Unaccompanied & The Verging Cities

     What is there not to say about Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Verging Cities? Each book is powerful and different in its own right but they have a few crossover themes such as the body, identity, borders and a life deeper than the borders that limit them but a life where they cannot forget the borders.

    First I will say, similar to Whereas, I fall in love with Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied every time I read it. Something sizzles in my bones, shudders in my throat and makes me hold my breathe. At the end of the book, I let out a long, final sigh over Zamora’s words which are filled with violence, memory, the Sonoran desert, civil war, home, gangs, family, thirst, heat & trauma. Although this may sound like an ingredient that could easily fall into “Poverty porn” or “stereotypes” of a person from a certain country or background, Javier’s words defy all those labels. He speaks from memory of a true poet, no matter what background he has or will encounter he writes with a deep poetic eye.  Besides Ofelia Zepeda, I have never seen anyone write so beautifully and terrifying about the Sonoran desert.

“Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup
clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival:
I also scraped needles first, then carved those tall torsos
for water, then spotlights drove me and thirty others dashing
into palos verdes, green-striped trucks surrounded us,
our empty bottles rattled and our breath spoke with rust.
When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.”

    As someone from the desert and the southwest, I write a lot about the desert as well but through the lens of Indigenous person living and loving in the Sonoran desert. He truly encapsulates the desert from another point of view, the view of the harshness, the unforgiving part, the part where power dynamics are abusive from the body to the soul. That being said, I think Javier is a great storyteller of his life in El Salvador and his 9 year old body migrating to the United States and living with his parents in San Francisco. He talks about his Abuelita with a kind eye compassion which you think you would find anywhere but the desert, one of the most haunting and compassionate memories Javier shares of two men trying to keep Javier and “his kind” out but still showing some type of humanness to them,

“The rest. . .
     I don’t know.
                            They weren’t there
when the thin white man
                                         let us drink from a hose
while pointing his shotgun.
                                             In pocho Spanish he told us
si correr perros atacar.
                                      If run dogs trained attack.

When La Migra arrived, an officer
     who probably called himself Hispanic at best,

not Mejicano like we called him, said
                                                      buenas noches
     and gave us pan dulce y chocolate.

Procedure says he should’ve taken us
     back to the station,

checked our fingerprints,
                                             etcétera.

He must’ve remembered his family
      over the border,

or the border coming over them,
     because he drove us to the border

and told us
     next time, rest at least five days,

don’t trust anyone calling themselves coyotes,
      bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra.

He knew we would try again
      and again,
                       like everyone does.”


    Scenters-Zapico also talks about the border and la migra in her book as well, ““he puts his foot on her neck and watches how slowly her face turns red with blood” (25). And she also speaks of the desert in a haunting way, “A wall of dust can travel miles, blind us, choke us, stain us but not kill us” (20). I find it interesting how the political, racism, hate and death can take the beauty out of the desert. A land that once was free, borderless, free to all brown people, indigenous peoples that lived in the southwest united Staes to northern Mexico could come and go as we please and see that desert as it once was with out the border. I hope one day all peoples of Mexico, immigrant or not can see the beauty the desert hold without the powers that be in Washington DC destroying the beautiful image by creating walls, enforcement and imaginary lines. If language can mold and shift I hope it can be the same with borders.