I think this is my seventh birthday, and this is the last birthday that I celebrated. For the eighth and ninth birthdays, I didn't celebrate it. My parents were saving for me to come here. This is right in our backyard underneath like the avocado trees, and there's a party outside my cat end that's playing in the back And those are my friends. That's my cousin. And out of all those boys, all of them have left and they're
all in the United States. Oh, it's my grandpa. He's young, he's fatter, he still looks strong and very and very imposing. He's scary.
Why she's so lively.
My Grandma's like even like her hand motions and everything, she's very lively.
She's like saying thank you.
And the weird part is that she's talking to my mom and my dad in the United States, and she's like, I hope that this party met your expectations, like you gave us money to provide for your kid, and and we hope that you met your like saying that you had imagined in your head. She was like my mom, the coyote that brought me here. He would visit I think almost twice a year to see how old I was. He was gauging to see if I could make the trip,
so we started this relationship. Last time I saw him, he said, next time, you just have to be ready, and I had my bags just waiting. I knew that I was going to leave, it just didn't know when. And I don't remember what day it was, but then my grandpa woke me up and it's like, you have to go shower now. My aunt and my grandma made
breakfast and they were crying. My grandpa and I walked out the door and it was dawn and the dogs were barking, and the sun hadn't broken through yet, so it was like this blueish tint all over and I just walked out onto the road and took a left all the way to the pier, which is where the buses stopped, and so in that that was the last time that I walked through my entire town. My grandpa left me and Watemala, and we had stayed there for
fifteen days. But my grandpa couldn't go anymore. So I remember him walking us to the bus and I was the last one to get on, and I was saying goodbye to my Grandpa and he was wearing a white polo shirt, black shoes and black belt and blue jeans, and he was in the middle of the road and he.
Was just waving.
When I left, I wasn't thinking about the time apart from them. I was mostly happy that I was en route to be reunited with my parents. It wasn't until much later that I began to understand that I wasn't going to see with my grandparents again.
From Fudromedia and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Mariano JSA and today the return. Twenty years ago, poet and writer Javier Samora traveled to the US Mexico border as a child, a life changing journey that haavi had ended up writing about in his book of poetry It's called Unaccompanied. It garnered a lot of attention for Haavied. In fact, it got him a Northern California Book Award and a fellowship
at Harvard. Then, on January eighth, twenty eighteen, Faviert woke up to a phone call from his mom, and again things would drastically change for him and for his family.
She was crying, saying he announced it. Give what I said? Good said, what are we going to do.
Trump had just announced that he would not be renewing Temporary Protected status for Salvadorans. In two thousand and one, nearly two hundred thousand Salvadorans received Temporary Protected status, or TPS after a powerful earthquake hit the country. TPS allowed them to live and work in the US until it was safe to return back to a Salvador. But with Trump's announcement essentially ending this protected status, Javiere's life in
the US was thrown into question. After living here for almost twenty years most of his life, now he faced the possibility of having to leave it all behind in order to stay in the US. Javiet decided to apply for an EB one visa, which is otherwise known as the Extraordinary Abilities Visa, and in order to apply, he would have to return to a Salvador in person, his
first trip back in almost two decades. We wanted to help Haayid share his experience, so producer Saah Kivilo worked with him to document his journey with audio diaries, interviews, and other recordings. This story originally aired in twenty eighteen, and since then in twenty twenty two, have yet published Solito a memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller. The book has been widely praised for its raw, personal
portrayal of his immigration experience. And so, dear listener, we're happy to bring you this award winning Latino USA back for you to listen to today. And remember just a warning that this story contains some language that might not be suitable for younger years. We're going to begin Haayer's story on a particularly important date for him. That date is June tenth, and that's the date that Haayid first arrived in the United States at nine years old and alone.
It's also the day before you returned to El Salvador nineteen years later.
It's June tenth. I'm alone at home. It's nineteen years today. I haven't packed. I leave tomorrow. Yesterday I babysat a kid, a four year old with Brittany. At the end. He chose four books for me to read to him, and one of them was Talked to Sue's All the Places You Will Go, And after Brittany read it to him, he said that it made him feel better and he was hugging me.
And now I'm home.
I woke up with Brittany, and I feel good about leaving, and I don't know when that changed, because I've been scared and there's something about this date that is full circle.
Okay.
On June tenth, the day before I left to us about I had dinner with my mom and my aunts. Well, you started talking, you know, about the trip, and my little cousin Tonito really surprised me. You are nine, and how do you think you would feel if you were going?
I feel happy, like right now, I feel happy for you guys are going there and seeing my grandma and my grandpa, and I wish you luck.
Any advice if you were to go to a place that you've never been to, what would you bring?
I would want to bring my parents your parents, yeah, so that they could go with me.
As I think that is the just natural feeling of a little kid the same age as me when I came here, that all you want is your parents and to be with them and bring them everywhere. I think just that feeling. I want to bring my parents and it always makes me cry because that's what I wanted when I immigrated by myself, all I wanted to be was to be with my parents. I was thinking about this from San Francisco to Houston. In Houston, I think it really began to kick in. By then, I was like, Okay,
am I going to come back? Am I going to return to this? How am I going to return from this? I was thinking about seeing my grandparents for the first time in nineteen years. After I got here, my grandparents and I mostly communicated over the phone, like how are you doing, how it's how's the United States?
How's work? How's the weather? Okay?
I love you by I feel like they hide a lot of things from us, and also we hide a lot of things from them.
Presently here for the next few minutes.
So when I land and I go through the checkpoint, and I get a whiff of the humidity, and I get to the road, my Grandpa's waiting there. I think he's wearing white again. He's wearing a white polo. Maybe he always wears white polos. I don't know, but at crucial moments he always wears the same outfit. Before I was five, he was rarely in the picture because he was working. But when he was in the picture, he
was drunk. The one memory that I remember it was him coming in through the door the back door, pounding it. He was drunk and on something else and I was four, and he bursts through and he started arguing.
And throwing.
He was throwing stuff and like cursing my grandma out. That happened multiple times.
Okay, I bet he still has a huge gut, but he's frail.
Yeah, yeah, ye.
The meat has been taken away from him, and with it, like the dynamic has changed. I'm less scared and now I'm bigger. The moment I get in the car, I start commenting on what I remember, like automatically, like on queue, and I try to remember the way home. First thing I noticed there's now a solar panel field. And then we keep on driving and the sugarcane fields are still there, but now we have like a little thing that says bimeniosa,
welcome to Lera Lura, right near the cemetery. I remember the cemetery being this huge thing, and the cemetery was like a block big, and in my head it felt like half a mile. And so we take it right of a new road that they've just built with new houses, and I'm commenting on it, and then I don't even recognize the clinic that I lived in front of so he parks. The car parks and my grandpa starts to get out, and I'm like, what are we here?
I didn't remember. My Grandma opens the door.
She's in her nightgown and she looks around to see if anybody's looking. And she doesn't get out of the house. She waits for me to get in. And she is way different than what I remembered. My grandma was this joyful woman, like who would always be dressed to the nines, who would do her makeup, who would take care of her hair. She's not that personal anymore. She's seeing a shadow of who she was. She's frail, her arms are so skinny, there's like dreads in the back of her hair.
She doesn't care for her hair anymore. And I hugged her, and she didn't hug me fully. She put one of her hands in between her chests and mind, I'm gonna protect my chest where my heart is.
And that's what she did.
Whenever I thought of seeing my grandparents, I imagine this big, dramatic moment where I would run up to them and hung them crying, my Grandma crying, hugging me. I imagine staying up talking with them.
I wanted.
To take them out on a walk to the market or to the peer.
That's what I wanted most. When we return, I feel down. I really hope that I can go back to the United States stay with us.
Yes, hey, we're back.
And last we had heard Salvador and poet Jaber Samora had just returned to Ol Salvador for the first time in nineteen years, and he was settling into his grandparents' home, which is the home he lived in as a young boy.
There's still pictures, one of my mom, one of my dad, one of my aunts, and one of me, and that's the first thing you see. And the fridge is new, but he's still in the same place that it used to be. The TV is newer, but he's still in the same place that it used to be.
Oh, the roof changed. The roof used to be terracoda.
Roof and now it's a there's like steel that you can hear when it when it rains, keeps you up. There are get goos. Now there's like an infestation that like squeak like birds that keep you up as well. I still showered outside, so.
Everything hadn't changed that much. As part of the visa appointment.
I had to go to this doctor in the capitol and do a lot of tests, and once that was approved, I could go to the embassy. Today, I went to the doctor's appointment, and once up there, they asked why I was getting the visa, and I explained that I have a book with the moment I meant, shouldn't Stanford at Harvard. He treated me differently, and then this like an hour later, the doctor actually saw me, and the first thing he says, you know, they already told me about you.
I'm really proud of you.
And I thought I was gonna go fine, and then he begins asking me about drugs, and then he told me to be honest, so I don't know if I did the right thing or not. And then I told him that I had tried marijuana before, and had I been stopped or arrested? And I said no, and under him breath he told me he said, you guys always put yourself up in Spanish. But then then he kept im pressing me. Had I try other drugs, had I try marry one of more than once?
Et cetera, et cetera.
I really hope that that doesn't hurt my chances, and I was just being honest, and I guess that's what's stupid. We'll see what I happen weapons But I'm really I feel down. I really hope that I can go back to the United States. I really hope that I didn't up today.
I couldn't leave the house.
So it was like when I was a little kid again, but this time it was kind of my grandparents telling me not to leave the house. But it's also myself. I didn't feel safe leaving the house, and I was afraid to leave because I'm a stranger there and nobody would really know me.
So I was scared that I would.
Be misidentified as a potential outsider gangster, and just that made me feel unwelcomed.
Yeah, young, young, and.
Yet so I asked my grandparents, how do they feel that they are part of my poetry and that other people are reading these poems and the other people and like in colleges and universities are reading them. And my grandma says that she's happy, and my grandpa says that he's proud. And then when people ask how I'm doing, oh, well, he's he's very that I'm like studied, learned, so I've read my grandma poems in Spanish, but not the ones about domestic violence. We didn't suffer the war, but my
grandpa brought the war into the domestic sphere. We all still love him, you know, there's like a bad that figure and who it's still my grandpa and it's still my mom's dad, but silence is definitely still a big part of our relationship. Today we went to start at the Kaluka, which is in the news and everywhere. It's one of the most dangerous places because of the gangs here in this department. And it was so interesting to go with my grandpa to pick up his remittances and
the bank was full today. My Grandma was supposed to go with us, but she didn't. She's still stuck in her house. Feel kind of bad that I didn't. I wasn't able to get her out, but I'm gonna try again. I was asking why, Grandma, and she didn't say anything. It had been three four years since my grandma has left the house. So I really hope that I was going to be the one, you know, the one that she raised like a son, that I was going to be the one to finally get her out.
And maybe you're going to go back to who you work. I think her isolation has a lot to do with cultural expectations.
She had three daughters and a grandson who is like a son to her, and we all left in culturely, at least one of us is supposed to stay there and help her out, and so I think all of that has taken a physical and emotional toll on her. My grandpa lives at the opposite end of the house. It's like it's own. He has his own kitchen, he has his own room. In the morning, he goes and wakes my grandma up and asks her what she wants for breakfast, and then he takes a moto taxi to
Al Marcalo. He brings back the stuff, He goes back and he retreats into his kitchen. After that he reads the paper, and then he goes out into the field. He's constantly cutting the grass. That's like his thing. And then he eats again, and then he goes back to the fields to burn leaves and trash, and then he retreats and watches No l Las and has dinner and then goes to sleep. He does it every single day. My grandma's day is literally at the opposite end of
the house. My grandpa goes out and brings my grandma food, so she has to wait for that. She watches TV or listens to the radio. Then she sleeps and then she watches an La at night. And it's all in that little room. So I had hurt my knee, so I couldn't run. I had graduated physical therapy the week before I leave to Olsavler. I started this job to run regiment in like my backyard, learning to run again. And so every day I would watch a soccer game.
This is during the World Cup. I would watch a soccer game, and in between game one and game two, I would put my shoes on and go to the backyard and create my own little track in front of the house.
Through in between the well and.
The out house, take a left through the orange tree, all the way up to the corn fields, and round around the sapota tree all the way back, take a ride at the coconut and then go along the fence and then I'm back to the front of the house. That was my running track, and I think that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to run away from there.
Slowly.
Every day that passed, I realized that I did not belong there, and I began to get exasperated. I did not feel free. I was there like four weeks. Five people were killed during the time that I was there, and once I heard the gunshots in the morning. If I didn't hear the gunshots that night, I would hear the bells ring, and that and my cousins and everybody knows that if they ring in the morning, that means there's a mass and somebody was shot, and the news
travels fast. All those things made me feel unsafe and that this was not where I belonged anymore. Yesterday I was freaking out. Yesterday was June thirtieth, two days before my appointment. I felt like I wanted to get away from the house and go back to the United States. And I think the trauma that I've seen in the house really got to me yesterday too. So, yeah, that was yesterday. Yesterday was the hardest day I've spent here. Two days a day before. It's July one. This is
the day before my appointment. Okay, my grandma likes soccer, and I think while watching soccer, we bonded and we started to talk more and slowly, I'll began to like.
Ask questions about.
Like how does it feel that your daughters that you haven't seen your daughters, or how you feel that I'm here. She certainly does miss us, but my Grandma's always returns to But I understand why. I think my grandma probably thinks that we all left because she was a bad mom, and I think she's failed to move on from that stage of grief, grieving the people that she.
Raised in our family.
She's the physical embodiment of what immigration does to a person and to a family. The day before my visa appointment, I didn't let myself think about my life in the United States. I didn't let myself think about what I would be leaving behind in the United States. I didn't let my mind go there because it would be too sad and too traumatic. And that's how I cope with things, just by ignoring them.
I woke up five am.
I had put the outfit out last night that was still freaking out and nervous, and then my grandpa went with me. He was wearing blue jeans and a white polo. That's what he chose this morning. There was my grandpa who accompanied me up to the Guatemala in Mexico border. That was in nineteen ninety nine, and he insisted that he walked me to the embassy. He knew that he wasn't going to be let in and he has a cane now, but he insisted.
We crossed the road and he.
Hugged me, and then I went through the security because only the person who's appointment it is is allowed past security in the embassy. And then I went in and I was by myself, and I saw him walk away on his cane, and it was the perfect I don't know, closing.
To that chapter, and then I woke up.
Oh. She asked what was my name, where I lived in the United States, where I lived in Ilsavadora, where I was going to return to, and for what? And then she asked what my visa was about. And then she took a moment to go and ask her supervisor for something, and then she came back and she said that I got approved and then it was done. M h. I haven't recorded in a while, and I think it's because I feel a lot better after knowing that I will get.
That I got the visa.
But today I got notified that I could pick up my passport, which I'm gonna go pick up tomorrow, which made me get a flight, and the cheapest flight is this Wednesday. And I hugged my grandma today. I told her that I was sad. She said that she's gonna be sad to see me leave, and then we hugged. She stopped stretching her arms out, pushing me away when I hug her.
Okay, I'll stop there.
So I asked my grandpa how he feels about me leaving, and then he said that things are gonna feel more lonely. There's a return to solitude. Just also, she's like, you're not that little boy that left.
Now you're grown.
She is very happy that I got my papers. And then she also apologizes for not as she described tending to me how she would have wanted to people. When I said that she doesn't have to apologize for anything, she said, she's gonna be waiting next time that I go there. You leave a country trying to make a life of it here in order to send money over there, but then at the end of the day, after sacrifice and sacrifice in this other country, does this not treat
you well? You're kind of face with like Oh, did I make a wrong decision by leaving my family and the people that I love Because look at the emotional and physical told that my departure has caused. My entire family is facing that right now, and we don't know what that answer is. I want to go back to try to mend all those years that I couldn't go back, and to show my grandmother we still do care and that I still care.
Our episode was produced by Serve and edited by Sophia Palissa Carr, with additional editing from Marlon Bishop. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau. The La You Know USA team includes Julia Cruso, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Strada, Renaldo Lanos Junior, Andrea Lopez Gruzado, Lies Luna Glri, mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Nor Saudi, and Nancy Juillo. Benide Ramirez is our co executive producer along with myself and I'm your host Mariano
Rosa join us again on our next episode. I'll see you on social media and made Yes Bye.
Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.
The John D.
And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Heising Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation dot org