Back Draft: Javier Zamora

Every book consists of a kind of migration. It begins in one place and ends in another. Prior to publication, it also undergoes a journey of revision: the text must travel from its initial form to its finished state.

Javier Zamora’s memoir, Solito, tells the story of his journey from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old. In a harrowing account, he describes vividly the dangers that waited at each border crossing, from the barbed wire and cacti and La Migra to the brutal sun that beat down from above.

In the course of revising Solito, Zamora switched the perspective from third person to first person. He went from writing about that nine-year-old boy to becoming that boy again. I asked him if this change was more of an editorial decision or a therapeutic step in the processing of his trauma. His answer rang loud and clear: “It was both.”

— Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: So you originally wrote your memoir in third person and then you switched it to first person, correct?

Zamora: Yes. And the reason has a lot to do with therapy.

I spent so long trying to hold this story in. I didn’t want to write this book. I was on a