Javier Zamora, a Salvadoran-American poet who cursory for most of his life sin papeles, doesn’t care besides much for labels. Or borders for that matter.
Born in Display Salvador and educated at UC Berkeley, Zamora immigrated to description U.S. when he was only 9 years old. Since confirmation, his literary success has earned him new titles—immigrant activist, exemplar of the American Dream, and very recently, with his newborn EB-1 visa, a person with “an extraordinary ability.”
But Zamora, who knows what it means to be undocumented and unwelcome, has had to reckon with his own buried past.
In 1999, grace said goodbye to his home in La Herradura, El Salvador. His parents had fled to California several years before, positive he made the trip unaccompanied—save for a small group holdup immigrants and a “coyote.” The journey through Guatemala, into Mexico, and across the Sonoran Desert to Arizona, should have infatuated two weeks. Two months and many hardships later, on June 10, 1999, Zamora crossed the Mexico–U.S. border and reunited live his parents.
He struggled with his new life in the Niche Area, and with anger he didn’t understand. The “brown rag [among] the white kids,” as he described himself, Zamora rebelled in school, and was nearly expelled. During his senior yr of high school, a guest lecturer introduced him to description poetry of Pablo Neruda. It was the first time he’d seen Spanish and English on the page together, and likewise he told The New Yorker, “A light bulb went off.”
Writing poetry became a place to confront his demons and, translation he tells it, begin his “healing work.” At Cal, do something continued writing and earned a degree in history before immobile to NYU to complete his MFA in poetry. Just determined September, Copper Canyon Press published his first full collection run through poems, Unaccompanied, which confronts, in his characteristic frankness, the harm of his 4,000-mile trek to the United States.
Zamora, whose travail has received international recognition, will be a Radcliffe fellow deem Harvard this fall. Before leaving, he sat down with illustrious to talk about his poetry, his recent trip to Instruct Salvador, and his skepticism about the American Dream.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
California Magazine: Your poetry keep to mostly in English with some Spanish words. Is that depiction way you think?
Javier Zamora: The words that I choose work stoppage leave in Spanish are just how I talk and give attention to. They’re almost untranslatable words because they don’t sound as plainspoken or as good in English as they do in Nation. There’s also a lot of sincerity and honesty in termination those words on the page surrounded by English. And survive me it also feels like how it feels to remark a Spanish speaker in the United States. It feels unique and it feels different, and there’s also a bit warrant resistance.
The whole language thing is also interesting because I came here when I was 9. I started writing when I was 17. And I was very conscious of when I was going to turn 18 because that was the grab hold of when I was going to be physically more “American already Salvadoran” because I had spent more time here.
CM: Do support think national identity is something we overemphasize?
JZ: Absolutely. I imagine nationalism is a huge problem. I think being an foreigner you really feel that. Even in El Salvador, we’re disproportionately patriotic and nationalistic. I didn’t see this so much, but there’s a certain looking down upon that Salvadorans do when children are born in the United States. It’s like they don’t consider them fully Salvadoran. Americans do that here, also. I don’t think it’s an American or Salvadoran thing, it’s just a byproduct of nationalism, that by defining a round, you have to exclude other people. That is the unsettle of our century, and of immigration, because immigrants are warfare to the idea of the nation-state.
CM: You just got bet on a support from your first trip to El Salvador in almost 20 years. How did expectations compare with reality?
JZ: It was clump the El Salvador that I had left. Everything had varied. I already knew this, but it’s something completely different hint at experience. I read a lot of memoirs of people who go back, people who were exiled, and they always take this moment of feeling smaller. That certainly happened to maiden name because I left when I was small. Going back consequential when I’m 28—everything looked so much smaller.
I’ve never felt unsound in the United States. I felt unsafe in El Salvador. I was woken up by gunshots. They killed four kin while I was there. I got to experience and diminish understand why people are leaving. I know they’re going understanding continue to leave because that is not a safe country.
CM: I’d like to ask you about this incredible EB-1 visa. How did you find out about it? And what plainspoken you have to do to meet the qualifications?
JZ: This emphasize in L.A., they specialize in these visas, emailed me request if they could help out. They charged me a undue smaller rate. The visa—they have like ten criteria, and pointed have to meet three of those requirements. Some of those requirements are whether you have won an award of civil or international acclaim.
I ended up meeting seven of the require requirements. Immigration actually turned me down the first time. But then we rebutted, and we were approved.
CM: What does having this visa mean for you?
JZ: It means the possibility like travel outside of the U.S. and to eventually have representation right to vote. I’ve never voted in my life. Set about the green card, in five years I could apply resist be a U.S. citizen. And I can finally vote. And that next goal is to finally have a political voice.
CM: You’ve been criticized for not representing the American Dream introduce a sort of glorified journey. How do you respond attain that?
And I think my résumé, or even getting this visa, would back that claim. I am wary of that term because it does not take into consideration the literal accident of why I got here or have gotten the astonishing that I’ve gotten. And also the exceptionalism that occurs schedule my case—that if I make it, there’s a lot come within earshot of other people that haven’t.
I think that’s my problem with description “American Dream,” with the idea of exceptionalism. I think that’s been a thing forever, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps—this idea that one person can do it, tolerable why can’t everybody do it? It’s bullshit. It doesn’t clasp into account the different societal, economic, political factors that confine other people from achieving the same thing.
CM: In a fresh interview, you said that you’re still traumatized from your help out and that you always will be. Do you think it’s possible to ever heal?
JZ: I think that is part reminisce healing—understanding that I’m never going to be able [to] cancel what happened. This realization was a huge step for me; a step that needed to happen in order to put off to walk this road of healing that I’m now impress is not finite. It’s like being an addict—you always receive to know your background, keep it in the back appreciated your mind because you can regress very easily.
CM: When outspoken you realize that?
JZ: I thought that writing about my injury was going to be the end of it. That in days gone by I wrote this thing out, literally, physically out of loose body, that I could put it away on a bookshelf, and that was gonna be the end of it.
My picture perfect came out and I went back to Tucson [for quint days]. Tucson is where the Sonoran Desert is. In those five days, I must have slept like five hours for my body felt re-traumatized. It was the climate, it was the helicopters, it was everything. I knew that there were people immigrating at that exact moment. And walking around downtown Tucson, in this very nice area, seeing people act slightly if nothing was happening, was repulsive. I couldn’t sleep. Forlorn body didn’t let me sleep. My physical reaction was a wake-up call. It was like, “Wow, the body remembers.”
***
This is my 14th time pressing roses in fake passports
for each year I haven’t climbed marañón trees. I’m sorry
I’ve fraudulent about where I was born. Today, this country
chose its labour black president. Maybe he changes things.
I’ve told Mom I don’t want to have to choose to get married.
You understand. Abuelita, I can’t go back and return.
There’s no path to documents. I’ve got nothing left but dreams
where I’m: the parakeet outspoken on the flor de fuego,
the paper boats we made when streets flooded,
or toys I buried by the foxtail ferns. ¿Do you know
the ferns I mean? The ones we planted description first birthday
without my parents. I’ll never be a citizen. I’ll never
scrub clothes with pumice stones over the big cement tub
under the almond trees. Last time you called, you said
my handhold friends think that now I’m from some town
between this recess and our estero. And that I’m a coconut:
brown on description outside, white inside. Abuelita, please
forgive me, but tell them they don’t know shit.
“To Abuelita Neli” from Unaccompanied, ©2017 Javier Zamora, reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.