Narrator: A nine-year-old boy in El Salvador tells his friends a secret. He’s about to go on a trip, a special one. “Fijáte vos,” he says, “one day I’m taking a trip. Like a real-real game of hide-and-seek.” For him, this journey is an adventure, the long-awaited chance to finally see his mother and father, who live in a far-off place called La USA. He has memorized their phone number, a string of digits that represents his entire world. But this is no game. The "trip" is a two-month, five-thousand-mile odyssey through Guatemala and Mexico, a perilous trek in the hands of strangers. The boy, Javier, will be passed from one coyote to another, facing dangers he cannot yet comprehend.

This is the journey at the heart of Javier Zamora’s gripping book, Solito: A Memoir. Told entirely from the perspective of his nine-year-old self, the memoir strips away the political rhetoric of immigration to reveal a raw, intimate, and terrifying human story about what it means to be a child, utterly alone, searching for a family.

Narrator: In Javier’s small fishing town of La Herradura, the absence of parents is a common ache. Many of his friends also have a mother or father, or both, in La USA, a place they know through phone calls and the occasional package of American toys. Javier’s own father fled the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War when he was just a year old. His mother followed four years later, leaving him in the loving care of his grandparents and aunt. For years, their promise has echoed over the crackling phone line: “We’re saving, we’re almost there, you’ll be with us soon.”

Now, at nine, the promise is finally becoming real. The family has saved enough money to hire Don Dago, a respected local coyote who successfully guided Javier’s mother to the U.S. years earlier. To the adults, Don Dago is a necessary risk, a man who operates within a vast, shadowy network. As he tells Javier’s grandfather, “I’m only one pearl in a long pearl necklace.” But to Javier, the preparations are just exciting. He overhears hushed conversations about the journey, but his focus is on the reunion. This isn't an illegal crossing; it's a trip. It’s an adventure. The family’s previous attempt to get him a visa with a fake passport had failed at the U.S. embassy, leaving him crushed. This time feels different. This time, he is sure he will make it to his parents.

Narrator: The journey begins with his grandfather by his side, a comforting presence as they cross into Guatemala. But in the border town of Tecún Umán, the first true test arrives. His grandfather, his last link to home, must leave him. In a heart-wrenching farewell, he gives Javier his toothbrush and a final blessing. “Bueno, this is as far as I go, Chepito,” he says, his voice breaking. “Te quiero mucho, cuidáte.” With that, Javier is handed over to the coyote and the small group of strangers he is traveling with. He is now truly solito—alone.

The group is moved to Ocós, a small coastal town, where they are told they will cross into Mexico. But the plan they were sold is not the plan they will live. Don Dago reveals a terrifying change: they will not be crossing by land. Instead, they will board a small fishing boat, a panga, for a harrowing, sixteen-to-eighteen-hour journey across the open Pacific Ocean. The news sends a shockwave of fear and anger through the group. They are trapped, their money paid, their lives in the hands of men who see them as cargo. For Javier, the adventure has vanished, replaced by a cold, creeping dread of the dark water ahead.

Narrator: The boat journey is a descent into hell. Crammed with dozens of other migrants, the small panga is tossed by violent waves. The air is thick with the fumes of gasoline and the stench of vomit. In the darkness, a man has a psychotic break, screaming about sharks and his dead relatives, trying to throw himself overboard. It is in this crucible of shared terror that Javier’s survival instinct kicks in, and something remarkable happens. The strangers around him begin to transform. Patricia and her daughter Carla, and a quiet, tattooed man named Chino, instinctively form a protective circle around the only child in their group.

This makeshift family becomes his lifeline. After surviving the boat, their journey through Mexico is a relentless series of new dangers. At a checkpoint, they are pulled from a bus by corrupt Mexican soldiers who rob them and mock their accents. The coyote, prioritizing his bottom line, pays a bribe to save most of the group but coldly abandons three men who "didn't pay enough," leaving them to their fate. Stranded on the side of a highway, the remaining group—Javier, Patricia, Carla, Chino, and two other men—are bound together not by blood, but by a shared, desperate will to survive. They are no longer just a group of migrants; they are a family, and Javier is their child.

Narrator: Throughout the journey, Javier is confronted by the two extremes of human nature: the casual cruelty of those in power and the radical kindness of those who have nothing. The soldiers who force them to their knees and the coyotes who see them as profit represent a world that wants to erase them. But it is the small, selfless acts of his new family that keep him alive.

On the freezing boat, Chino, a man Javier was initially scared of, sees him shivering. He wraps Javier in his own jacket, holds him, and tells him he reminds him of his little brother. "Sleep, bicho, rest," he whispers. It is an act of profound, unexpected tenderness. Patricia becomes his surrogate mother. She washes his clothes, holds him when he’s scared, and at a bus station, she declares, “Eres mi hijo”—You are my son—to create a convincing cover story. These were not grand gestures, but they were everything. They were the moments of grace that shielded a small boy from the abyss, proving that even in the darkest of circumstances, people can choose to care for one another.

Narrator: After two terrifying months, Javier is finally reunited with his parents. But the reunion is not the perfect, storybook ending a child would imagine. His parents barely recognize the boy who arrives, covered in the filth of the journey, smelling of "piss, shit, sweat, a nasty stench." For seven weeks, they had heard nothing, living in an agony of silence, not knowing if their son was alive or dead. The trauma of the journey did not end at the border; it settled deep within him.

As an adult, Zamora reflects that he couldn't fully process the experience for years. The memories were locked away until he found a voice for them in poetry and therapy. He writes of his enduring gratitude for the people who saved him—Patricia, Carla, and Chino. His mother calls them his "angels," but Zamora worries that term "takes away their humanity and their nonreligious capacity for love and compassion they showed a stranger." He owes them his life, and he wrote the book in part with the hope that it might one day reach them, so he can finally say thank you.

Narrator: Ultimately, Solito is a story about borders—not just the physical lines on a map, but the borders between childhood and trauma, between stranger and family, and between being alone and being saved. The book’s most powerful takeaway is that in a world of systemic violence and indifference, the most essential acts of survival are often small, intimate, and profoundly human. It is a testament to the fact that when all official systems fail a child, a new family can be forged in the crucible of a shared nightmare.

Javier Zamora’s memoir challenges us to look past the headlines and statistics of migration and see the nine-year-old boy at the center of the storm. It leaves us with a question that echoes long after the final page: When a child is left utterly alone, who will step forward to become their parent?