Solito

by Javier Zamora ★★★★☆

Solito is the memoir of Javier Zamora, who immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in 1999 when he was just 9 years old. Both of Javier's parents had left El Salvador previously -- his father in 1991 fled from the El Salvadoran Civil War, and his mother left a few years later. Early in the memoir, Javier says "In first grade, I was the only one who didn't have both parents with me... Now, most of my friends don't have their dad or mom here either. A few lucky friends have left to be with their parents in La USA. Most left inside giant planes." His parents' hope was to reunite with him through proper channels, but when that failed, they worked with a coyote to orchestrate his journey over the border.

The memoir opens in El Salvador in March 1999, with a young Javier living what appears to be a perfectly happy life. He's excelling at school, placing first in his class, and while he misses his parents, he has a peaceful life living with his grandparents and his aunt Mali. He knows that one day soon he'll "go on a trip" and be reunited with his parents, but he doesn't know when. Eventually the time arrives, and Javier leaves with a coyote named Don Dago who also helped his mother successfully cross the US-Mexico border four years prior.

What follows is the detailed account of Javier's trip. It's interesting to wonder how accurate the details and remembered conversations are nearly 25 years after the fact. On the one hand, this was a traumatic experience that is almost certainly cemented in his memory. Zamora refers several times in the afterword to the "trauma" and how "weekly therapy sessions helped me tap into the well where I kept this story hidden". On the other hand, he was only 9 years old at the time, and so I assume his memory must be hazy on some of the minutiae of the story. I'm sure the significant events are emblazoned forever in his memory, but it was surprising to me that one so young could remember as many details as he's managed to put on the page.

I mention that, in part, because the significant events in the story are fairly spread out. There are short bursts of action, followed by a lot of waiting, and those periods of waiting are filled with the mundane. There is a lot of Spanish in this también. Why'd I use "también" instead of "also"? Because Zamora uses it incessantly -- 97 times, to be exact, in a book that clocks in at under 400 pages. If you're not a fluent Spanish speaker, I'd recommend reading this on Kindle where you can use the built-in "translate" feature to get the fullest experience of the book. In some cases it's a singular Spanish word tacked on an English sentence (like también), but in most cases there are full sentences (and sometimes paragraphs) of Spanish that translating will help enrich the experience of reading the memoir.

There are some sweet moments in the memoir. Javier's farewell with his grandpa, a man who was somewhat terrifying to Javier and who he never grew especially close to, is one of the more touching moments in the book. And there are some selfless acts by other migrants he travels with that are both heartwarming and heroic también. However, for each of those, it feels like there are just as many that Zamora failed to capture. Perhaps one is meant to find the beauty in the small things -- a fellow migrant keeping watch while Javier uses the bathroom, something Javier was afraid to do -- but those moments are more limited than I would have expected. Stated another way, the story comes across almost with a bit of detachment. Perhaps this is due to the associated trauma and the difficulty Zamora felt plumbing the depths of his memory to extract these details. But I came into the read expecting to develop a deeper emotional attachment to those in the memoir, and for some reason that connection was missing more often than it was there for me.

So, is it good? It is...but I think my expectations were too inflated coming into this one. Amazon made Solito its #2 book of 2022, and so I was expecting something magical. And while the first-person account of Javier's journey to "La USA" is interesting, it was lacking that deeper emotional connection that would make it a full five stars for me. I found it interesting as well to come across a good number of plot similarities with American Dirt, a novel that was angrily panned by some critics as culturally appropriating and inaccurate. While I understand American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins got some of the details wrong, reading Zamora's first-person account also showed me that Cummins got a lot right. Setting everything else aside (the controversy, the challenge of comparing fiction with non-fiction, etc.), American Dirt was a more compelling read about the migrant experience for me.

In summary: worth a read, know your Spanish (or read it on Kindle and use the "translate" feature), and if you only have time for one book about fleeing to America from Mexico or Central America, choose American Dirt instead.