"I Survived the Unsurvivable"

Javier is describing his approach to winning over the other immigrants who were also on this dangerous three thousand mile journey to the US border. It's been more than twenty years since that experience, and Javier has finally decided to revisit his childhood in a memoir called Salito. In reflecting on his past, Javier realized he needed to update his understanding of his nine year old self. In looking at this kid, I also realized that I was treating him

how the politicians and the news outlets treat immigrants. He had committed a crime. He is somebody that doesn't belong into society. He is an outsider, and slowly I was like, no, hold up, this kid is a g He's a gangster. He really knew how to survive. Rarely, rarely have I heard that term survivor be attached to himmigrants. On today's show,

Javier Zamora looks back on his harrowing immigration journey. I'm maya shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. In his memoir, Javier writes from the perspective of his nine year old self. For our conversation today, I was eager to hear how thirty two year old Javier reflects back on his experiences as a young child. In particular, I was curious about his relationship with loneliness and how it ebbed and flowed

as he made his way to the US. But first I asked Javier to share a summary of his immigration story to help us better understand what made his journey

so treacherous and his survival extraordinary. I was born in a small fishing village, and I sat by load in nineteen ninety in the middle of a civil war, and my dad fled that war in nineteen ninety one when I was still one years old, and my mom left when I was five in nineteen ninety five, and they left me at the care of my grandparents and my aunts.

And at first my parents promised that they were going to come back, but then around the time when I turned seven, I started hearing the word trip a lot, and it became clear that I would be trying to get to the US as well in order to be reunited with them, And so they decided to use the same coyote to help my mom get to the United States in nineteen ninety five. And the coyote is like a smuggler, and he was with my mom every single step of the way, and her trip was relatively safe

and fast. It took two weeks. So at age nine, I leave my hometown with my grandpa to go and meet the coyote who has six other people that is also bringing along with me, and we make it safely from or to a town in Guatemala where we stay for two weeks. After the two weeks, my grandpa has to leave, and so now truly for the first time alone or solito, and from that bordertown. We got to another bordertown in Guatemala on the coast, and we get on a boat and we take a twenty two hour

boat ride to somewhere and the Mexican coastline. Fast forward. From there, we take multiple bus ride warehouses that we're locked in. There are bribes, and we get pulled out of buses by Mexican immigration cops. After five weeks, we make it to the US Mexican border, so that's an Oran desert, and it is there that we make three attempts to make it across the border. And during these attempts, I get apprehended by border patrol agents twice, we get

chased by helicopters twice. I'm in a detention cell and I literally almost died during each of my attempts, and I have guns pointed at me multiple times. And it's not until weeks later that I make it across the border successfully and I'm finally reunited with my parents. Thank you for sharing that, so, Javier, I would love to start off by talking about your experience as a five

year old in El Salvador. Your mom fled to the US, as you mentioned, at this very formative time in your development, and she left you under the care of your grandparents and your aunts. And I'm curious to know what this transition was like for you, what impact it had on you. Well, you know, one of my first memories is my third birthday. And in my third birthday, I remember being this loud, very extroverted child, and I think it was because of my mom. My mom made sure that I would be

the kid the volunteers for everything at school. She would take me with her every time. That in the morning where she went to them at gallo or the local market, and in the afternoons, and there was this popular song. There was this dance called sasas Apple, and everybody in town when I was two and three would ask me. All the vendors would ask me to dance and that, and that carried over into preschool and kindergarting, and so for every Mother's Day and Father's Day celebration, every assembly,

I would be the kid who performs in front of people. Yea, And so I was very ex reverted and everybody knew me. I knew everybody. And then she leaves when I'm five, in the middle of first grade, and from then on, I'm no longer on this stage. I never volunteer for a talent show again, and I'm very quiet, and I rarely raised my hand to answer a question, and so my personality truly changed. And she also leaves during a very formative year for me that she was potty training me,

and she leaves in the middle of it. I never graduate onto the adults toilet. It's like something that I refused to learn. And I think I refused to learn not because I wasn't intelligent, but because I think it reminded me of my mom. Do you think that also explains the shift from extroversion to introversion, because what I'm hearing you say is that being extroverted was inextricably linked to your mom. She was the one who brought you to the markets, she was the one who made sure

you were volunteering. And so in part, do you feel like you retreated from that way of being because it was too sad to be reminded of those memories? Absolutely? Why just flashed in my mind was my mom. She would choreograph these dances as I would like sing along or pretend to sing along. It was lip singing, but she would teach me. We would make a cost him together, and then she would teach me a dance and so

all those things. Yes, you're absolutely correct. It was too hurtful to do the things that I would do with my mom because it would mean that I would acknowledge that she was no longer next to me and that she was no longer with me. Wow. Okay. When you left for your trip to the US, and of course it's uncertain how long this trip will be and what

it will look like. As you mentioned, your grandfather traveled with you as far as he could go before he had to return to El Salvador, and then you were truly left alone with a group of strangers who would be accompanying you on the rest of your journey. And this group included a woman named Patricia and her daughter Carla, and also a man named Chino in your nine Javier, So I want to know how did you respond to

suddenly being in a group of just strangers. I think, going back to when I was five, I learned to grow up, I learned to be an adult. Like my dad was gone, I never missed them because he was never there to begin with. Who I did miss was my mom, and once she left, part of me becoming introverted also got coupled with trying to behave and be a good kid so the adults around me wouldn't leave

me ever again. And as a little kid, I remember always trying to do my best to fold my clothes, to wash the dishes, to eat everything on the plate, just so I wouldn't disappoint them. And so my training for this trip didn't start weeks before. I think it started the moment that my mom left, because I'd behaved so well that I didn't want to bother my grandma and my aunts, who are my dominant caretakers. And acting like this helped me once my grandpa was gone, but

he leaves me with these strangers. I know how to act in a way, I know to grow up, and I know how to make myself all so these individuals will won't think of me as an a knowing little kid, and so that they would love me and take care of me. And so it was like, oh my God, please please love me and please like me, and please take care of me, because if you don't, then I don't know what I'm going to have to do. Yeah, And that was the constant every day life for me.

On this trip. I want to unpack the conclusion you drew as a five year old about how you needed to be in order for people to stay with you to not leave you, which was, I have to be this good kid. I can't misbehave, I cannot do anything bad. I need to be an adult. Did you feel that your mom had left you because you were not a sufficiently good kid? I mean, how had it ever been explained to you why she was leaving. Well, I'm just

beginning to unpack that now. Wow, okay, but yes, the short answer is yes, I internalized her leaving and I made it my fault. As a little kid, I thought that I had done something wrong for her to leave. And then I heard about this other individual, my dad, who I only talk to on the phone, and as a little kid, i like kids do, my whole world was just me and the people around me. And so all these people must see something in me that I don't see, and I am the reason why they keep leaving.

And that just saying that out loud has taken me years. And so this is like a self almost hatred that was planted in me from that age, caused by my mom's departure. Because why why are these people leaving? Why is the person that's supposed to take care of me and love me, my mother? Why is she gone? As a little kid, I have no context for a war, poverty, all these push factors, the violence that was increasing, so at no context for that. The only context that I

have is my mother's love. I see. So let's return to your trip, Javier. You're alone with this group of strangers, and you're being extremely careful to be as well behaved as possible. But some of the men in the group, they decide to play a joke on you, and this

results in a turning point in your journey emotionally. And it begins when the men send you on a fool's errand they tell you to fetch pattered gasoline from a nearby store, which is not actually an item that exists, and a local shopkeeper ends up laughing in your face when you make this request, and you're very embarrassed. I'm

wondering if you can tell us what happens next. So this was the fourth shop that I enter in this small coastal village, and nobody everybody just pretended went along with it until this shop owner and her laughter just felt like an arrow right at my heart and my head because on top of being this well behaved kid, I tried to be liked by being really good at school, and I prided myself in being the most intelligent. I

was the valedictorian. I want first place every single year, and so here was the valedictorian of this Salvadoran town in fourth grade being tricked by the adults. So it reduced my ego. And this is like three days into being truly by myself. And I didn't allow myself to cry because that's what little annoying kids do. I'm not a little annoying kid, an adult, and if I cry, people are not gonna like me. So it just broke

me down and I just started crying. And I run back to my room that I share with Patricia, the mom and her daughter, and I tell her what happened. And Patricia, being Patricia, a small, self adorned woman who is a fighter, she just grabs me by my hand and takes me to the men who are still smoking. They always they were constantly smoking, and she screams at them and tells them why did you do this? Like why are you picking on this kid? Like you know,

and they're like, oh, no, no, it's a joke. Calm down, calm down. And eventually, after she stopped screaming and they apologize, she makes them apologize to me, and then they asked me to stay behind and she looks at me and I'm like, it's okay. And then she goes back to the room and it is there with the men that they explained to me that it's the writer of passage, that somebody has done it to them, and they tell me, oh,

you're a grown up. Now, you're an adult. And as they're saying this, they offer me a cigarette and it is the first time that I have a cigarette, and I just start coughing. And so all of that being lied to being broken down, Patricia helping me and standing up for me, and then being inducted into the man's club.

What that situation did for me is it weirdly made me more comfortable around the man and it made me closer to them, and it made me feel that I was actually an adult and that I could undertake anything that was going to happen on this trip because I wasn't a normal nine year old kid. How did Patricia coming to your defense change your relationship with her and how you saw her and how you saw yourself, because you know she is a mom. She's a mom in your environment. When she stood up for me, I knew

that she liked me. I wouldn't go as far as saying that she loved me, but I knew that she liked me more than any of the other strangers. And what that did for me is that I began to trust her more and more, and I knew that I could count on her. I knew that when we were walking in town that I could walk next to her. I didn't have to walk by myself or behind everybody, or walk next to the coyote, but I walk next to her, And internally, I think that I began to

see her as a mom. And it's weird that she had the exact same name as my mom, Patricia as my real mom, and her temperament was very similar to my mom's as well, And I think in hindsight, those two things subconsciously made me gravitate towards her. Yeah, and I slowly also won her over, and she won me over as well. You said you noticed that you were starting to trust her, which is a very big deal. In the life of young Javier and your constant fear

of abandonment, I think speaks to that. Did this episode with Patricia and that growing trust lead you to come out of your shell a bit more and maybe tap into some of the extra version you had shown as a young child, but had hit away because it was just too painful a little bit. I don't think I allowed myself to go back to the extra version. It was too risky. It was too risky. The closest I came to that was induced by Patricia tell me about that.

We're in another room and she starts farting in front of me, and then I'm like, oh my god, and adult farted in front of me. That takes a lot of trust. And that is something that I never did with my mom, but something that I had done with my aunt, and it took us years to get to that trust level. And here is this stranger, Patricia, who I'm getting closer in culture with us the days go on. She just lets it rip and then I let it rip and we have this beautiful, stinky moment. And that

takes trust. Yeah, And so that is the epitome of my extraversion. But that's it. I'm still very afraid that if I act out, even she will leave, because my mom has left, you know, so anybody kills you, we'll be back in a moment. The slight change of plans. From what I read in your memoir, it seems like the trust between you and others in your group really did ebb and flow over the course of your nine

week journey. You know, you would take a few steps forward, then many steps back, and then more steps forward and many steps back. Do you remember any defining moments in which you became more trusting of the people in your group, Any other stories or scenes you can paint for us. So I think the cigarette scene was when I learned to trust Patricia, when I learned to trust the person that I trusted the second most, or at times the most, became this individual named Chino, the man. All they did

was chain smoke and drink and watch TV. And Cino was the youngest of the three. Chino was around nineteen or twenty, and I learned that he liked me, and I learned that I could trust him. On this boat, so we're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and it's completely dark, and it's already night. We got on the boat at dawn around five am, and this must

have been around like ten pm eleven pm. And it's very, very cold, and all I have is this little thin jacket and I'm shivering, and Patricia has a jacket, and her daughter also has a thin jacket, but she puts her daughter inside, and then she also try to put me on top of her daughter. All three of us hurdled together and it's not working. The zippers not sipping up, so the wind is still coming at me, and it

feels like I'm in like the Arctic ocean. And Chino is sitting across from us and he sees this, and everybody is seeing this woman struggle, but nobody offers to help, not even the older man in the group. But Gino is like, hey, how ye do you want to come over here? Like I can cover you with his jacket with his jacket, and I kind of look up at Patricia, who I trust. We have this bond now, and she gives me the okay, and I'm like okay, and I

walk across the boat. Gino opens his jacket and I put my arms where his arms go and its leaves and he SIPs it up and he's just hugging me and trying to warm me up because we're both extremely cold. And from then on I learned that he cares. But again our relationship that has some flows. I knew that he changed when he was only with the adults. He was probably trying to be a man or trying to impress these older men. So in him trying to impress the man, he forgot about me, and he wouldn't really

talk to me. He would be different. So when he tried to embody this more manly role, it came at the extense of a trusting relationship with you. Yeah, and I don't know, in a very patriarchal my chief the way, like a man is not supposed to take care of a little kid, and yet this young man was. And the older men would tease him too, They were like, oh, why are you this kid's mom? And that is, like I guess, not a thing that men should do. And

yet Chino China would and did. There's also this moment when you are both in a detention center where Chino really steps up as this surrogate father figure and helps you use the restroom. You know, using the bathroom on this trip was the biggest fear that I had my grandpa in what the malan those two weeks. He took it upon himself to really teach me to trust that I wasn't going to get flushed out into the ocean if I flushed the toilet, So you were worried it

would suck you in. Yeah, that was a complete fear. And I didn't know how to swim, so I was like, if I'm flushed down the toilet and I'm in the ocean, I'm gonna die. And then once my grandpa leaves, I could do that privately. But peeing in warehouses and eventually peeing in a detention cell in front of all these other adult men with adult size penises became this fearful thing. And I learned to like keep my pee inside as long as possible. And I was in attention for forty

eight hours, so at one point I had to pee. Yeah, And it is Cino who steps up. He pretty much becomes the curtain so all the other people won't see me pe and he does this repeatedly. I think it's it's telling that it's that it's him, the pseudo father who's really taken care of me. There's this very stirring moment that you just drive in your book, in which, after these three attempts, you successfully make it across the US Mexico border, and there's this feeling where trust is

at an all time high. There's such unbridled joy and happiness actually finally making it to your destination. But then it's accompanied by a massive heartbreak because you realize that all these people you've grown close to over the last nine weeks are going to be living on the opposite side of the US from you. And as you're forced to say goodbye to Patricia, Carla, and Chino, you realize for the first time just how much your relationship has

shifted with them over the last nine weeks. The moment that I have to say goodbye to them, you know we have already made it. We're somewhere in a warehousing Tucson, and we are not alone. The four of us are part of this group of thirty immigrants who have just successfully crossed the border. And not only that, more and more vans keep coming. So at one point, this two bedroom apartment in Tucson is filled with I want to say,

over a hundred people, and it smells bad. And in this whole commotion of people coming and going, we Padresiacchino and Kardilla have to say goodbye, and it didn't click to me or in my brain that we Like. I knew that the US was big geographically. I thought that we were gonna at least be like an hour away from each other. But they're in DC and I'm going to San Francisco, and then describing that they still have like a three day car ride left, I'm like, oh

my god, you're going really far. This goodbye is the goodbye that still makes me break down whenever I think about it, because I still remember huddling in this dirty carpet in the middle of all these strangers and all of us crying because they were going to say goodbye to this kid, and I was gonna say goodbye to these family members. You know, they started as strangers and

they became family. In that goodbye in that warehouse, I realized, because they were family, that I loved them, and I knew that they loved me too, and I knew that I wasn't going to see them as much, and I didn't know that it was going to be forever, and so I haven't seen them since then, and I think every time I didn't allow myself to remember that, and whenever I do remember it, I get teary eyed, because

this was it, This was the goodbye. And they are the only people that know exactly every little thing that occurred, even the unimaginable things that you would think I am making up. They are the only ones that know that that truly happened, and they witnessed it with me, and they were there every single step of the way, even when we almost died in the desert, when we didn't have water, and even when this Arizona rancher pointed a shotgun at all of us, they were there and they

know it all. I think that's why it hurt, and that's why it hurts to you and remember that. And I think what kept me from writing this memoir for twenty years was that these individuals that I had learned to trust and that I had learned to love, and that loved me in the worst of conditions were gone. And I think that five year old came back. And by that I mean that I probably blamed myself. I blamed myself that I was the reason why they didn't stay in touch, and that I was the reason why

they were gone. And of course I don't know what their life was like. I don't know what they were coming to here, but I do know that after two weeks we stayed in touch for not two weeks, like like a few weeks, but then they stopped calling, and as a nine year old, I blamed myself again. So I don't know. And when you tried to call them, you were not successful. They changed their number and but we didn't change ours. Yeah, yeah, so you felt abandoned again.

I felt abandoned again, even though when it mattered, they

never abandoned me. Ye. Yeah, from what I understand, trying to get back in touch with Patricia Carlncino was a huge motivation for you to write this memoir in the first place, to revisit your traumatic past in so much detail after pushing it away for so many years, and curious to know if you are given the chance through this book to reconnect with them, what would you want to share with them in that conversation That I still love them and that here is the nine year old

stranger kid they didn't know me, that they helped and they chose to help, they didn't have to, and that that kid has grown up, and this is the one way that I know to thank them. You know, the book is dedicated to them for a reason. I am indebted to them for life and for my life, and I just want them to know that I am very very very very very grateful and yeah, that I still love them and thank you. Yeah. Yeah. How would you explain why it is you kept these memories buried for

so long? What were you running away from? I was running away from myself, meaning that if I looked at this nine year old kid, it explains a lot of how I act now as an adult. And so if I look at him, I would be looking at myself, and that is too much. What's striking me in this conversation, Javier, is that we were left alone so many times in

your childhood. But what we know from the science of loneliness is that it's actually establishing a strong and loving relationship with yourself that is a prerequisite for staving off loneliness. It's a prerequisite for being able to feel connection with others. And I heard you talk in the beginning of this conversation about self hatred, and it seems like that's the real demon that you've been fighting, Is that right? Absolutely? Yeah. I have this deep seated hatred of myself, and what

I need to know and learn is to love myself. Yeah. I love who I am, and my wife reminds me of this every single day, God bless her. I still don't believe it. Yeah, And I think you're a one hundred correct that if I don't love myself, it makes the loneliness last longer. And it's like, I'm addicted to that loneliness because I've been alone for so long. But if I learned to love myself, I won't be because now I would have a relationship with myself. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,

I've felt that self hatred too. I think so many of us have. And oh, gosh, in your case, what I feel is it is such an unfounded dislike of this little boy that I see as a hero is a brilliant, strategic, loving little hero, and so it just feels so irrational, right that you would you would not love that little boy. But gosh, this is a big question.

But that's kind of like what has worked for you in terms of learning to love yourself and to unwind some of those negative thought patterns you know, in the process of writing this book, I would have this very vivid dreams where I was back on the route. I was back somewhere sometime during those nine weeks. And in the writing of this in the facing it almost every day, I learned to view the kid as how you just

describe them as a superhero. For twenty years, from the ages of nine till twenty nine, I saw this kid as this helpless push over who put people at risk. And so I was blaming him and hating him for having done what he did. Sorry, let me tell me what you mean by done what he did? What did you do by that? I mean that he immigrated by himself that and that was on you, and that was on me. And I blamed them because you know, why

would you do this? And I guess that traces back to none of this would have happened if I had been more lovable and my mom had stuck around and I had given her a greater reason to stay. Yeah, it goes back to that. And so you blame yourself even though you're a nine year old kid. Yeah. And and in the looking at this kid, I also realized that I was treating him how politicians and the news outlets treat immigrants, so I was believing them, and that also affected how I viewed my nine year old self.

He had committed a crime, he was taking resources that are not his. He is a pushover. He is I don't know, somebody that doesn't belong into society. He's an outsider. All these negative terms that I have completely internalized, and slowly I was like, no, hold up, this kid is a g he's a gangster. He survived the unsurvivable. He really knew how to survive. Rarely, rarely have I heard

that term survivor be attached to immigrants. You know your refugee a lot, but it's unpacked that these refugees have survived something. And these immigrants have survived the thousands of miles as they cross Mexico, and they've survived the desert. And using that term and claiming that term has really unpacked a lot of things for me to the point that I'm like, Wow, this kid is a superhero. He has so many skills and he made it and that gave me agency, and having that agency is the beginning

of learning to love myself. Yeah, I'm not there yet. And when you said that, one thing that my wife just recently made me do She made me tell myself in front of a mirror that I love myself. She's like, just do it twenty five times. And I couldn't do it. And this is after I wrote the book. This was like a few weeks ago. I couldn't do it. I started crying. And that's even after having finished this. That's

still where I'm at. Although she doesn't know this, but I've been on the road and I've caught myself staring at the mirror and telling myself that I love that I love myself. So I can't do it. I'm learning to do it, and it sounds like a very basic thing, but he has it has helped me progress. Yeah, how do you think about when you reflect back on your journey and where you are today, how do you think

about loneliness? I used to think, I don't know that cliche thing of people say, oh, happiness is fleeting, but we think that happiness is like a place to be and that it's going to stay forever. Well, I used to think that loneliness was always forever place. And I'm understanding it that is fleeting and it doesn't have to stay forever and That's what I didn't realize. Part of Javier's process for learning to love himself again has been

to rebuild trust with his mom. For years, he had resisted talking to her about his childhood and how her leaving affected him. But they finally had that conversation and while says it's been a long road, today they are closer than they've ever been. Hey, thanks so much for listening. That's a wrap on season five of A Slight Change of Plans. We'll be back in twenty twenty three with new episodes. Until then, you can follow the show and connect with me on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker, wishing

you a happy holiday in New Year. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Greene, our story editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vastola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.

A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, So big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker