09/04/23 09/04/23 [captioning made possible amy: from new york, this is democracy now! today, a labor day special. >> the person who called me was unlike most of the workers who called. he wasn't from mississippi or louisiana. he wasn't either white, black or latino. he was an indian man, flown in from india, calling from the mississippi gulf coast. and i thought, "what was an indian man doing coming here to clean up after hurricane katrina?" amy: we'll speak to longtime immigrant labor organizer

saket soni about how immigrant workers have been lured to the united states and trapped in forced labor to rebuild communities after climate disasters. then we'll go to salvadoran poet and writer javier zamora, author of the best selling memoir "solito." as a nine-year-old boy, he traveled alone 4000 miles to reach the united states. >> from seven, eight, and nine, i knew that i wanted to be reunited with my parents. what kid doesn't want to be and wake up next to his parents? and so i didn't really understand how i was going to get here or how dangerous it was for me to travel the 4000 miles that i did. but what i did know is that i loved my parents and i really, really, really wanted to be with them. amy: all that and more, coming up. welcome to democracy now!,

democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. today, a labor day special. as the rate of climate fuel disasters intensifies, we begin today's show looking at how immigrant workers had been lured into forced labor by corporations that hire them to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards, and wildfires. this is what longtime labor organizer saket soni writes about in his new book "the great escape: a true story of forced labor and immigrant dreams in america." i talked to saket soni earlier this year and asked him to take us back to 2006 when he received a mysterious call from inside a heavily guarded work camp in pascagoula, mississippi, where hundreds of welders and pipe fitters had been recruited from india to come to the gulf coast to repair oil rigs after hurricane katrina. >> thanks, amy. that's right.

it started with a mysterious midnight phone call after hurricane katrina. i was a labor organizer running a scrappy, small workers' rights nonprofit. and this was a time when the post-katrina flooding had turned the u.s. gulf coast into the world's largest construction site. i was protecting the workers who were doing the cleanup and the rebuilding. most of these were black and brown workers, who would stand in the morning under a giant 60-foot-tall statue of robert e. lee when contractors would pick them up and take them out to do the rebuilding of the distant dark corners of the gulf coast. that's what i was doing. those were the workers i was talking to when i got the mysterious phone call. the person who called me was unlike most of the workers who called. he wasn't from mississippi or louisiana. he wasn't either white, black or latino.

he was an indian man, flown in from india, calling from the mississippi gulf coast. and i thought, "what was an indian man doing coming here to clean up after hurricane katrina, all the way from north india?" i discovered that he was one of 500 workers who had been recruited to come to mississippi and texas to work for a large oil rig builder to clean up, rebuild shipyards and oil rigs. and when he arrived in the gulf coast, he found himself in atrocious conditions. these men had been promised green cards and good jobs in india and had been told that they would get those if they paid $20,000 apiece. $20,000. i mean, that is generations of savings. workers sold ancestral land. they took on extraordinary loans

from violent loan sharks to come. but when they arrived, they found themselves not on green cards but on temporary work visas in labor camps in company property. amy: and talk about the security on the company property, not exactly security for them but for the company, signal, that still exists, right? >> well, the company, signal international, decided to build a labor camp on company property. this was a series of trailers that were placed on a toxic waste dump. the workers were living there 24 people to a trailer. the labor camp, which the company itself called a man camp facility, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. workers were working around the clock in 12-hour shifts to build these oil rigs for the company.

this was a private equity-owned, rising behemoth in the gulf coast, signal international. and they were getting these workers, the most skilled workers in the world, at a fraction of the cost of u.s. workers. there were security guards. the men were only allowed out of the labor camp chaperoned by american security guards, and the places they were allowed to go to were walmarts where they would buy provisions to come back. that's how the workers lived. those were the living conditions. amy: what about the food? >> the food was atrocious. atrocious. the workers were given most mornings stale bread and frozen rice. there were no microwaves, amy, on the worksite, so the way the men would eat the frozen rice would be to suck on it. the men would suck on frozen rice-icles in order

to gain the sustenance to do their really difficult and dangerous work. in fact, the whole great escape, the escape out of a heist film that's at the center of the book was actually imagined and engineered over a secretive -- over a series of clandestine meetings that featured food. i started partnering with a man deep inside the labor camp, a worker named rajan, someone who is -- he was a labor organizer's dream. he was extraordinary. he taught me about the pressures on the men. he taught me about the conditions at the labor camp. but he also taught me to cook. and over a series of months, i would smuggle in to him spices and ingredients to create indian food. he commandeered the kitchen in the labor camp. and through a series of magical meals,

he brought the men back to life from their catatonic state. and he convinced them then to undertake the great escape at the center of the book. i don't want to give too much away, but it involved -- amy: oh, you have to. saket, you have to tell us the story of what happened. >> well, you know, it involved bribes for the guards, you know, involving wild turkey whiskey, flavored cigars. and rajan and i created an elaborate pretext, a fictitious indian wedding, to ferry the men out of the labor camp five at a time, under the noses of the guards, to put them on the path of a freedom journey. the men escaped overnight from the labor camp, came back the next morning, threw their hard hats in protest back at the company's gates saying that they were leaving the company. and then they set off on a march to washington.

what we didn't know then was that there was an agent deep in the government who was unraveling our plans. but we set off that heady morning for washington thinking that justice was at hand. amy: and take it from there. can you tell us the journey that they took? >> sure. well, when the men escaped from the labor camp, they filed a civil lawsuit against the company. but the path to legal status for them was a department of justice human trafficking complaint. human trafficking is a crime. and the men were alleging that this company and their recruiters had trafficked them from india to mississippi and texas and held them in forced labor. the men were counting on the department of justice

opening an investigation. we now had -- i personally now had the problem of hiding 500 brown men in louisiana. so we hid out in a hotel in new orleans that had been ruined by hurricane katrina, flooded by hurricane katrina. we hid for over a week. but there was radio silence from the doj. so we set out. like many people in social movements past, we decided to come out of hiding and come out as undocumented to the government. and we proceeded on a march to washington. along the way, we met with civil rights figures who gave us strength. and although the men had it hard -- i mean, we were walking on the sides of roads through alabama, mississippi, and georgia passing cars, were full of passengers who were jeering us. bottles were being pelted at the workers from open windows in passing cars.

but nonetheless, the men's spirits were high, because they believed that when they got to washington, they would get justice. in their particular english, they actually called it the department for justice. and they believed they would just get to washington, and they would get the status that they deserved, the special humanitarian visas designated for trafficking victims. what we didn't know was that the fight would take three years, because deep inside the government, there was a federal agent, an immigration cop, with his own corrupt ties to the company and with his own secret motivations to unravel our plans. on our way to washington, we uncovered surveillance, and we uncovered a whole federal dragnet that was working its own machinations to jail and deport these men even before they got to washington.

amy: so, saket, you have to stop there because what are you talking about? there's someone in the justice department who has a tie to signal corporation? >> not in the justice department, but at the federal immigration agency called immigration and customs enforcement. there's an -- amy: ice. >> immigration cop who lives -- ice -- who lives in mississippi, who has his own motivations for colluding with the company. so now that the workers are on their march and headed to washington, he appoints himself as the investigator for the doj. when the department of justice launches an investigation, they bring in a law enforcement official to investigate. we've been waiting, at this point in the story, for ice to bring in the fbi. we did get a call from the fbi, but after that, they were nowhere to be found.

when the investigation actually did start, an ice agent came forward to tell us he was in charge of the investigation. and again, i don't want to give a lot away, but this very ice agent had his own ties to the company, had been working with the company for years and years, and now was in charge of the investigation. what he was doing, though, amy, was -- we'd find out later, wasn't investigating the workers. he was turning the investigation into a weapon against the workers. he was trying to frame the men we were representing, the 500 indian workers, as the criminals and working to jail and deport them. amy: and so this is not just a story of a corporation that is exploiting, that is, to say the least, not just terrorizing but deeply abusing these workers, but it's a story of corporate-government complicity.

talk more about what the government knew, what the government did and didn't know along the way. >> well, you know, in the -- right at the middle of the story, there's this smoking gun that we find. it's the astonishing revelation of a long-standing collusion between immigration and customs enforcement, ice, police, and the company. and it really gets at, amy, what we see all the time. i've seen this for years and years in my work as a labor organizer after disasters and also across the south, which is that companies have at their behest cops who moonlight as private security, immigration agents who work deeply with the company to keep workers feeling like they can't come forward and report abuse because they might be deported, they might be punished.

in this story, when a few brave workers came forward to meet with me clandestinely, and after that, these brave workers demanded things from the company -- not anything major. their demands were hot tea in the morning, because they'd get up in the morning in the cold and need to warm themselves to go to work. they demanded microwaves on site so that they could warm up their frozen rice. these were their collective demands. i mean, it is a sad day in 21st century america when workers have to press collective demands, not for union rights, respect, and a contract, but for microwaves on site in their labor camp, on company property, to warm up their rice. those were their demands. and for making those demands, the company worked with law enforcement agencies

to punish the workers. and that was -- the details of that revelation were ultimately what blew all this up in washington. and i tell that story in "the great escape." amy: and talk about what happened when the workers and you -- i mean, we're talking about hundreds of workers who escaped from a mississippi labor camp, there to clean up after hurricane katrina, and then they make their way to washington. what happens there? >> well, one of the things that happens is we're coming out of a civil rights memorial on the way to washington, and we look up, and we see a man surveilling us. we see a man recording us. there's a chase scene that's recounted in the book, up to the top of the building, around the block, and all the way to a parked -- what looks like a parked construction van,

a contractor's van. i thought it was, you know, some kind of self-appointed white vigilante operation -- and flung open the doors of the van. inside it was the alabama director of ice conducting a surveillance operation. so, you know, that was when it came to light that the ice dragnet was surveilling us. as we got to washington, we realized that the conspiracy between the government and the company went deeper and deeper. it wasn't just one or two ice agents but a whole network of law enforcement officials that surveilled us all over again in falls church in virginia, right as we were going into washington. so, you know, what we were very clear about coming into washington, was washington wouldn't be easy. d.c. would be a fight.

when the campaign hit the rocks in d.c., my partner rajan and i, over an elaborate meal, came up with the next escalation. rajan cooked our -- you know, we had become close friends. every friendship has its rituals. we never solved problems over a whiteboard. we solved problems over extraordinary meals. and one night that's recounted in the book, rajan cooked an elaborate, mysterious bedouin dish called al-kabsa. it has rice, meat, and 22 spices. and we came up with a plan over that meal for a hunger strike in washington, d.c. and that was the next step. i recount the story in the book about a long hunger strike, over the course of which all of washington is talking about these workers. but the ice agent blocking our plans holds steadfast. so even in d.c., even with the world watching,

even with the department of justice investigating, the company and its allies in law enforcement were still strong enough to hold back our justice march and keep the workers undocumented and on a pathway to being deported. amy: so, saket soni, in this remarkable story that you tell, "the great escape," you bring us back to 2005, hurricane katrina, the cleanup. but 2005 is a few years after the 9/11 attacks, 2001. can you talk about what happened with ice, with dhs, the anti-immigrant fervor in this country, and then what these guest worker programs are all about? >> well, 9/11 was a very pivotal moment for america.

it was a tragic event but followed after that by multiple other tragedies. one of the impacts of 9/11 was that immigrants lost their foothold in normal american life -- immigrants like me. i came to the united states as a foreign student before 9/11. i was actually in chicago. i arrived from new delhi to chicago to study at the university of chicago. i was getting a theater degree. my parents were probably the only parents in the history of indian civilization who said it was ok for their son to go to america to become a theater director. and that's what happened. that's what i was doing when i missed an immigration deadline. that was before 9/11. so i just took it as a routine thing, something i could fix. i didn't think it was more serious than an unreturned library book -- and i had a lot of those.

and then 9/11 happened. and i lost my foothold in america like lots and lots of immigrants. we were underground, working without papers, you know, doing our best through a string of low-wage service sector jobs. 9/11 was also a pivotal moment for immigration policy. immigrant rights activists were really close to immigration reform and a large-scale legalization before 9/11. those plans were gutted after 9/11 because of the anti-immigrant backlash that was not connected to the perpetrators and motivations behind 9/11 but came from an opportunism in american politics to congeal an anti-immigrant sentiment in america, a sentiment that only grew after that.

so 9/11 was a really, really great turning point. amy: as you publish this book now, we're right on the end of the catastrophes that california is experiencing. your book, you know, takes place in the aftermath of hurricane katrina, which many see as the dawn of the era of climate disasters. but can you talk about the connection between what happened then right through to now, and what you're looking at with, to say the least, the knowledge and organizing you have behind you? >> absolutely. you know, what i didn't know then, amy, was that these workers who came from india were among the first workers that would be a rising workforce, workers who we now call the resilience workforce,

the workers who -- largely immigrant, largely undocumented, mostly vulnerable -- the workers who rebuild after climate disasters, the workers who continue to clean up, repair, heal and rebuild after hurricanes, floods, and fires. the workers who i represented after hurricane katrina, the workers who would gather under the statue of robert e. lee in new orleans, or workers like the ones in this book who were in labor camps, were among the first resilience workers. katrina was supposed to have been a once-in-a-hundred-year flood. that's what it was called, an event that would not happen for another 100 years. well, since katrina, as a result of climate change, disasters have become more frequent and more destructive. there have been, since katrina, over 200 billion-dollar disasters.

and as disasters have grown, this workforce has grown. and these workers do all this without legal protections, without legal status. they often have to fight to be paid. and if they fall off roofs, they're often left at the doorstep of hospitals for dead. this is how we're doing recovery in america. and that's what we at resilience force are trying to change. amy: saket soni, director of resilience force, author of "the great escape: a true story of forced labor and immigrant dreams in america." coming up, we'll speak to the salvadoran poet and writer javier zamora, author of the best selling memoir "solito." as a nine-year-old boy, he traveled alone 4000 miles to reach the united states. stay with us. ■■ [music break]

amy: this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report.

i'm amy goodman. we turn now to javier zamora, a salvadoran poet and writer, whose "new york times" best selling memoir "solito" tells the story of his own odyssey to the united states as a nine-year-old boy, from salvador across guatemala, mexico and eventually through the sonoran desert. he traveled, unaccompanied by his family, by boat, by bus and by foot. after a coyote abandoned his group in oaxaca, mexico, javier made it to arizona with help from other migrants. >> well, i was born in 1990 in a small fishing rural village of el salvador called la herradura. and, you know, i was born during and because of the salvadoran civil war, that started in 1980, ended in 1992, my dad fled in 1991.

the war ended, but the war didn't end at the same time, so my mom left my country in 1995 -- amy: javier -- >> and i was left at the care -- yes? amy: i'm only interrupting for a moment, because before you take us on that journey, if you could expand more on when you said your father left? you're talking about a country where the u.s. backed the military in salvador, well known for killing thousands of salvadorans. can you give us a picture of what that u.s. policy meant? because i think that is what is so absent from so many discussions as people now try to make their way to the united states. >> you know, at one point, only israel was getting more money than el salvador in the 1980's, and we're talking millions of dollars a day. and before the u.s. got involved, the left was winning. and what the left wanted was equality, women's rights, and education. and because of those asks, my dad was a leftist

and he was a head of a co-op, one of his older brothers was disappeared by the military in 1980, and the violence was everywhere. and because of those reasons and because of his ideological leanings, he had to flee in 1991. and same with my mom. you know, it is still difficult in my country in 2023, and also in this country, being a woman. there's a lot of gender-based violence. and because of -- you know, you were talking a lot about sexual assault and that is everywhere. and those were -- that was a huge reason why my mom also fled the country. amy: and so, you were what, one year old? >> i was 1 when my dad left, and i was five when my mother left. amy: being raised then by your grandparents. and talk about them deciding for to take this journey

and how you traveled. >> you know, the moment that my dad left, he would -- we would communicate via letters and phone calls. when my mom left, it was the same thing. and what they both told me was that they were going to come back. and we have to remember that in the brief period of time el salvador had peace, and that was -- it lined up with my childhood. 1993 'til 1999 was perhaps the most peaceful moment in my country's timeline. but in 1997, you know, people were beginning to get shot in my home town, and my parents changed from "we're going to return to el salvador" to "you're going to come be with us in the united states." and so from 7, 8, and nine, i knew that i wanted to be reunited with my parents. what kid doesn't want to be and wake up next to his parents?

and so, i didn't really understand how i was going to get here or how dangerous it was for me to travel the 4000 miles that i did. but what i did know is that i loved my parents, and i really, really, really wanted to be with them. amy: so you went with your grandfather from salvador to guatemala? >> yes. so my dad -- my dad -- my grandpa accompanied me all the way to a border town called tecun uman, which is still a very major crossing hub. and from then on, he gave me over to the coyote, a smuggler, and i wasn't the only one with him. i was part of a larger group of seven other immigrants. and he, the smuggler, was supposed to bring us to the united states in as little as one week from guatemala.

and, of course, that doesn't happen. amy: and then your grandfather leaves. and talk about how you traveled on from there and the massive danger. i mean, you almost didn't make it to the united states. if you could then talk about going through to mexico and what happened? >> you know, i still don't know why my trip took the turns that it did. but the plan was for me to cross a river from guatemala into mexico. that was the original plan. but i have done some research, and already in 1999, the mexican government was militarizing the southern border. and this is also continuing to happen now. and so because of that militarization, the coyote thought that it would be easier for us to cross into mexico if we took a 22-hour boat ride from guatemala to bypass chiapas and land in oaxaca.

and that is what we did. but when we were supposed to get on the boats, there were news that three boats had capsized and immigrants died. and this is still happening in the southern borders as people are trying to get over here. so that was my fiasco and, like, number one when i was so close to death. as a nine-year-old, i didn't really understand it as such. what i understood was that i couldn't swim and that i was scared of sharks and i was scared of the night. so those were my fears. in reality, i was very close to death on that boat. and that was my first day in mexico. and when we land, we also face a checkpoint, which still happens daily all over mexican states against central americans and other immigrants. and because of those checkpoints, in 1999, we were dragged out and robbed by the mexican military.

and from then on, it was weeks until we -- "we" meaning the group of six other immigrants -- until we figured out how to make it to the sonoran desert and the u.s.-mexico border. amy: so talk about crossing the border and what it meant to be in the sonoran desert. i mean, you have obviously a very different experience right now living in tucson, arizona, but what it meant to cross and then to be there, to survive in the hot, parched desert? >> you know, similar to the boat, i, as a kid, my nine-year-old brain didn't -- i think, subconsciously, i knew how close to danger i was. but in the front end of my brain, i was like, "oh, look at this weird plant called a cactus, and i'm really thirsty.

i don't have food. but if i keep on walking, my parents are at that finish line." so that's how i understood this as a nine-year-old. all of the adults around me by that point that we made it to the u.s.-mexico border, it wasn't only the six. there were immigrants from ecuador. there were immigrants from cuba. there were immigrants even from brazil at that time who we all joined together in a group, i want to say, 50-plus. and each try, which it took me three tries to cross the sonoran desert, we suffered a lot. you know, the first time, we were apprehended by border patrol and i spent two nights or one night -- because i blacked my incarceration up -- i blacked it out. and so i spent either 48 hours in detention -- and, you know, we hear about the effects of detention. i spent less than three days in there,

and i still suffer ptsd from those few hours that i was there. and that was only my first try at crossing the desert. the second time, we ran out of water. and we, ironically, were rescued by a border patrol agent after we needed to get water from a ranch. and we were released back into mexico. and finally, the third time, we finally made it. amy: let's jump forward to how you do convey this, how you became a writer. but first, tell us how you met your parents, how you saw them in the united states, and then who influenced you, how you came to be a writer through all of this trauma. >> you know, i left el salvador on april 6, 1999, and i finally met my parents on june 11, 1999. and i opened a door in tucson, arizona,

which, ironically, is my home now, and i see two shadows. and i recognize my mom because she left me when i was five years old. and i see this man behind her. and i knew how my father looked or what my father looked like from pictures, but pictures and reality are two different things. and so he was a stranger. and i think that's a metaphor for how i felt after not being around him for eight years. and it took us a few, i want to say, months until i got comfortable with not only my dad, but with my mom, being in this country. and i had to live with the fact that, you know, we were all undocumented. from 1999 until i'm 21 years old, i don't have papers and i can't return to my homeland. and i think that fact is a huge reason why i became a writer.

and it was in high school that -- you know, when google becomes google, that i google salvadoran writers, and the first name that comes up was roque dalton, who is a leftist writer who wanted to create a better el salvador. and i start reading his work. and what really impacted me was that roque dalton spoke like us and he wrote like us, meaning the rural salvadorans, not the elite salvadorans who wanted to replicate spain spanish, but he wrote like the people. and i hope that in my -- both my poetry and my prose, i am in tune with our caliche, which is salvadoran slang. and that's all i wanted when i was 13, 14, 15 years old

and i was searching for salvadoran books. and i hope that my book now could speak to another nine-year-old salvadoran, guatemalan, honduran kid who has immigrated or is thinking of immigrating to this country. amy: after a break, we'll continue our conversation with salvadoran poet and writer javier zamora, author of the best selling memoir "solito." ■■ [music break]

amy: this is democracy now!,democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. as we continue our conversation with javier zamora, the salvadoran poet and writer, his bestselling memoir "solito" tells the story of his own odyssey to the united states as a nine-year-old boy from his home in el salvador. i asked him how he became a writer. >> after surviving that nine-week journey,

surviving the united states as an undocumented person was perhaps the main reason why i became a writer. and it was almost like a chance encounter. you know, as an only child and a child of immigrants and an immigrant myself, my parents always wanted me to be a lawyer, even an accountant, or an engineer, you know? to them, i think, i just needed to go to college in order to make money. and so writing was never in the cards for me. but thinking back, you know, this is before facebook, and, you know, we were very poor in el salvador, so we didn't have a phone line. so our main means of communication with my dad, when my mom was still there, like, i would write him letters as early as four years old. and once my mom left, i continued that. and i think that was my practice into my eventual writing life.

but being in this country, you know, it took a chance encounter of a local poet by the name of becky foust to go into my high school and teach us about pablo neruda. and i had never -- i had heard of pablo neruda because my parents are nerds, and they had his recordings at home. but i'd never seen his name in classrooms up to that point. and what the poet chose to do was focus on spanish and english side by side. and for some reason, that was all i needed for me to begin to want to be a writer. and from then on, you know, i volunteer with a local organization called 826 valencia that got started by dave eggers. dave eggers becomes the very first writer, living writer, that i meet. and then i go to college,

but i don't go to college to become a writer. i go to college wanting to be a historian. but on the side, i'm writing. and i'm taking, you know, electives for -- in ethnic studies and english in the english department. and that's when i encounter june jordan's work and her idea of -- that poetry is for the people. and that is a program that i take at uc berkeley, which is poetry for the people. and all of this kind of convinces me that perhaps writing can be a thing that i can do as an undocumented person, as a salvadoran immigrant. and these become the foundation and the tools that i have, and, eventually, that i have to write my first book of poems and now a memoir. amy: and, javier, though writing, of course, can be such a cleansing experience,

you have gone through so much trauma in your life. even when you just read news reports of what's happening on the border, do you find yourself experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder? and how did you deal with this trauma as you grew up, in addition to writing? >> anger. you know, i was -- anger is often the first emotion that you have when you don't have the other words for it. and for myself, that anger began in middle school. you know, i didn't know why i felt this way, but i did know subconsciously. i felt different than all the other children. i think it's as a nine-year-old, 10-year-old you have no conception of what it means to be documented and undocumented. and i think at 16 and 17, i began to see those concrete results of me just being me,

but the world viewed me as less than because i didn't have papers or i didn't have documents, so my life got a little bit more complicated. and writing becomes that thing in which is, for lack of a better term, free therapy, but is not therapy. and so, once in 2011, which is when i'm 21, and 2010, i think that the american news cycle begins to really focus on immigration, peaking in 2016, 2017, with the child unaccompanied minors crisis. and i say "crisis" because, as an unaccompanied child myself, it really angered me that it seemed to me, an unaccompanied child, that the news media was -- didn't recognize that there had been many

thousands of unaccompanied children prior to this crisis. so the crisis wasn't a crisis that started in 2016 but had been a thing that all of us -- because i'm not the only unaccompanied child that has come to this country. but it made me feel as such, and anger was the main means through which i tried to process my unprocessed thoughts. and so short story is, yes, you know, every news cycle retraumatized me. and it made it harder, ironically enough, for me to do the work that i eventually do in writing this memoir. because when it's all around you, and i feel constantly erased and triggered and retraumatized, it stopped me from really going into those memories and understanding them and unpacking them,

which, you know, at 29, i also had a chance meeting with a great therapist. i had had therapists before, but i think i needed another immigrant. and she's from the dr and she immigrated here when she was four years old. and i think i needed a child immigrant to also be my therapist, which doesn't usually happen. it's very difficult. but that really changed my life. amy: and talk about how she changed your life. talk about that mutual experience and why it made such a difference in your therapy. >> you know, in therapy, you have to repeat things until they hit. and perhaps other therapists that i had before caro, which is my therapist's name, had told me this before, but it never landed until she told me. and what she told me was this, that you -- up until that point, i sincerely thought that you go to therapy in order to forget

or to erase what has happened to you. but that's not the case. what caro said, "what happened to you, you can never take back. it happened to you, and it will follow you for the rest of your life. if you accept that, why not -- instead of running away from that trauma, why don't you try to understand it?" and for me, that trauma is embodied in this nine-year-old kid. i was trying to run away from that kid. i was trying to erase that kid because i felt shame. and i felt shame of that kid because of all the news coverage, how politicians talk about immigrants, etc., etc., etc. and once she told me that, i began to look at him -- meaning me, my nine-year-old self -- differently. and to this point, after now four years of therapy,

i've learned that instead of being ashamed of nine-year-old javier, i should be super proud of the superhuman capacities that that little child showed in order to survive. and those are things that should never be questioned and should never be made to feel negative, anybody feel negative about. you know, i survived the unsurvivable and i'm a stronger person for it. do i wish it never happened to me? absolutely. but it happened. and i'm beginning to understand that that kid will be with me until i die. amy: you're going to be speaking tonight on a panel put on by the pen america world voices festival that's headlined "how we became/become: latinidad, identity, & love."

and if you could just preview for us what you want to say there and also if you can talk about finding love in this country, and what that has meant for you? >> you know, latinidad is a complicated thing. you know, it's not a race. it's an ethnicity. and what has really helped my healing, you know, like therapy, is accepting the different parts of who i am as well, primarily accepting and recognizing my indigeneity, which in my country of el salvador, we have had a very, very complicated relationship, like most countries in latin america, with our indigenous community. infamously, you know, there was one of the biggest massacres

in latin american history in 1932, which was genocide, was indigenous genocide. but that is the culmination of many other genocides in my country against the black and indigenous communities. and so for me, again, talking about shame, instead of feeling shame, i have learned to love that part of me. you know, this nose doesn't come out of nowhere. i am nawat, pipil. i am that. and sadly, our language has been lost in our sect, but it is still alive in another region of the country. and learning to love those parts of ourselves, i think, is very important to understanding our latinidad, understanding who we are. and also being open to different paths

towards that love is also very important. and now, in a more concrete way, finding the person that encourages you and pushes you towards that has also been part of my healing. you know, i'm married now. i never thought that i was going to be married. i've had a complicated relationship being undocumented, in my belief of marriage. by that, i mean that, sadly, for most of us, that is the only way for us to get citizenship. and so i've refused it for a big part of my life. and so unpacking all of what i just mentioned in therapy, that's also finally made me believe in love and that you could find a union with another person. and, you know, that has occurred for me. and we, you know, help each other. she is a survivor of a different type of trauma, and we understand that about each other.

amy: as you talk about being documented and undocumented, for people to understand your life experience, i mean, you made it. you survived in your journey to the united states. and yet as you grew up, as you went to school, in high school, you weren't documented. how did that make you feel? and how did you ultimately become documented? and what do you think it's most important for people to understand in a country like the united states where there are so many millions of undocumented people? >> you know, a lot of the coverage for undocumented people has also been this coverage of dreamers, you know. and i think that's how a lot of nonimmigrants have understood what it means to be undocumented and undocumented.

and for us, who actually are those things, this idea that you must be the best of or you must be the greatest citizen in order to even be considered a citizen is really traumatizing. i don't think it's a coincidence that my cv is of an overachiever. you know, i've internalized those things, that rhetoric of "if you want papers, you must be the best." and i don't think it's also a coincidence that the one path available to me towards citizenship, outside of marriage, is this visa called an extraordinary abilities visa, or an einstein visa, which was open to me because of my poetry.

and just the title itself, "extraordinary," backs up that rhetoric of i must prove that i'm more than in order for you, the u.s. government, to consider me normal. and that is so taxing and it's tiring. and i hope that we can begin to think outside of those -- that terminology, that anybody can and should be able to become a citizen whether they're a straight-a student or a terrible student, or whether they came here by a certain timeframe, which is how we talk about access to becoming a daca recipient or not. i think that anybody, regardless of their age or when they came to this country, should be seen as a complete human being

and should have the freedom to apply for citizenship and be considered a citizen. amy: and when you were in high school, did your friends know that you were undocumented? did you know that you were undocumented? and what did it mean for you to go through that process? >> you know, your brain does wonderful things. i knew that i was different because my -- the moment that i got to this country, because my parents told me not to ever tell anybody how i had gotten here, and then they told me to tell people that i was born at the marin general hospital, you know, which was a lie. and so as a teenager, i think i began to really believe that lie. and it wasn't until i was faced with the consequences of, "oh, it's going to be harder for you to get a license," "oh, you can't apply for fafsa," "oh, you can't apply for a pell grant" -- you can't really do all these things that normal citizens can.

and again, a survival tactic was for me to just keep all that information to myself. my closest friends didn't know that i didn't have papers. and i don't -- i never really told them that. i think they found out through my writings. it's weird because i'm very public about it, but in my personal life, i'm still very private. i don't really talk about it. and i think that shows you the amount of trauma, packed on top of the trauma of crossing the border and those nine weeks of being by myself and then being undocumented. it just, you know, just builds up on you. and luckily, i've had the privilege of, you know, getting a green card and finding the right therapist, which is another thing in itself, that i'm here at the stage of my healing that i am now. but it is a privilege and not a lot of us

previously undocumented or undocumented people can afford. amy: so, javier zamora, as we wrap up, you first wrote this collection of poems called "unaccompanied," and now you've written your memoir "solito," a memoir. what next? >> i don't know. hopefully another book depicting exactly what we've been talking about, you know, how difficult it is for us survivors of one form of trauma to then be thrown against the immigration system as an undocumented person, and what that does to a teenager, and how we learn to cope or not cope with what we internalize. so that's what i'm working on. it will probably focus on my time of june 11, 1999,

until like eighth grade. so that's the next step. and again, i think writing, for me, prose writing has become a way to heal and to understand different time periods of my life. you know, me and my nine-year-old have a great relationship now, but me and my middle school self, not so much. and writing will help me get there. amy: the salvadoran poet and writer javier zamora, author of the bestselling memoir "solito." he's also author of "unaccompanied," a collection of poems about his experience migrating to the united states as a child to reunite with his parents. and that does it for today's show. democracy now! is looking for feedback from people who appreciate the closed captioning.

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