Solito: A Memoir
By Javier Zamora (Hogarth Press, 2022)
Solito chronicles the journey of an unaccompanied minor from a village in El Salvador to “La U.S.A.” to reunite with parents who had to leave their home years before. Zamora is attuned to the character, the narrative, and the details of that story because he was that nine-year-old boy. And somehow, as a poet in his 30s looking back, he captures that child’s thoughts, fears, language, hopes, fantasies, and experiences on the page. While others have written powerful memoirs, few can bring back a child’s voice and trust the child to tell the whole story. Solito presents to readers outside this community some notions of what this crossing into the U.S. entails. It also paints a nuanced picture that calls into question what we thought we knew.
The questions it raises are why Solito should be on every educator’s reading list. More and more children and youth are streaming into our schools with trauma in their backstories, yet few are able to speak to those experiences. (In his acknowledgements, Zamora thanks his therapist for helping him process and write his story. He also says that he and his parents have only spoken twice about his crossing.) As we strive to provide trauma-informed care and attend to students’ social-emotional needs, we would do well to be informed by a book that relays to us one boy’s experience of what that trauma looks like.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Greenberg
SHARON GREENBERG is a former high school English teacher in the Chicago Public Schools and is now an improvement science adviser and literacy consultant.
