinking, on that landscape really untapped even more memories for myself.
Miller: You said some people call it exposure therapy. Does that phrase work for you? Does it make sense for you?
Zamora: It makes sense now. It didn’t make sense before. The whole industry of healing and mental health, I think, has really flattened a lot of these very important ideas or words that actually do work. I’ve struggled with trauma. I always try to avoid therapists and avoid any sort of “healing therapies” or whatever methods. But eventually, I tried them and they do work for a reason, if you’re open to them.
Miller: Let’s take another question from a member of our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Hi, my name is Dulce. If you had a 9-year-old Javier in front of you right now crossing the Mexico and U.S. border, alone, in search of his family, what advice would you give him?
Zamora: Oh my God. What would I tell a 9-year-old Javier, trying to cross the border right now. I don’t know, you know. Um, good luck. And that sounds funny, because it is. What do you tell somebody? There’s nothing to. I just hope that you make it and I hope that you survive. And I hope that you remember what it feels to be a child. And I hope that you can almost freeze this because there’s always a before and after in any sort of trauma. In a lot of ways, my childhood ended when I began this trip. There was Javiercito before and then there’s the Javiercito, the kid who came here. And they were completely different. So I would desperately tell that kid to rescue as much of that childhood innocence as they can.
Miller: Your answer there does remind me of the very first page of the book and the way you describe the way your family told you about the immense migration ahead of you. They called it a trip. I’m not sure that it was minimizing language exactly, but it did not capture anywhere close to what lay ahead for you. Do you wish they had described it differently?
Zamora: Well, they didn’t know. My parents did not sign up for this.
Miller: Because your mom’s trip was with the same coyote [but] very different from what yours ended up being?
Zamora: It was completely different. She made it here in less than 14 days. That’s the exact same thing that he had promised them. And he charged them more money. We were 14 days in and we were still in Guatemala. And already, I guess the adults, I don’t know … To me, I was exploring a brand-new place. I was in a new country. Everything was great. We were eating different types of food, seeing different types of people, hearing different accents for the very first time. It was exciting.
Like you said, I don’t think they were minimizing the trip because the idea that had been sold to them was exactly that. You’re gonna see your kids in less than two weeks. Everything’s gonna be OK. I’m gonna be with him. I’m gonna be holding his hand. And I’m gonna shake your hand when I hand him over to you.
Miller: This is what the man they were paying to take care of you said to them, promised … and then he left?
Zamora: And then he left.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: [Introduction in Spanish] I was just wondering, how do you find community? Because I feel like sometimes being in the U.S., outside of Latin America, can be kind of hard to find that community, especially when you’re coming to a new country. How did you find that community? How do you connect with people and other Latinos, especially other Salvadorians?
Zamora: Thank you for that question. You know, it was difficult. I came to this country in 1999, probably before a lot of you were born. And it didn’t seem that anybody was talking about immigrants at the time. So to me, I felt like I was invisible. And then I had the fortune or misfortune of growing up in a 95% immigrant community called “The Canal,” in San Rafael, California. The interesting part of that was that it was a predominantly Mexican community. And so, as a Salvadoran, which happens a lot, if I would have grown up in Florida, it would have been Cubans. If I would have grown up in New York City, it would have been Dominicans or Puerto Ricans.
What happens is that, as a Central American, you end up not only trying to assimilate to the American white culture, but as an immigrant, you’re also assimilating into the predominant immigrant community which, in my community, was Mexican. So it was very difficult to be Salvadoran, to speak the way that we speak, to use “voseo,” to use the “Caliche” [terms for elements of Salvadoran Spanish dialect]. So that, I struggled with. I even have a lot of aunts who grew up in L.A. [and] immigrated here in their late twenties, who, to this day, have completely forgotten their voseo. When they speak, they sound Mexican because they had to adapt. It’s like a survival tactic, a survival method.
Miller: And this is a way of addressing people?
Zamora: Yeah, we don’t do voseo, which we use in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Argentina. For me, it’s gonna be a long answer, but there’s also assimilation that gets thrown in there. I was just trying to survive. I was just trying to fit in. I didn’t want people asking where I was born, where I was from, if I had papers, if I was a citizen. I wanted to avoid all of those questions.
And it took getting to college for me to finally find other Salvadorans and to find there was a student group called MEChA. When you go to college, you should look for them. Then there was, at that time, a student group called USEU. It was predominantly Salvadorans. Now there’s something called CAFE, Central Americans [For Empowerment] student group.
That’s what’s sad, because usually it takes leaving your community to find community in this country. And it takes graduating from high school to begin to learn the history, the books, the people and the culture to be taught to you. So it seems like you’re way behind. So to anybody out there, just hold on because there are a lot of pockets of our culture everywhere in this country and the world. So you just keep going.
Miller: There’s another question. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: [Asks question in Spanish]
Zamora: [Answers question in Spanish then translates] “How does a 9-year-old cope with the departure of a parent?”
Wow. I didn’t. In a lot of ways, I didn’t. It really impacts you. There’s another book that I use as an epigraph. It’s called “The Body Keeps the Score.” And in “The Body Keeps the Score,” there’s this test that I always forget the name of. But it asked 10 questions. And if you answer “yes” to four of those questions, you have a high childhood trauma number. I answered yes to eight-and-a-half of those. And one of the first questions is, “Did you grow up without one parent?” That’s a yes. “Did you grow up without both parents?” That’s another yes. So I’m already halfway there.
I read that book when I was 29. It was eye opening because it made me accept that, oh my God, I did have [trauma], even before immigrating. I always thought that the trauma was when I, my first steps into Guatemala, but it began before and that’s something that I didn’t understand. I forgot your second question.
Audience Member: [Asks question in Spanish]
Zamora: [Answers question in Spanish]
Miller: Can you please give that in English too? It’s a beautiful answer all about the discovery of food.
Zamora: “What was my favorite part of immigrating?”
I’ll answer it really fast. I think it was food because when you’re trying to immigrate, it’s very boring. But it’s also very sad. And if you give in to that sadness, you don’t make it. Your brain has to trick yourself in order to keep on going to create that momentum. And for me especially, it was exploring different food.
I had my first tacos in Mazatlan. If you ask people allegedly, they [say that] Mazatlan has some of the best tacos ever. And I can say yes, they do. And I had my first flour quesadilla. In El Salvador we don’t have quesadillas. Our quesadillas are bread. And to this day, it’s my comfort food because I love the taste of Northern quesadillas from Sonora.
Miller: There’s another question from our audience. Go ahead.
Audience Member: My name is Rosita. What’s something that reminds you of El Salvador? Like a touch, a sight, a feeling?
Zamora: Great question. When it begins to rain. It rains here a lot. But imagine when it hasn’t rained in a while, and the soil is so dry, and those first drops, and then you begin to … I don’t even know how to describe that smell. It’s very unique. And for me, that is my country. That is a smell attached to my childhood. We don’t have glass windows in El Salvador. So when it rains, everything just rushes in and it’s almost like that rain, you’re dry, but you’re wet. Your spirit is wet in a lot of ways. So that’s the feeling that I yearn for.
And I think that I love living in Tucson because Tucson is the only place in the United States that I have lived where it rains like it does in El Salvador. There, it’s very dry and you see a distant cloud. Then in two minutes it’s pouring, and it floods. It’s also the flooding of streets that reminds me of my childhood. Because growing up, when it rained, it rained really hard and there was no drainage in our small town. It almost felt like our house became an island. And it did because the water would sometimes come into our kitchen. And it came into our first steps because it was a little elevated but not that elevated. So both of those – rain and flooding – is my country.
Miller: You’ve written that you were, in El Salvador, the valedictorian each year, the top student in your class each year. And one of the duties or responsibilities was that you had to memorize and recite poems in front of your classmates or your school. What impact did that have on you, in terms of baking in words and language?
Zamora: I recently went to Colombia. Yeah, I’m gonna get to the end.
Miller: I’m with you.
Zamora: And in Colombia, their $50 money has a writer on their money. It’s Gabriel García Márquez: Gabo. And Gabo is valued in our household. My parents love García Márquez. The Colombian people apparently seem to value their writers because they even have them on their money. In my country, in the ‘90s, it seemed to me that we also valued our writers in El Salvador, to the point that alongside the National anthem, there was always a place for poetry. And as a valedictorian, that was my duty. So outside of the literal memorization and speaking in front of an audience, I think what that did to me [was to] tell me that being a writer was cool, that being a writer was valued.
I mentioned Colombia because if I were to have grown up in Colombia, just holding a $50 bill that has a writer on it means everything. Colombia, to this day, is one of the biggest consumers of books. I found a black market for books. People read so much that there’s a black market. The people just get a photocopier, and they sell them for cheaper. People are yearning to still read and that just fills my heart.
Miller: That’s another question from our audience. What’s your name?
Audience Member: My name is Isaac. And my question is, while you were writing “Solito,” is there something new you learned about yourself or your journey?
Zamora: Great question. Outside of the question, why am I in this country? You know, how does a Salvadoran kid make it to the United States? That question is why I think I became a history major in college. I could answer that with facts. But another question that I had is, why did I survive? How come I’m not part of these thousands of people that die every year in the desert? That could have been me. And that question has really eaten away at me. So the closest thing, while writing this book … I’m not a religious person. I’m spiritual. To answer the
“why” that I survive, to me, it’s my ancestors.
And in the process of writing this book, I remember the myth of El Cadejo, which is an indigenous myth for the people of Cuzcatlan, which is El Salvador, from the Nahua-Pipil people. The myth goes along like this. Everybody gets a little dog-like figure that protects them and takes them home. You can’t see it, but you can sometimes hear it. It’s a very high-pitched whistle. And if it’s far away, that means that it’s close. If it sounds close, that means it’s far. And for me, that myth, that dog-like figure became almost a substitute for my ancestors.
I genuinely think that it was my aunt and uncle, who were murdered during the war, and my great-great grandma. I got to meet her and was the first person that found her dead. I used to take her coffee every 6 p.m. so I was the first person that found her dead. My great-great grandma. So I think it was those three, at least, who helped me survive.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: I’m Julian and my question is, was your journey worth your destiny? All the accomplishments you’ve made till now, would you do it again?
Zamora: Great question. Yes. I wouldn’t have answered yes until 2022. So for 21 years of 23 years of my life in the United States, that would have been a no, because I didn’t see a point to it. Why did I have to give up my childhood for access to education or to become a New York Times bestseller? I think that it doesn’t really equate. But then, I’m reminded that had I stayed in El Salvador, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
I’m part of a generation in El Salvador that a lot of people I went to school with had, what seemed like, three options: become an evangelist and live; join the gangs and get killed; or, go to jail. That is my generation. Nobody that I know went to college because we were poor. I’m not from the capital. I’m from the rural area. I don’t come from a family with money. That access is even a larger step or a ladder that I had to climb than it was for me to come here.
So, I’m trying to understand all of those things. But I’m beginning to answer that with yes, and that is a recent thing. Does that make sense?
Miller: I’ve heard you talk in the past about privilege in a couple different contexts. Once was a poetry fellowship you got pretty early on in your career that seems to have been one push towards where you are now. What does the word mean to you? How do you think about privilege?
Zamora: I think we all have it. My wife has taught me so much. She is queer and I have a lot of privileges just being a cis man. I think it is a very useful tool to really understand who you are first, and then how who you are affects the way people perceive you. Or the way that you, in a lot of different ways, have a head start in life. A lot of us immigrants, we don’t have family who has bank accounts, who have investments, who have homes that eventually will get passed down to you. We don’t have that.
We are our own investments. We are our own banks in a lot of ways. So that’s a certain level of privilege. There’s also the privilege of access to education. I know things. I know things that perhaps somebody who was born in this country doesn’t know. And right now, I think there is a backlash to DEI. There is this resentment almost like, “Why do you know things and I don’t.”
Even I, who was born in rural El Salvador, has had the privilege of a better education than somebody who was born here in the rural areas of the United States. And that resentment has put us in the current political place that we are now. But the answer is not to do away with DEI, to do away with education. It’s the contrary. It’s to have education for everybody and for it to be free.
Miller: Let’s see another question from our audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?
Audience Member: My name is Elijah. I was just wondering if you have any favorite authors or favorite pieces of work that people have written, as an author and a writer yourself?
Zamora: Thank you. Great question. I don’t think I would be a writer without Edwidge Danticat. She is a Haitian-American writer who blew up with her first collection of short stories called “Krik? Krak!” And she published it [when], I think, she was 21 or 22. And she won a very big award with her very first book. Her very first short story is a love story being told. And this is something you could only do in fiction. There are lovers writing letters to each other, Haitian lovers. One of them is on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean. And that story unlocked the boat scenes in “Solito,” something that I had lived through but that Edwidge conceived in her fiction. And I’ve read everything that she’s published because she is brilliant. So there’s that.
There’s her and also June Jordan. I began being a poet and June Jordan, another daughter of immigrants, created this class or coursework in colleges called Poetry For the People. And I wouldn’t be a poet without her project, her program. I attended it at UC Berkeley. So both of them, I owe them a lot of things.
Miller: I’m gonna give a quick plug. We talked to Edwidge Danticat at Woodburn High School on a show just like this, something like three or four years ago.
Zamora: That’s cool.
Miller: I wanna go back to your decision to settle in Tucson. What has surprised you most about making a life there?
Zamora: That I can just be a writer.
Miller: What does that mean?
Zamora: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, expensive, gentrified. And then I moved from there to New York City. So, expensive. And in both of these places I had to have at least two jobs to pay for my rent. I don’t think you can be an artist if you’re really worried about getting kicked out of the apartment. In Tucson, when we moved, it was in the middle of the pandemic, so everything was cheaper.
And to this day, rent, I’m not gonna tell you how cheap rent is because then everybody’s gonna move there. But I can just be a writer. And I can think. I think I have the space to think. So think about that. You don’t have to stay in Portland if it’s getting too expensive. If you wanna be a writer, choose the art if you can. And I will continue to do that. If Tucson gets too expensive, I think we’re gonna move to somewhere else.
Miller: Do you still work for a nonprofit called Savavision?
Zamora: I volunteer. Salvavision was started by somebody like me, a Salvadorena, who immigrated when she was 18 years old, in 1980. She almost died in the same place where I almost died on my second attempt. And she had to be rescued. In 1980, she made national news. But instead of leaving Tucson, she’s stayed in Tucson since 1980 and she became a social worker. Now, she is one of a few heads of immigrant organizations who was also an immigrant herself. She’s one of the few who is a woman, so this is a woman-led immigrant organization called Salvavision. And if you have anything, any money lying around, they would desperately need it.
Miller: Have you found that you’ve become a kind of magnet for migrant stories, from wherever in the world, since you’ve started writing, first your poetry book and now your memoir?
Zamora: Yes and no. I don’t think I’m only an immigrant. I am more than just my immigration story. But it is also important that now our stories are being told by those of us who survived them. For a long time in the global North, not only the United States but all over the global North, it has been other people speaking for us. It is completely different when we are live on the radio and the story is coming from our own mouth. And when we have center stage, it does something to others, listening to others, in here. It tells you that our stories are valuable and that our stories matter.
Miller: Javier Zamora, thank you very much.
Zamora: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Javier Zamora, the author of “Solito,” which is chosen as this year’s “Everybody Reads” book from the Multnomah County Library.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
