Solito

Solito is Javier Zamora's 2022 memoir, the canonical contemporary literary memoir of an unaccompanied minor's migration to the United States. Zamora was nine years old in March 1999 when he left his grandfather's house in La Herradura, El Salvador, to reunite with his parents in California. The journey took two months on foot, by boat, and by smuggler-arranged truck across El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. Zamora reconstructs the entire trip in present-tense first-person prose, written from inside the nine-year-old's perspective as it actually was at the time, without the retrospective adult-narrator framing memoirs about traumatic childhood events typically use.

Zamora's structural achievement is the sustained nine-year-old voice across four hundred pages. The boy's perception of the adults he is traveling with (the small group from his village he calls la Familia, his coyote Don Dago, the strangers who cycle through the group as some make it and others do not) is rendered with the kind of patient inside-the-child interiority that contemporary American memoir rarely commits to. The Sonoran Desert chapters in the back half are some of the strongest contemporary prose about the operational realities of the actual unaccompanied-minor migration. The novel's structural argument (that the contemporary policy debate about migration is being conducted in the absence of what migration actually does to nine-year-olds) is made through the voice rather than through argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American memoir reading, as the canonical literary text on contemporary U.S. migration policy from the migrant side, and as one of the most carefully written contemporary memoirs in English. Compare to Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us and Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends. The Javier Zamora audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.