Unaccompanied
Written by Javier Zamora
Published by Copper Canyon Press
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”
Primary ISBN: 9781556596063
Publication Date: August 2022
Available As: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
Memoir, Age 18 or older
Community Represented: Salvadoran/Salvadoran American
Themes: Family Relationship: Parents, Family Separation: Different Immigration Status, Genre: Poetry, Identity: Multilingual, Immigrant: Reunion of Family, Immigrant: Undocumented, Multilingual: Spanish Featured Words, Own Voices/Lived Experience, Setting: US/Mexican Border Crossing, Unaccompanied Minors
Setting: El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, United States
Character's Place in the Immigration Journey: On Journey, Immigrant
Book Creator(s) Connection to the Community Represented: Own Voices/Lived Experience
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