Poured Over: Javier Zamora on Solito

Miwa Messer

“That nine-year-old kid still follows me and is with me and is very much a part of me… And this is the hope for the book, not only for non-immigrants, but for immigrants, to really start to have that internal conversation about what we have been through. And I think this book is mostly for them. The book was for me, and then putting it around the world is for everybody. But I hope that nonimmigrants can see that we don’t want to do this, and that it’s difficult, and that we carry this with us every single day.”

Solito is the story Javier Zamora has been trying to get out ever since he started writing. Through choppy waters and unforgiving deserts, this intimate, gripping memoir is an immersive look into the consciousness of a young boy seeking to be reunited with his parents. Listen as Javier talks about reliving trauma, growing up undocumented, poetry as a gateway to therapy, and what it was like to give his nine-year-old self back his voice, with the host of Poured Over, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books (Episode)

Solito by Javier Zamora (also available in Spanish)

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)

The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz

Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes landTuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full Transcript For This Episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over. And Javier Zamora is an incredible poet. He has now written a memoir and I’m going to tell you, Emma Straub is a fan. Sandra Cisneros is a fan. Dave Eggers is a fan. Rumaan Alam is a fan, Daniel Alarcón. All fans of this memoir. It is a huge, beautiful, gorgeous book. And Javier, I’m really happy to see you, but I’m going to ask you to start by talking about the desert, and the Sonoran Desert specifically, would you do that?

I will. But first, I just want to say thank you for having me. It’s a huge honor, I’m a huge fan. And now to talk about the desert, as a nine-year-old, I was just thrown into this landscape that did not match my nine-year-old idea of a desert, which was Aladdin’s desert, meaning the Sahara, where there was just going to be dunes, sand, no trees, and hopefully an oasis out there. And then I get to Nogales somewhere outside of Nogales. And all I see are bushes, cacti that I’ve never seen before. I was familiar with Nepalis. But not these other strange looking things that nobody told me the names of, and a lot of my wandering than this strange landscape,

You’re in awe of something that could have cost you your life when you were nine. And this brings me to Solito. And this is some of the territory that you’ve covered in your poetry collection, Unaccompanied. And I’m going to encourage folks who pick up the memoir that if you haven’t picked up Unaccompanied, you need to read that as well, because some of the same terrain is covered. But would you introduce Solito to listeners, please?

Solito is the tale told by my nine-year-old self of this trip that I had wanted to partake on, since I could remember, because my dad fled El Salvador in the middle of a civil war, when I was about to turn two. So I don’t remember my dad at all, I remembered him through phone calls and pictures. My mom, I did remember, and she left when I was five, or about to turn five years old. And so from the ages of five till nine, I was left at the care of my aunt and my grandma and my grandpa in El Salvador. And this idea of the north, of the United States, of something new, of where my parents were, and they were thriving. This country of Baywatch and Full House, of snow and Coca Cola polar bear commercials. This was where I wanted to be. And not because of these things, but because my parents were there. It was a thing that I kept on aiming for. And then I get to nine, and my parents make the decision to hire the same coyote smuggler who brought my mom here. And her trip was very fast. It was less than two weeks, she was safe. She was a woman, she was 23 years old. And it was successful. And so they paid the same man to bring me and a group of seven other strangers, and things go awry, or what was supposed to take two weeks takes two months. And Solito is that tale of this group, just making their way across the border.

And you’re a nine-year-old who can’t tie his shoes properly. And I’m pretty sure that’s a detail I’m never going to forget because I can imagine, and anyone who’s been around nine-year-olds knows that they’re their own little creatures. They’re their own little people. They’re not tiny kids, but they’re not big kids and getting a nine-year-old to walk anywhere can be complicated, unless sometimes there’s bribery involved. And here you are passed off to strangers. I mean, your grandfather does go with you for a couple of weeks, but then he just can’t go any further. And here you are, and you have to trust strangers, and your parents have to trust strangers. And it goes from buses to boats to trucks to walking across the Sonoran Desert and climbing over fences and under fences and avoiding cacti and terrible things in the middle of the night. And also, obviously helicopters and the Border Patrol and it is fraught. So, I gotta ask though, what’s it like for you as an adult, going back thinking about one of the most traumatic moments in any individual’s life and here you are recreating it, for the consumption of other people. I mean, in a poetry collection and the memoir.

It was certainly difficult. And I like to say this that in the writing of Unaccompanied, my mental capacity in my living circumstances, meaning privilege, didn’t allow me to fill the page. And my immigration status as well, I was still, when I began to write Unaccompanied, I was undocumented. And so, my ability to travel and live, which I do now in the Sonoran Desert, 100 miles from the border, which is where a border patrol has complete access to go into your home if they want to. So that I couldn’t do. And I also didn’t have a therapist, I had therapists, it wasn’t working for me as a young 20-year-old, mid 20-year-old. And it wasn’t until I turned 29 that I find this therapist who is a child immigrant from D.R. herself, and all the stars align in all of the stars aligning. The difference was that I had the capability of writing more, meaning writing prose. And I had a group of people, my therapist, my now wife, who is also a Reiki Reiki practitioner, Reiki, you certainly helped. I was meditating, I was actively trying to heal. And so when you have the supportive group, who I am now comfortable and breaking down, and crying, and shaking and re-traumatizing myself, I could write that stuff out of me because I needed to, because for those 20 years, it was it was like a backpack that I was carrying, and it was heavy. And I was like, toiling through my life. And the writing of this, I feel lighter, I feel happier. And I feel lucky, as well, that I did have all those things around me and those people around me to get this out of my chest.

You’re also coming of age, though, at a time where we didn’t really have the language for trauma. It seems to me though, that here you are. Your grandpa sounds like he was kind of handful, and I say that with love and respect. But it sounds like is a little bit of a handful. And I’m guessing he’s not hanging out teaching you as a nine-year-old how to talk about your feelings. We’re going to come to your parents later. But it is a big shift as a young man in the United States, coming from a tradition too where you’re not really sort of emotionally open, let’s call it, and here you are sitting down and saying okay, now it’s time. So is that how you get to poetry, though? Because I know there are lots of people who sit around thinking oh, well, poetry, you know, that’s, it’s poetry, but there’s a discipline that goes to it. And there’s an understanding of language and what you can do with it.

Poetry taught me where it’s like, the what do you call that? That gateway drug? Into therapy? Yeah, but it certainly wasn’t the end all. And for the longest, as I was writing poetry, I thought, I genuinely thought that that’s all that it needed to do. Right? Because I was, Oh, look at me, I’m writing my deepest, darkest secrets. And I’m sharing it to the world. So of course, I’m healed. And no, I was just scratching the surface. And I hadn’t, I hadn’t allowed myself to open this door. I was just like peeking through a door. But now, with Solito, I have really flung the door open. And I’m an only child. I’m a Leo rising. I’m an Aquarius. And I think just inherently I’ve always questioned the status quo, beginning with my parents, and my situation. I think immigrating, being an immigrant, quote, unquote, border crosser. I’ve really carried throughout my life. And so I’ve always questioned why my grandpa treated my grandma the way he did. Patriarchy is something that I still struggle with. In Salvadoran culture, it’s like so ingrained with and it’s part of colonization. And these are things that you have to actively be trying to unpack and destroy. And for the longest, I thought that I was doing that work, but it wasn’t doing that work. And all those combined when I was 29, again, and and I found myself in a place where I was tired of pretending, and tired of this shame that I carried and tired of watching my family suffer, because none of us have talked about the things that we carry. And all of us have trauma of crossing, it’s just the beginning of the trauma that my family carries.

So your parents still haven’t really had that conversation with you have they?

Yes and no. Like I mentioned at the at the end of the book. When they picked me up from Tucson apartment somewhere, they kept asking questions, and I had just survived what I described in Solito. And that had been the first and perhaps only full conversation in which they understood what I had just experienced. And because of that conversation, it has been hard for us to sit down and talk about what happened. We have tried. And my dad, in particular, always cries when he remembers what I smelled like when he picked me up. My mom, it’s harder for her to talk about it. I think she carries, they both carry a lot of guilt for what they put me through. And it’s just the book has become sort of like a conversation starter. And to put it this way, my dad finished the book. And he apologized. He told me that he cried again. My mom couldn’t make it past the first chapter. And we haven’t talked about it since.

I can see that. So we talk about how you move from sort of poetry and scratching that initial itch right, to writing. How long is Solito, it’s very quick read all things considered. But it’s not little three hundred and eighty four pages, 385 if you count your author bio, the very last bit. I’m assuming you don’t write in a linear fashion when you’re catching memories and reconstructing sounds and smells. And there’s a lot of visceral imagery here. I mean, obviously, you’re a poet, you know how to do this. But how do you construct a narrative like this and capture the truth of the thing?

In a lot of ways I have been trying to write this story since I started writing when I was 17 years old. I have been trying to get this out of me, and I couldn’t. My living circumstances, my lack of privilege, lack of papers, et cetera, didn’t allow me to. So what I produce is poetry. Since I was 18 years old, I’ve found

attempts at prose, attempts at capturing what eventually became Solito. And some of those, I trimmed all the way down. And it became June 10 1999, which is the poem that that closes off Unaccompanied Images, I also attempted from the age of 17 to 29. And once I was of all places, Harvard, because I got a Radcliffe fellowship, to write my second book of poems. I abandoned that project, because the project was supposed to look at all the headlines of refugee children, Central American children in the New York Times and write like poems. And that project got me so mad that other people were writing this story, and here I was, in the most privileged institution in the country, and perhaps the world. Why don’t I use that privilege now and finally start this thing? And which became Solito, but from the get go, the scene in the chapter that really clicked everything for me, was the boat scene. And I reread Edwidge Danticat’s “Krik? Krak!”. And that first story, Children of the Sea, retraumatized me in a good way. And I just wrote most of that scene, and that became the anchor. I was like, Okay, I have this. It’s in the present tense. I had it prior attempts of like, look at me now. I’m at Harvard. I am 29. And this is I’m retelling you that story? The past, kind of like a traditional memoir. And then I wrote that in the in the present tense. And I found my voice, I am nine years old, I am going to tell it as a nine year old kid. And then I took all these other molds and clippings that I had been working on for 10 years, I was looking really looking at my poems, getting lines or remembering things. And then I’d made a linear timeline. Which to me, I knew when to begin it and when to end it. And that would be easy for me to fill everything in.

Yeah, I’m so happy to hear that about the boat scene because in my notes, I’m just looking at this line that I grabbed rrr splash, rrr splash. And I’m like, you know, right there. And then there’s another moment where you’re talking about how the moon paints the waves platinum, that whole setup. As terrifying as it is, really works. It really, really works. I can see how that unlocked a lot for you. But also you’re nine. And this is a lot of book for a nine year old. And also you have lost touch with the people that you crossed with. I mean, it’s the nature of the thing you tried to stay in touch these tried to stay in touch phone numbers get changed. Everyone’s traumatized. The people that you were closest to as you cross have gone to Virginia. I hope they’re okay. But we don’t know. We don’t know. And so how do you sit with yourself? I mean, Reiki obviously is part of this. And therapy is part of this. But how do you sit in your own skin? There’s a lot in this book.

You don’t. I got here in 1999, right after California went through a pretty racist moment, that they wanted to not help immigrants at all. And but then luckily, by 99, ESL programs were quote, unquote, legal. And I was thrown into this ESL program with I was not the only child there. There were five of us in Marin County, which is where I go, I do this thing, go to Marin County, into the the, I want to say 98%, brown spot of San Rafael, California, which is the brand that and we’re all immigrants. We’re still all immigrants there. Most of us undocumented. And so I’m there in a school that’s predominantly Brown,

with like two white kids in the whole school. So to me like, well, where are all the white people, Baywatch. From the get-go my parents, like don’t tell anyone what happened. Don’t tell people that you were not born in this country, learn English fast. And I think I really, that was really sunk into my head. And, and because you have to in order to survive, right. And as a nine-year-old, I learned to lie. And I was a really good liar. And the things that I learned from my trauma are, and that was therapy, I can I can say this, transference. I knew have to create mother figures and knew who to attach to, a stranger, in order for them to help me survive. Right? So that’s really good. I also learned how to black things out.

Distance, so I’m really good at just like, No, that happened to me. I’m gonna store it away. I’m going to lose the key. And now we’re doing this thing. And so from ages nine, till teenagehood, I was, I was okay. I was living this assimilated life at one point, pretending that I didn’t speak Spanish. And then the hormones kicked in. And I was just angry. I was angry at everybody. I was that academically good student. And but behaviorally terrible, students to have. I would, twice I threw water bottles at my teacher, and I got kicked out. And I was so mischievous that nobody, I didn’t take the detention to the principal. So I didn’t get suspended. I like knew how to connive and talk my way out of things, even from that age. So that has been me and it kept on getting worse and worse and worse. So that’s how you live with that. And the only person that you can control harming is yourself. And so that has been the book that I’ve carried, and poetry began to distill away and wash that trauma away slowly.

And that angry, traumatized kid, had a fellowship, had a Stegner fellowship at Stanford, was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard. Let’s see, you also have an NEA grant. But how does that kid go from being the angry kid who’s throwing water bottles at his teachers and figuring out how not to get suspended, to a lauded writer.

For better or for worse, my mother’s upbringing really, really cemented. With a stick, with belts. That idea of school is going to be the way out. And I’m from a very small town. And there was one private school, which happened to be the Catholic school that had just opened two years before I had started school. And it was the only one that required payment. And my parents, and I’m still proud to this day to say that that has been the only time that they have paid for school. When I was in second grade, and this is in the book, I was on my way to a grammar competition. And at the national level, so I met the president and shook his hand. And I was the only representative of second grade all second graders and for my department, which is like my state. And so since then, that you don’t forget. And, and none of my family members have ever forgotten, and they always remind me Oh, you’re smart. School was going to be the thing. So they didn’t know about my behavioral problems. But they were like, Oh, you’re getting good grades. Cool. Yeah, keep that up, keep that up. And it was it was a mixture of that and my anger, which made me also a good soccer player. And it was soccer that gave me a huge break. And by high school, I got a full ride scholarship to one of the most expensive schools in the United States, which is the Branson school in Marin County, and I paid zero. And again, I tried to get kicked out of Branson, they didn’t let me and, cause I was the only one of like five brown kids in the entire school.

22:15

And they’re all rich, like their first cars are, we’re talking bright yellow Porsches, but a senior had a bright yellow Porsche as his first car. I think that’s how you get to all these fellowships. And it’s something that has also been harming, at the same time. And after having the privilege of having been in those institutions, it’s also a drain. And again, finding myself being the one brown person or like the first to get this or like blah, blah, blah. It’s also taxing partially.

I asked you about school because at some point, you discover words are the thing that you love. And I’m wondering who are some of the writers who made you Javier Zamora, the poet and now memoirist, prose stylist, whatever, whatever is going to come next. And you know, we’ll get there too. But who are some of the writers who have contributed to who you are, and where you’re going.

As a way to learn English, when I was in fifth grade, my dad, my dad who loves Marquez. And he had this old copy of Chronicles of the Death Foretold in English and in Spanish. And it was like, it’s like the white with green trim cover. It’s like a very small, thin book. And it’s like here, learn words. I liked the act of figuring out what these long words that I’d never heard of in both English or Spanish meant. And I still didn’t like to read. I never liked English. I wanted to be a historian. First it was math came easy to me. I was very good at math and history as well, but English never I always resisted it. And so then I finally read A Hundred Years. And it was like, my life. You know, there are passages in there in which a grandkid meets their great great grandma. I have been in a, what’s that, five generation home? I met my great, great grandma. I would take her coffee. I can still with 100% fact tell you that I saw her spirit go out of her body and walk back through our cornfields when she died. And then I was 17 and I learned I did a Google search because then somebody taught Neruda. And I was like he’s cool. But then I google searched are there Salvadoran poet. So I googled. Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, came up and broke it out in his, for lack of a better word at G. And he started a revolution. He was incarcerated, escaped twice. And this is how small the country, my country is as well. And it’s funny, because Roque Dalton has played a huge part in my poetry. I use a lot of his poems, and I have his poems tattooed on my body. And I consider myself very left leaning. My grandpa is not left leaning at all. Yep. And my grandpa was in the military and my grandpa met Roque Dalton. The first time that he got incarcerated, okay. And so the two sides and now it’s funny I find it very hilarious that now his grandkid has this guy who was incarcerated tattooed on his body. And so from then on, there have been a lot of others, but those are like the people. And like I mentioned earlier, Edwidge Danticat’s work has been a godsend. Reyna Grande’s work. Another immigrant who came here and did a similar treck as mine when she was nine or 10. I can’t remember. But she was a kid. And so this story that I’m telling has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.

Your grandfather, I was thinking about him earlier, as we were starting taping because of his military background and the fact that your parents, your dad, left first because of the Salvadoran Civil War, which was funded by the US like let’s not pretend for a second.

Thank you for saying that.

We had a deeply unpleasant hand in it. And Salvador, actually, ah the Didion essays Salvador really. You may have noticed, I read them when I was young. I carry them around with me. But you know, when we look at the people who are coming to the States, as migrants, and who are taking a path that is really traumatic, and really difficult and really dangerous, and certainly this is not something that parents think of lightly like, Hey, I’m gonna hand my kid over to a stranger and hope I see them on the other side. I mean, that’s. We have to look at America’s legacy, in Central and South America, I mean, around the world, too. But let’s let’s focus for a second on Central and South America. It’s extraordinary to me how little compassion we seem to have. And you know, you see it in Europe, too, with refugees from North and Central Africa, as well. It’s just this idea of the other, right that somehow a nine-year-old can be the Boogeyman. I don’t know how we get past that. But I think part of it is admitting to what we’ve done. Yeah, we as Americans, we don’t really seem ready to have that conversation, which I find deeply frustrating, as you can tell, but how do we push past? How do we how do we get people to see that we’re talking about extreme, extraordinary circumstances, and not just oh, it’s Tuesday, I think I’ll go run across the border.

What this reminds me of is the reasons why I wanted to do history. Like I got my history degree from UC Berkeley. What I learned, and there are two facts as to what you were saying. By 1983, the left, which was looking at co-op was using a woman, so there was like this glimmer of hope for gender equality, in El Salvador. There was this hope of social equality at all levels, was winning, and they were about to win and then the US sends millions and millions of dollars at one point surpassing the aid for Israel on a daily, on a daily basis, more than a million dollars per day. And that really shifted to what we have now, which is one of the worst countries, my country, for, in which where it’s unsafe for you to be a woman. It is unsafe for you to be part of the LGBTQI community. There’s a huge amount of hate that and my question is like, what would have happened? I wouldn’t be here and I will gladly not be here. My family would gladly not be here. So there’s one. The other was a because of Reagan politics, and this statistic really bothers me. Out of all refugee applications during the Salvadoran Civil War, out of all those immigrants that came and asked for refugee status in the United States, less than 2% got that refugee status. And that was truly because the Reagan administration didn’t want Americans in the world to be like, Oh, these people are fleeing a democracy that is funded by the United States. They’re not refugees, right. And so that complicated the lives of the Salvadorans in this country, which helped it wasn’t the only way, but it helped push adolescents, teenagers who were angry for having done the crossing and witnessing terror, push them into gangs. And then that has been this thing that we’re still living with today.

You didn’t know how to tie your shoes properly. You didn’t know how to keep yourself clean, really. I mean, you knew sort of how to shower and whatnot, but like laundry, and no nine year old knows how to do laundry please, I, I have a younger brother. I love him to bits, he can now do his own laundry. But you know, it’s it’s all of this. It’s all of this. It’s this mythology that we’ve created around the other. And I say this to you, as someone who’s also a brown American. Who happened also, you know, I was born here, I you know, and but I had a passport at the age of 10 months, because my mother wasn’t yet a US citizen, and signed by my dad. And there’s this sort of old family story where we were coming back from Japan, and my mother had to send me through the US Customs line. And she had to go through the foreigners customs line, I couldn’t even see over the counter. I was five, and I couldn’t reach to handover my passport. And I mean, I make light of it. But you know, I’m also thinking of my mom, because I saw her face. I saw her face when she had to just shoo me. And I’m simply talking about a customs line at JFK. I’m not even talking about buses, and boats and trucks and crossing a desert. And I saw the terror on her eyes when she was like, I have to send my child and her Mary Jane’s and her, because back in the day, you know, you dressed up to fly. And it’s stuff like that, where I’m just kind of like, hey, wait a minute, we all have some version of this story. And yeah, you just kind of want your parents. And in a way you created. Mom and dad from Patty and Chino to the adults that you’re traveling with. And Patty’s daughter, Carla, is with you. And here you are making this tiny unit. All so you can see mom and dad. That’s a lot. You’re nine, you’re nine and you don’t know how to properly tie your shoes. And I have to say too, at one point you’re talking about in the book, taking off your Velcro shoes and putting on shoes with laces. And I was like, Oh, I hope you don’t get blisters. I’m really hoping you don’t get blisters, tiny man, that doesn’t seem like a great idea. It’s all of these things. And at one point Patty falls into a cactus as you’re running and you’ve got to take time to put all the cactus burrs. There’s not a moment of rest when this is happening. You’re hyper vigilant. You do run out of water at one point. I mean all of it. Do you feel like do you feel like you have rest now? Do you feel I mean, it’s a you make it clear in the book that it’s exhausting. And have you been able to rest since then? Do you feel? Do you feel like you have past that level of exhaustion?

I think the writing of this was and I’ve asked other writers and it’s an unbelievable like my best writing day. I just sat down for like 10 hours and wrote 5000 words which only happened once. I that is annoying still to me now because I can’t do that. I haven’t been able to do that, recreate that. But I think this idea of work and just being hunched over that, us immigrants, I think I leave I can’t speak for everybody but for myself, I have, in a way destroyed my body because I hate it because it carries the trauma but also I’m trying to honor and go back to those moments. And the only way to do that is to overwork. And that is not healthy. And I think I’m learning that. And now having the privilege and the ability to just write. And to just rest, I think has been the biggest gift that this book has given me. And so finally, I feel like I can, and I’m allowing myself that it but that has also taking a lot has taken a lot of work. Because there’s still this little voice, oh, you’re you’re lazy, you’re not doing stuff, you’re not doing enough, look at what everybody else is doing. Bla bla bla, this little voice that is always there, now can finally rest a little bit, never gonna go away. Like my trauma is never gonna go away. Right like nine year old kid still follows me and is with me and is very much a part of me. But now I can understand it. And, and this is the hope for the book, not only for non-immigrants, but for immigrants, to really start to have that, that internal conversation about what we have been through. And I think this book is mostly for them, the book was for me, and then putting it around the world is for everybody. But I hope that nonimmigrants can see that we don’t want to do this, and that it’s difficult, and that we carry this with us every single day. And for immigrants to see that, perhaps facing it. And talking about it can lead hopefully, to healing them to just living a life where you are allowed to rest. And that that is okay.

Hey, so what’s next for you? You’ve written your collection, you’ve written a memoir, I mean, yes, you’re touring, for the book. There will be lots of conversations in lots of different places. But what’s next for you as a writer?

Trying to figure that out. I have rested perhaps a little bit too much. But I am, I think I found a voice. And one of your episodes. I forget which writer, but I was listening to that episode, I was like, I am like that, that I can’t seem to move forward in a project of prose until they find the voice. And again, I think it’s a memoir, and it’s gonna be very angry, adolescent, visibly citizen, internally undocumented and traumatized kid at this fancy institution, which you know, I guess I already mentioned them, but I might change the name of the Branson school in this part two of Solita,

I really want to read that book, I really, really want to read the book, I think it’s a chance for you to talk about masculinity and mental health and all of these things that we’re still as a culture finding words for. And sometimes, you know, sometimes we’re better at it than others. And some days, I just look at us and go really? Really? And I’m saying this as someone who grew up in Boston, I mean, you know, gin was invented for us, so we didn’t have to talk about. That’s really I mean, straight up. We just didn’t want to talk about anything.

I am aware that along these conversations regarding Solito, people are gonna look at the back of the book and read my bio and be like, Oh, you are, you got to this country, and you are this, for lack of a better word, you know, the quintessential, like example of a good immigrant. We are not all good. And we’re not all that, we need to stop thinking in those terms, and it’s more complicated. And it’s the more complicated that actually, hopefully, you will change American stands around immigration in this country. And as someone who has always rejected the model minority label that people have attempted to put on me, I support that plan. Oh do I support that plan, my friend. Yeah, but yeah, I just want to walk through the world like a human being, that’s really all I want and the things that people project onto me because of my face or how I sound or anything. You know, that’s that’s, I cannot wait for the next book. I really, I’m so excited. Javier Zamora, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over Salito is out now, as is Unaccompanied. So go get the poetry too

Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure. I’m a huge fan.

Poured Over