The Salvadoran Poet Speaks of Migration as the Jewish Poet Imagines His Grandfather’s Trip
Notes on Javier Zamora’s ‘Unaccompanied’
The press describes the crush of humanity at the southern border as a crisis. As if the danger is to the border itself. As if the people crowding the series of tents that make up a central border detention facility are a threat. // They pack into a “severely overcrowded tent structure,” reports the AP, “more than 4,000 people ... crammed into a space intended for 250.” // There are children here, the AP says. Lots of them. Unaccompanied. “And the youngest (are) kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping.” //
A child crosses the desert. Travels north through Guatemala. Mexico. Alone. Age 9. Crosses the Rio Grande into America. Not my story. But familiar. Historical. Repeated by generations. Jews from Poland and Russia. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese. Seeking something. Seen as a threat. The Chinese who came in the 1800s were barred from citizenship. Quotas were imposed after record numbers of Jews arrived. Later, the Japanese would be interred. The Mexicans forced to toil on California farms. // Today, we watch the border. Fear the darker other, as we always have. Use the same language. It is an invading horde. A migrant army. Carries disease. Will compromise our cultural integrity. These were lies then. Ugly racism then. They still are now. //
The child arrives. “I could bore you with the sunset,” Javier Zamora writes in “Let Me Try Again.”1 Remembering is difficult, the speaker says. Looking back across almost two decades. // “The way water tasted / after so many days without it, / the trees, / the breed of dogs,” details that would bore us, he says. Not him, though. Not after the long trek. Doing without. Details that stand out for him. Simple images from among a multitude of other details that the poet — and perhaps the speaker — struggles to reclaim. //
The poem comes near the end. Of the journey. The book. After we hear his family. Live in their lives. Until his family is left behind, and the child migrant becomes the primary focus. Traveling with a group, but alone. // “Until this 5 a.m. I couldn’t remember / there were only five, / or seven people,” the speaker says. // He remembers the “think white man” who “let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.” He remembers an officer, La Migra, giving them “pan dulce y chocolate.”
Procedure says he should’ve taken us
back to the station,
checked our fingerprints,
etcetera.
He didn’t. A note of humanity. Perhaps a memory of “his family / over the border.”
My grandfather was an unaccompanied minor. In 1914. Travelled by boat across the Atlantic from Poland. Escaping pogroms. Seeking stability. Like literally millions of others. Jews. Poles. Italians. // I didn’t know him. Could not have asked about his voyage. About the ship that carried him. I’ve not heard any family stories. Can only imagine the vast ocean liner navigating storm-tossed waters. It’s mooring off Staten Island. His disembarking. //
The ship would have been quarantined, according to historians. Boarded by doctors and medical staff. Passengers, migrants, checked “for dangerous contagious diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, plague, cholera and leprosy. Once the ship passed inspection, immigration officers began boarding the ship via rope ladders, before it docked.” //
Imagine Henry, my grandfather, at 14 or 15. Told by uniformed doctors to strip. Having his body prodded. Poked. Explored by instruments. Pen lights. Fingers. // What must he have thought? Did he see the uniforms as a threat? Their actions as invasive? // It was procedure. Clinical. Men looking “for eye disease, skin disorders, heart disease and more.” Then as now. At Ellis Island and the southern border, “it’s procedure to inspect / the ass of an immigrant kid,” Zamora writes.2
undress put this gown on
the doctor will be here soon
that first day after Sonoran Desert
I showered for hours when we got to parents’ apartment
For Zamora’s speaker, everything is new. “I’d never used a sponge / soap-bar and hand was enough back there next to a well,” he says. Never used a shower, “kept turning the wrong knob,” water getting hotter and hotter, “it burned that first time / my skin.” // Is it America that burns the skin? Did it burn Henry’s skin, too, as he moved in with siblings? As he sought and found work? As he enlisted in the Army? Gained his citizenship? //
Generations follow. Irish. Jew. Italian. Pole. All woven into the American fabric. Served in the Army. Fought the Germans. Brought up families. // Descendants of immigrants who struggle to see the their family histories playing out in the Mexican desert. Talk of entering the “right way.” Following rules. Not knowing or not admitting that the rules are rigged. That migration is as much a fact of life and history as are borders. //
Henry did not have papers. Few did. They weren’t required. Just a declaration on the ship that would follow you through processing. // Just a crush of bodies seeking entry. All with stories. All forced to endure similar invasions. All viewed with suspicion. All seen as “the other.” // This was before World War I. A mass of immigrants would flow through Ellis Island. // Then: Backlash. Restrictions. Immigrants from China were already banned. Restrictionists seek to shut the doors to more Jews. Italians. Poles and others. The “shithole countries” of the day. keep out New literacy tests were imposed. Quota systems. To preserve a European culture. To prevent infection. Crime. //
Restrictionists still make these arguments. Still claim that migrants are dirty. Criminals. Will bring COVID. // Still call them “aliens.” “Illegals.” But find ways to hide their racism. // “Who do you think are the ones getting away?” says Mark Morgan, former acting director of CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His syntax hinting at conspiracy. Implying a nefarious them that plays on long-standing fears. Of Black and Brown people. Of Muslims. Jews. This is the history. This is the politics that elected Donald Trump. // “It’s not your upstanding citizens,” Morgan says.. “That’s where the criminal element is coming in. That’s where the gang members are getting through.” // They call them the “getaways.” Raise the specter of an uncountable horde. An unaccountable threat. // “More than 800 criminal aliens, including 92 sex offenders and 63 gang members, were apprehended on the Texas border in recent days,” writes Bob Dane, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Raises he specter. Asks a question. “How other criminals slipped through?” How many?The question cannot be answered. He must know this. But asking it implies an answer. His answer — “Nobody can say for certain, but one is too many” — is both specific and leading. References his actual question, and the one implied. // Like Trump announcing his candidacy. “They don’t send us their best.” They. Them. The other. //
The restrictionists are still with us, even if Trump is out of office. The restrictionists still control the narrative. Still dictate the language we use when we talk about immigration. About a border crisis. An immigration crisis. A threat to the American way of life. // “I wasn’t born here,” Zamora writes. “I’ve always known this country wanted me dead.”3 //
Zamora, Javier. “Let Me Try Again.” Unaccompanied, Copper Canyon Press, 2017, pp. 61-62.
Zamora, Javier. “Doctor’s Office First Week in This Country,” Unaccompanied, Copper Canyon Press, 2017, pp. 66-68.
Zamora, Javier. “June 10, 1999.” Unaccompanied, Copper Canyon Press, 2017, pp. 79-91.