A Review of Solito, A Memoir

Much has been written about the treacherous crossing into the United States from Mexico over the unforgiving Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico and Arizona.

Five years ago, Francisco Cantú drew much criticism from immigration activists after he published The Line Becomes A River, an account of his years as a border patrol agent in the same region.

Eighteen years ago, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote The Devil’s Highway, an account of the May 2001 attempt by a group of men to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona. The  book was a national bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Solito, A Memoir by Javier Zamora (Hogarth, 381 pp., 2022)

Javier Zamora’s new book, Solito, A Memoir, has drawn the kind of attention that Cantú’s and Urrea’s volumes did. (It is already on some best-seller lists.) It is not difficult to understand why. It is a captivating, beautifully written work. But, unlike the other two books, Solito is written by a migrante, someone who walked across the desert—at the age of 9.

Growing up in his grandparents’ home in La Herradura, a Salvadoran fishing village, Zamora dreams of flying over mountains to a land where everything is new, garbage is collected by trucks, water comes out of silver faucets, and it snows the whitest snow.

Zamora’s father and mother, both in their late 20s,  are in Northern California, two of the thousands of Salvadorans who made their way north in the aftermath of the bloody U.S.-funded civil war of the 1980s. His father left when Zamora was still a toddler and he has no memory of him.

 “There was a war and then there were no jobs,” is how his Tía Mali explains his parents’ absence to Tontito, as his grandmother calls him. It’s a word he likes because it sounds “like rain slipping through holes in our roof.”

In 1999—four years after his mother had made the trip to California to join her husband, Zamora begins his own journey north in the care of Don Dago, a coyote. The plan was that it would take them a couple of weeks to travel—with other Don Dago clients–through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, and that he would cross the border near Tijuana, where his parents would pick him up. Instead, he ends up crossing in the Arizona Sonoran Desert. On foot. Three times. And by the time he is at last reunited with his parents, nine weeks have gone by.

Zamora, whose 2017 book of poems, Unaccompanied, garnered widespread praise, had no idea how harrowing his journey will be, nor how long.

Long before Zamora is finally picked up by his parents at an Arizona safe house, Don Dago has disappeared. The child would have been left to fend for himself, except that he hooks up with three fellow travelers: Chino (whom Zamora comes to regard as the older brother he never had), Patricia and her daughter Carla. The coyotes have assigned them fake papers proving they are father, mother, daughter and son. These three are to become Javier’s traveling family, (“our little fake family”) providing assistance, companionship and compassion.

Zamora dedicates the book to that family. “I wouldn’t be here without you,” he writes. He probably wouldn’t, for the book is replete with account after account of how his adopted family helps shepherd him along when his quest seems utterly hopeless.

Solito tells us many stories. Some are humorous:  the Salvadorans’ awkward attempts to speak like Mexicans (“practicing my Mexicanness”) to avoid the Mexican hostility towards Central Americans; learning the meaning of a new English word that sounds like “faak”; and Zamora’s amusing himself by naming trees in the monotonous desert based on their looks: Lonelies. Spikeys. Fuzzies.

Some not so funny, as when Javier forgets and asks a food vender for a pajita, the word used in El Salvador, instead of the Mexican word, popote, leading to some tense moments as the group wonders if the vender will expose them as migrantes. She doesn’t, but that does little to ease Javier’s anxiety and remorse.

Some are moving. A Latino U.S. border patrolman takes pity on the group and, instead of detaining them, drives them back to the border, where he releases them, allowing them to try crossing again a few days later. And there’s the touching scene of 19-year-old Chino carrying an exhausted Zamora on his back during one particularly treacherous desert hike.

The most harrowing passages describe the group’s being held up, at gunpoint, by Mexican soldiers, and the hikes across the unforgiving desert, lost, without water or food, and constantly on the lookout for snakes, la migra, angry ranchers—and angrier bees.

Solito is about family: family left behind, family waiting at the other end of the line, and the family that sustained Zamora along the long journey. That family is led by Patricia, who looks after Javier as she does Carla. Javier reacts with warmth towards Carla but finds himself feeling guilty, wondering if he has somehow betrayed his real mother in California, also named Patricia.

In one of the most poignant passages, Zamora describes the early-morning departure of his “pretend family” for Virginia after they finally make it across the border:

“I think I watched them leave. The room was dark, a lot of people standing up with their backpacks, waiting in line. Patricia kissed my forehead. Chino combed my hair. ‘The van is here,’ they both said. ‘Salú,” Carla waved at me. Then they each hugged me one by one. The door closed, and I closed my eyes and slept. I thought it was a dream.”

For seven of the nine weeks he is on the road, his family does not hear from Zamora, nor of him. During one of their stops, the coyote forces each member of the group to call relatives in La USA to ask for more money. Javier gets excited about being able to talk to his parents but the coyote says no, he doesn’t have to: his parents have already been contacted. This is one of Javier’s lowest hours and he briefly rebels, going against his family’s instructions to always do what the adults tell him to do.

The fear of death is always constant on the journey, as is the fear of being jailed, robbed or killed by men with badges on both sides of the border. Zamora describes his brief time in an Arizona immigration jail as like being in a cage, “a monkey with at least twenty-one other monkeys.”

Yet, there is also humor, even in the direst of moments, offering temporary relief from reality.

“Rest,” a coyote tells Zamora’s group as they stop to rest before crossing the border. “Tomorrow you’ll be gringos.”

This is a fascinating book; readers will find it hard to set aside. Zamora is first and foremost a poet and his talent shines through in practically every page. For instance, in describing the riveting scene of the immigrant party’s cramming into a van for the final trip from their desert pickup point to the safe house, Zamora writes:

                                   We look like a matchbox

                                   Sticks on top of each other.

                                   A human cake.

When the reality that his long saga will soon be over hits Zamora, he becomes concerned that without Chino, Patricia and Carla as witnesses, no one will believe what he went through.

“No one else will understand the bees in the desert,” he thinks. “The flying fish, that fried fish in Acapulco, getting dragged out of the bus….”

Zamora need not worry. Countless news accounts have made us way too familiar with the horrors undocumented immigrants endure in their quest for a new life in this country. This evocative, skillfully crafted narrative is all the witness he needs.