Javier Zamora sat in the front row of the classroom at UC Davis and read an excerpt from his memoir Solito about morning he first left home in El Salvador. He recalled the dark sky and his last shower. At the request of the people who would guide him north, his grandparents dressed him in dark clothes and even blacked out the label on his backpack.
Solito is this year’s UC Davis Campus Community Book Project selection, and on the evening of March 10 he gave a talk and reading at the Mondavi Center. Earlier that morning, wearing a black button-down shirt, black jeans and black leather boots, he spent a class period with roughly 50 UC Davis students who had spent the academic quarter studying the history of immigration in the U.S.
The course, HIS 173: “Becoming an American: Immigration and American Culture,” is about what it means for the U.S. to be a nation of immigrants, as well as the history of laws and regulations that have defined and shaped immigration, citizenship and American identity.
“It’s been quite a heavy and intense quarter to be teaching about immigration history, yet more important and timely than ever,” said Cecilia Tsu, a professor of history who teaches this course. The first classes took place in January, when the federal immigration raids in Minnesota began.
Tsu said that her students found the process of learning about their family histories, particularly stories of migration, rewarding and meaningful but also challenging. Solito, one of the assigned books for the course, resonated on many levels.
“Your book affirms the value of confronting and acknowledging the traumas of our past,” Tsu said to Zamora in her introduction. “Our students have come to believe that reckoning with those difficult moments is a way to honor our past, what our family members endured.”
Learning about why he left home
Zamora’s story of coming to the U.S. without his family is threaded throughout his life, from his first collection of poems to his memoir Solito. He has shared his story widely, including in appearances on national broadcasts like the Today Show.
At 17 years old, he began to write poems as a way to think through his own identity as an immigrant. Was he more Salvadorian or American? He had been shamed in school by his U.S.-born Latino classmates who teased him for being a recent arrival. He had learned to hide his Spanish accent and spoke Spanish in public.
His biggest question was why his parents had come to the U.S. in the first place.
“They never talked about it,” he said. “Just little snippets.”
As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Zamora studied history with an emphasis on Latin America. In 2001, he gathered an oral history from his family in preparation for a hearing that could lead to obtaining a refugee visa.
It was denied. However, the document he prepared became the basis for poems he would write in New York University’s creative writing program and then at Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow.
He kept writing poems, and years later, during the first Trump administration, he published his collection. He found that the people who came to his readings didn’t look like him. Their lives had nothing in common with his own experiences.
“I read a poem and it sparked more questions than answers, and I wasn’t ready to answer those questions,” said Zamora.
Eventually, he began to answer them in prose with Solito.
Students share their own family histories
After Zamora’s reading and brief talk, some students shared family stories they had learned about for class. On a projection slide, stars on a world map showed that students’ families had come from countries on nearly every continent.
One student’s grandmother came to the U.S. from Colombia because of political violence and ended up falling in love with her grandfather, a U.S. citizen. Another student learned about her family’s move from Brazil, where they had been prosperous but constantly threatened with violence. Another student talked about how for decades his mother, originally from Mexico, has been afraid that at any moment immigration agents would show up at her door to take her away.
One student did archival research from where his family settled in the northwest after arriving from Italy four generations ago. In old newspapers, he found a tragic story about a murder and a failed suicide involving his great-grandparents.
“I almost wonder if it was better for this story to be forgotten,” the student said.
Often, said Zamora, parents and grandparents don’t want to tell their stories to their children and grandchildren. These events and stories carry through generations, even when they remain unspoken. A school assignment can be a reason to ask or them.
“If you keep asking, they will share,” said Zamora. “The question then becomes what you do with that information, and the feelings those stories bring up for you.”
For him, he said, therapy has helped.
“To assimilate is to forget your past,” said Zamora. “Assimilation doesn’t believe in history. And it certainly doesn’t believe in therapy.”
Longing and empathy
Many of the stories were about a sense of deep longing, even among students whose families had been in the U.S. for many generations. One student’s aunt who grew up in Mississippi moved to Texas, then spent the rest of her life thinking about home. She would even stand in a horse tack room to soak in a smell that reminded her so much of her life in Mississippi.
“For a lot of you, this is the first time you’re leaving home and all the people you grew up with,” said Zamora. “You still are experiencing a form of longing. Maybe it’s just a little less with the privilege of being able to go back and forth.”
This lack of freedom to return home, he said, is what it means to be an immigrant. It’s the inability to be present with loved ones, never getting to hug a grandparent again, that creates a longing that can never be resolved.
To understand this, he said, requires empathy.
“If we could just lead with empathy, then we would have a better understanding of what immigration is,” said Zamora.
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