I finished Solito in 2024. It made me think again about a family I’d stayed with in Los Angeles seventeen years earlier, and how little I’d understood about the journey that had brought some of them there.
Javier Zamora’s memoir follows his journey from El Salvador to the United States in 1999. He is nine, leaving the relatives who have raised him to join his parents. The route takes him through Guatemala and Mexico, travelling with people he barely knows. What he expects to take a couple of weeks stretches into roughly two months.
That is the outline. The strength of the book is how closely it stays with the child making that journey.
A child’s view of the journey
Zamora writes from the perspective of his younger self. We share his incomplete understanding of what is happening, his attachment to the people around him and his wish to be with his parents. He has very little control over when he moves, where he goes or who he can trust.
I think that choice makes the book particularly effective. You can recognise danger that Javier cannot fully explain, while understanding why he is thinking about something smaller and more immediate. There is a detail about his difficulty tying his shoelaces that brings his age into focus. A child who still needs help with that is being asked to cope with a journey many adults would struggle to survive.
The physical demands are hard to read about. The cold, thirst and exhaustion build up, with no reliable sense of when it will be over. The uncertainty matters as much as the distance. Being told to wait, or to keep moving, means depending on someone else’s judgement when you have no way of knowing whether it is sound.
Yet Javier’s curiosity survives. He notices the landscape, the plants and the unfamiliar things around him. I liked that the book allows him to remain recognisably a child. He is having to learn frightening things very quickly, but he still has a child’s imagination and need for reassurance. That makes the demands being placed on him harder to accept.
The people he comes to trust
Patricia, her daughter Carla and a young man called Chino become central to Javier’s journey. They begin as strangers and gradually become the people he depends on. Their relationship is the part of Solito I found most affecting.
They are trying to get through the same dangerous situation themselves. Looking after someone else takes effort when your own safety is uncertain. Their care means taking responsibility for a child while coping with their own exhaustion and fear. I found that more convincing than any general statement about people helping each other.
It also complicates the loneliness suggested by the title. He is separated from his family, but the connections he makes along the way are substantial. Zamora gives these people enough attention that you care about what happens to them too. Their growing closeness gives the book much of its warmth, even during its most difficult passages.
Reading it after Los Angeles
In 2007, I spent three months in Los Angeles with friends I’d met through online gaming. I stayed with a family of Mexican heritage. The parents had crossed the border, as had two of their five children. The other three children had been born in the USA.
I knew something of the danger and suffering involved, but I didn’t really appreciate the scale of it at the time. Reading Solito more than fifteen years later gave me a much fuller sense of what such a journey could ask of a person.
I can’t assume their experience matched Zamora’s. They had their own circumstances and their own story. What the book changed was my understanding of how much might sit behind the simple fact that someone had moved to another country. I had spent months with this family while understanding only a small part of what had brought them there.
Why I’d recommend it
Solito asks you to spend time with the journey. Its attention to small observations, waiting and uncertainty means the pace can be slow. For me, that detail is a large part of its value. It makes the length and strain of the experience harder to skim past.
The wish behind the journey is easy to understand. Javier wants to live with his parents. His family wants a better life. Many of us want those same basic things, with very different circumstances determining what we have to risk to reach them.
I came away with a greater appreciation for the ordinary certainty of knowing where I’ll sleep and being able to reach the people close to me. More than anything, the book made me less willing to assume I understand someone’s past from the life I see them living now.
I’d recommend it for the care of its telling. Zamora makes the experience specific enough that you have to pay attention to the people involved. That is what stayed with me after finishing it.
Book details: Solito by Javier Zamora, published by Hogarth. For more on the writing and the people in the book, see Zamora’s conversations with Poured Over and Latino USA.