First

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

WHEN I heard the news that Javier Zamora and Erika L. Sánchez, both of whose careers I’d been following, had placed their books with two of the most prestigious poetry publishers in the country—Copper Canyon Press and Graywolf Press, respectively—I knew I had to find a way to visit them and ask them about their work. Both identify as Latino and have close connections to a narrative about undocumented immigration; they both also received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, which recognizes early talent and promise. But their personal stories are as distinct as their voices, as I learned after spending time with Zamora in Washington, D.C., while we were both in town for different literary events, and with Sánchez in the Chicago area, where she was born and raised.

Javier Zamora’s story begins in a small town in El Salvador called La Herradura, or “the horseshoe,” where he was born in 1990. The country’s violent civil war was still years from ending and the Zamora family began to fracture under the weight of living in the part of the city occupied by the military. Zamora was only a year old when his father, an eighteen-year-old fisherman, fled the country under cover of darkness. “The family myth is that that’s how I learned to walk,” Zamora says. “I followed him out the door.”

Four years later, his mother migrated north to join her husband, but Zamora would not see his father until age nine, when he made the treacherous trek from Central America to the United States, unaccompanied by a family member, under the charge of other undocumented immigrants.

As we walk along the National Mall, past the Washington Monument and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Zamora can’t resist a pause in the story he’s told many times but which still moves him.