Three Things To Remember About Undocumented Immigrants
Posted June 16, 2024.
Est. Reading Time: 6 minutes.
I was separated from my parents when I was three months old. They stayed in the states while I was sent to Mexico to live with my grandmother. Those months, I’ve never could remember.
But my parents do recount this period. And their recollections still add pieces of that vague past; more often now, they are stories blended with old and new feelings. Of the many countless strains we experienced since then, our bonds have always kept their reparative nature.
In Solito, Javier Zamora tells a story about what makes us human. Like our ability to form—and repair— deep attachments with each other. It is a story about a nine-year-old boy who traveled from La Herruda, Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. A story with no guardian angel to answer his prayers. And where his survival was placed in the hands of strangers.
“Expensive things are better than cheaper ones,” learned Javier, long before he left his small town. Simply beginning his journey was costly, and he kept being stripped of much more along the way. Everything became breadcrumbs: just enough water to survive, just enough hugs to remember love.
Yet there was another memorable part to this story: that of a group of strangers, willing to sacrifice everything, even their own lives, in a world wanting to take away every bit of their humanity. It is one of the many narratives that does exist because one survivor was willing to share it, and it can be much more if others are willing to listen. Here are three ways Solito brings light to the lives of undocumented immigrants.
The choices that are made.
Grandpa isn’t here to talk to me before falling asleep, to go out for walks and explore the town, and because of that I feel alone, lonely, solo, solito, solito de verdad.
Javier began his 10-week journey north accompanied by his grandfather. On the 15th day, Abuelo went as far as he could. The people that remained with Javier were still strangers. He was accompanied, yet still alone. “When adults talk, I look at my hands. I hold them together and play with my thumbs. I don’t know what to say. Who to stay close to,” he shared.
Each day of those days Javier was present. Days filled with many plans, decisions, changes…but he was silent. Powerless. “I annoy everyone. So I just stay in the room, try to sleep, look at the map, memorize things,” he shared. Unnoticed when he left his hometown. And to remain unnoticed amongst an already unseen group. Javier learned that something about his presence was wrong. He learned silence was right. It was this complete concealment which always threatened him with another sort of real disappearance.
Yet it was when Abuelo left that Javier began to form The Six: Javier, Chino, Patricia, Carla, Chele, and Marcelo. By the 27th day, he shared, “it feels lonely. Strangers surround us” as some of The Six were surrounded by other migrants heading north. Sometimes his group became The Four or The Three. Fear always loomed for the day it will become just one. And on that final day, he realized, “I don’t want to be separated from my second family… Patricia, Carla, and Chino won’t be near me like this anymore. I want to explore La USA with them, learn and speak English together.”
Amidst everything, it was always the choices of others which nourished Javier and his self-beliefs—out of mere lonely existence. Like in his last moments with Abuelo: “I love my grandpa… I didn’t know I did. I didn’t know he loved me.”
Choices are remembered as much as words: the intention of what is spoken; the smiles, hugs, and attention…when these are absent, a sense of family can feel distant, and when generously given, strangers can draw closer. Just how “Chino could’ve gotten away. But he came back” after being caught the first time. And how Javier didn’t leave Chino before crossing a second time. “We didn’t leave him. He didn’t leave us. We’re a unit again. A family,” shared Javier.
A heart’s reason.
El Salvador
Stupid Salvador, you see our black bags, our empty homes,
our fear to say: the war has never stopped, and you still lie
and say: I’m fine, I’m fine, but if I don’t brush Abuelita’s hair,
wash her pots and pans, I cry. Tonight, how I wish
you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier
to never have to risk our lives.Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied
Love leaves deep marks. Javier revealed many of his own; one of these, carved long ago: “Mom said she was gonna go away for a while, but didn’t tell me when or for how long. I had just turned five.” Four years later, the plans had changed. By the age of nine he knew, “no one who’s left to La USA has ever come back to visit.”
Giving up a loved one was a heavy price. Javier’s separation from his parents was but the first of these sacrifices. “My parents I’ll see soon. But Mali, Abeulita, Lupe, Julia…I won’t see them anytime soon,” he shared. Being robbed of his possessions didn’t pierce his heart, not like being robbed of a lifetime with loved ones. There’s little planning could do for these goodbyes. Like when Abuelo reached his farewell point in Guatemala: “I look at Grandpa…an expression I haven’t seen…Grandpa’s eyes are doing the same, trying to hold his tears inside their corners.”
But love forms many different shapes—even strangers can leave markings and new surfaces. By the end of the journey, Javier also felt the molding of his second family. “I love them. I really love them,” he shared. “A pond, a lake in my eyes. I don’t want to let go. None of us wants to let go. A river.”
Love will reveal many faces, sometimes an abundance of happiness. But sometimes only sadness appears to be left behind. A heart know its reasons for holding onto these bonds before reason can fully understand.
Stability in instability.
Grandpa distracts me with stories. My favorite is the myth of the cadejo. Mom first told me about cadejos when I was four. The myth says God created a light cadejo to protect humans. The devil got jealous and created his own version, a dark one.
What became of Javier’s sense of self? “Bad things” somehow had to be faced. Dawn and betrayal. The Screaming Man. The Centipede. Almost always he felt forced to retreat from the world. “I want to cry but can’t let them see me like this,” he shared. Almost always having to swallow what wanted to come out. Sometimes, he also needed distance from what was inside of him: “I squeeze my fists together. Concentrate on the ground. The pattern of the trees. I can’t cry. Don’t cry.” His inner world, wanting to be free, but also unknown.
There was more to Javier’s story than the rigidness of his two realities. There also existed a blurring of the two. This kind of blurring also happens when belongingness feels unsettled within spurious love or when a disbelieving mind seeks to disconnect from its overburdened body; when things that are meant to work together instead tell lies to each other and behave as opposites.
This isn’t happening. My entire body moves with each heartbeat. It’s hard to breathe. My head feels huge, the sides of my forehead like they’re about to explode. I want to wake up.
That is how his mind’s terrain stretched out like a desert. It became a large enough landscape to make sense of things. Survival had forced him, as a child, to move away from the bad things, towards any place that could deliver hope. To leave behind enough empty space for his inescapable world outside and his confided world within. His oases, sense of safety and taste of relief: Loneliness and Spikeys; Paula the lizard friend; Cadejito the protector. These places, far in between.
Solito offers a glimpse of the threat always present for undocumented immigrants—a break in their realities mixed with blurring and confusion—the danger of being unable to make sense of things and no longer knowing their source of realness, what’s true of oneself and one’s place in the world.
But Solito is not that story. It is a story about the light surrounding this darkness. About expanding on something meaningful for undocumented immigrants. Stories about how their human qualities can counterbalance the disorder creeping upon their lives and relationships.
In the absence of miracles, even when Cadejito failed, humanity was the hope that never perished from beginning to end. It is seen when Javier says, “Patricia, Carla, and I have to be the eyes, the mouth, the shadow, the hunger, the brains of the Three.” Because of The Six, their suffering, their need to survive together, there was synchrony, there was order. The proof of their humanity remains the realist thing. Solito is the living memory that undocumented immigrants, human themselves, are the light in their own journey.