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Zamora writes about his journey in his indelible 2022 memoir Solito, a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna book club pick, and one of the most powerful stories we’ve read about the migrant experience. For anyone who thinks they understand something of the ongoing tragedy at our southern border, Solito will assure them otherwise. News stories and TV images peddle clichés of either heroism or heartbreak; more often than not, the truth lies somewhere in between. In Solito, Zamora writes from the perspective of his nine-year-old self. With the trusting optimism of a child, he leaves home expecting a “vacation” that will last just a couple of weeks. In reality, it is a harrowing two-month, three-thousand-mile trek featuring smugglers, gun-toting soldiers, and a series of strangers in and out of whose care Zamora helplessly passes after Don Dago abandons him. By the time he’s made his way through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert, he’s left his childhood innocence far behind. Almost twenty years later, Zamora turned to poetry as a way to begin processing his experience. In his acclaimed, award-winning collection Unaccompanied, he explores themes he will develop in his memoir in rich, vivid language characteristic of Latin America’s best literature. Both his poetry and prose are lyrically beautiful yet specific in ways that remind us—more than any newspaper or magazine article can—that there’s not one border crisis, but thousands. Each migrant is unique, as is each journey. In the ceaseless noise about immigration, it can be easy to forget that. “We need to stop treating immigrants as a story [and start treating them] as human beings,” Zamora has said. “Until people in power—and I’m not only talking about politicians but also people in publishing, in journalism, in media—stop looking at immigration as an opportunity for clicks and advertising, and look at this as a truly humanitarian crisis, then shit won’t change.”
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