 And thank you for being here again. I know there's lots of places you can be in our beautiful city, which happens to be on a loney land. And we want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Romitushaloni people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Romitush community. With that, I have a reading list and a really great map that you could check out if you've never seen native land map. It's really amazing. It's interactive. It will let you know what territory you're occupying at the moment. It also lists what treaties have been in place or broken. And then one of my favorite organizations in all of San Francisco Bay Area, Segorte Land Trust, all women led, all indigenous land back organization. Check them out, support them within dollar sign S. They are wonderful. All right, tonight you will be able to ask your questions within the Q&A box. That's at the bottom. And I want to tell you just briefly about some upcoming events. This is part of our on the same page campaign, which is a bi-monthly read. Upcoming after we've done celebrating Salido is Hold You Down by Tracy Brown. And this is the story of African-American sisters who are confronting challenges of family and friendship and personal growth set in the 90s and 2000s in New York. So that will be hitting your library shelves starting Monday, you'll find it. Upcoming events, we're celebrating the American Indian Film Fest, posting free film screenings from November 4th through the 8th. Amazing lineup, all day long films and all free to our public. So please come check that out. They're in their 48th year and we're honored to be the house and the film house for the event. November 1st, the scandal of Cal land grabs, white supremacy and the miseducation with Tony Klatt and Milton Reynolds. And this is all about the outrageous amount of indigenous remains, indigenous ephemera and culture that UC Berkeley is doing. It's just mind-blowing. So I hope you will all come check that out. And tonight we are here to celebrate Javier Zamora and his stunning book, Solido. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our speakers tonight. So again, please use the Q&A. If you would like to use the interpretation service that's available with a tiny globe at the bottom of your toolbox. And Javier Zamora is a native Salvadoran who grew up as an undocumented American. His book, Solido, tells into the complex meanings of home and identity, facing challenges due to his immigration status. Zamora co-founded Undocu Poets, a fight to fight citizenship-based discrimination in publishing. His advocacy led to organizations like the American Academy of Poets and the Poetry Foundation opening their prize submissions to all poets regardless of immigration status. His accolades include fellowships from Stanford University, Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. His debut poetry collection, unaccompanied reflects on the navigating politics, racism, war, and the impact of border crossing on his family. With a BA from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA from New York University, Zamora's work has been published in many notable publication. He currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. And tonight he is in conversation with Hernan Acevedo, a queer undocumented immigrant from Zacatecas, Mexico. He studied ethnic studies with the Chicano Studies Focus at also UC Berkeley. His working class upbringing in Contra Costa County, his unique status and sexuality inform his perspective on social justice and intersectionality. Acevedo is a dream SF and San Francisco fellow alumni currently serving as a diversity, equity and inclusion analyst at San Francisco Public Library. He's involved in implementing the SFPL Racial Equity Action Plan and launched the Racial Equity Library podcast which I'll throw the link to that. And it really highlights historically resilient communities but also are resilient and BIPOC library staff. So I'm very proud of the work that he does. And I am going to turn it over friends to Javier and Hernan. Thank you. Hi y'all. It's an honor to be here with you Hernan. It's an honor to be with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for writing this book. Like I already said, when I was reading this book you would catch me crying on bar or my cubicle. It was a healing journey for me and I'm preaching for a lot of the people in the audience. Let's just start off with how are you? How are you coming to this space? I'm good. Rested, there's a lot going on in the world. Come here with a heavy heart but trying to be present. What message do you have for those kids and families in Palestine that are currently experiencing similar things that settler colonial violence has embedded into our countries? Thank you for just starting with out of the bat. And that's the thing for growing up and I went to Berkeley in 2008 and there was another invasion of the West Bank at the time and it was a Palestinian student alliance. There's a Palestinian students who at that time kind of taught me so much about what it meant to be an undocumented person and just come from the global south and to live under an empire. And since then, since I became, for lack of a better term, educated, time and time again after every struggle it is always the Palestinian people who make a protest either in Gaza or the West Bank. And as a member of the global south, I think it's our turn to show the same solidarity that they always show. And that's why I'm always present on social media and doing the best that I can to just show the same humanity that they have shown us, every color person that's oppressed and that is living under empire. Thank you for those words. And for the people that heard those words, please take them far and wide. I know there's a lot of going on in the world and it can be sometimes difficult to just congregate right now, but take this moment for yourself, for your bodies, for your families and for your loved ones. What is getting to some of the things on your book. This book is painful for some of us to read but I also wanna touch on the joy, right? Tell us about the joy and telling the story and what he meant to become a kid again. You know, and coming at it from the context of what's going on in the world, even in the midst of tragedy and in the midst of obscene trauma, there are moments of joy because the human mind and the human body wants to survive. You know, we are wired to want to live. And it is in those moments that perhaps we are most human because as I describe in the book, when you are so hungry and you haven't eaten in a long time, whatever that may be, that next meal is gonna taste like the best thing ever. And that's what I wanted to show in the book because time and time again, in the topic of immigration, literal human lives have been flattened to our bodies have been flattened to only be bodies that can experience trauma. And all these things happen to us and that takes away our agency. But if you've lived it, you know that that's not the complete truth, that there are moments of joy, that there is community, that there are jokes, that there are fart wars that also happen when things are rough because they must in order for you to trick yourself to keep on going because if you can't find that joy, you're stuck and you get paralyzed by really being aware of recognizing what is actually occurring around you. Thank you for that. I shared a little bit about this in my introduction, but I myself, and I'm undocumented immigrant and I was a child immigrant as well. Didn't go through the same journey because I recognized my privilege as a Mexican citizen in coming to the US as opposed to Central Americans. But what you just said reminds me of the movie Voces Inocentes and how kids in this war-torn, this like US-funded war-torn country kind of steal the war by being kids, by being themselves and having that joy present. So thank you for that. My next question is as an immigrant, as immigrants, we're often taught to work. We came here to work. We came here to get ahead, to send money back to our loved ones to have a better life. And we're often taught to put our feelings aside and tie our self-worth to what we produce. How have you dealt with that growing up in the US and coming to terms with what the American dream actually is? I have, in a weird way, it is a privilege because one of my coping mechanisms has been to be good at school. And that occurred to me even before I immigrated here. I grew up very poor and rural El Salvador and in a town where you have to pay for your education and given the context, paying for a Catholic school education was very expensive for my mom. And she made sure that I was the best kindergartener so she wouldn't have to pay for first grade because in El Salvador, if you're, for lack of a better term, the valedictorian, you get your uniform, your tuition, and you even get free books. And that was me. So from age four, I knew that I had to be good in order to spend the tuition money on things that I wanted. So every month we would go to Pollo Campero once a month or buy your plate and frosted flakes so we can use that money for something else to eat. And I think subconsciously that made it into the back of my mind. And that once my mom left, being a good student, I got treated like royalty by the nuts. And everybody was making sure that I was like taken care of. So I learned that education could replace the love that my mom had given me when she wasn't there. It that made sense. And once I got here, the same thing happened. My mom knew that I needed to learn English really fast. She gave me like a week break. I got here June 11, by June 18, she gave me homework. I had to learn 10 English words a day. So by the time the last week of August when fourth grade started, and I was in the ELL classroom, I was already more advanced than the other students. And I quickly graduated from the ELL, which we were like isolated in the middle of the soccer field in a portable classroom. And then I got transferred into the regular class. And that seems to be like a metaphor that I'm still trying to impact in therapy because I've had this idea that I learned when I was four of like, you must be the best, you must be the best. And at the same time coming to this country from a war-torn country and being told that I can't share where I come from and I can't share my immigration status. It was like these two opposing forces like going against each other. And I just internalized it all and have suffered from it. And I see that the chat's going off. We can go to the chat after because we can get lost in the sauce. How like given those, given what you just said how have you been able to take care of yourself? Knowing that like sometimes it's like as immigrants or just like, even as men, we're often taught to not take care of ourselves and suck it up, like keep going. Like you have privilege being in this country. How have you been able to take care of yourself given those two opposing forces that you talked about? I haven't, you know, and that's the honest answer from ages nine to 29 when I started to write this book. I really believed that my coping mechanisms were doing their job. And as you mentioned, as Latino men, we are taught to be silent about what we feel, we don't feel, and we also don't ask for help. You have to do everything on your own. And when you come from a culture that's very close-minded, I learn to replicate what other men were doing and, you know, I'm always very open about it. I started drinking in sixth grade. I started smoking weed when I was in seventh grade. And those were also not the best coping mechanism that I used for a long time. And so I was suffering inside and at that age in seventh grade, I also started therapy, you know, and I don't mention therapy as this one fixed all thing. You know, I'm on my 13th therapist that I finally met when I was 29. And I think that was the beginning of learning to understand that what I thought was helping wasn't truly helping and learning to what the metaphor that my therapist uses is that your body is like a race car. And that's the only car that you have, but you can choose to who gets to drive that very fast and lethal car. It could be a good driver or a bad driver or a reckless driver. And so I'm learning to change the driver given the different situations. And that's just awareness. And that comes with years of therapy. I'm at year four with Dr. Carolina Franco. And you know, it's just like a lifelong thing that you have to unlearn and you also have to be aware that that's how your brain has been wired. Thank you for that answer. I saw and heard in one of your interviews that you talked about The Body Keeps the Score, another book that you also quoted in in the beginning of your book and how after writing this book, there was like certain aches in your body that were alleviated. Can you touch more on that? You know, part, in you here, I want to say that people have told me different things at different times and I just wasn't listening. I wasn't ready to receive what they were saying. But for some reason, when I turned 29, I think I was finally ready to receive every advice. And one of those advices was to read this book that had been published a long time ago. And what was illuminating, and I never finished it. You know, I read up to the part where I was comfortable reading. And the two things that I learned from reading that book is that the aches that I've experienced in my body come from somewhere. They don't just come from nowhere. The left side of my body always has hurt and it still hurts now from time to time. But I have learned that and I, you know, my wife was my first editor of the book. And there's a paragraph, a section I think in the first try that we tried across the desert where Chino is pulling my hand and it's my left hand. And then the next paragraph, or I asked the question, it's like, I don't know why my left hand's hurting. And then the next paragraph is like, oh, Chino is pulling me and running away and like spilling me like this. And I think I truly believe that it is this hand, which is the one that he kept on pulling is the reason why my left side of my body is always the one that feels things. On the other hand, I suffer from this thing called eye migraines, which less than 2% of people suffer. And it's whenever I'm stressed out, I go blind. Only on this side. And I go blind for like five minutes, 10 minutes tops. And that is also from trauma. And like all of these things, and I have, I've done all the tests, and I have what my doctor and I ended up doing is every time that I get one, I write it down. And I have a long notes folder of like eye migraines. And by the moment that I stopped writing this book, the number of migraines has gone down. I have one every three months now when it used to be two a week or three a week. And so literal things that once you're finally ready to process the trauma that you have survived, which for me took me 21 years, eventually you will get to a place if you really want to, in which you can see it and hopefully dispel it and live with it. Because it's not gonna go anywhere. This happened to us. And sadly, we have to live with it, but we can learn how to better live with it. And I think that's where I'm at right now. Thank you for that. People are in the chat are healing as well. I'm gonna ask you something that Chino asked you in the journey. And if you could have anything right now, what would it be? Peace, world peace on the grand scale. But on a more smaller scale, I would have nachos. Shrimp nachos. It's interesting how the answers vary when you're hungry and in survival mode. Yeah, you know, it's weird how I react to food. I think because of my trauma, food to this day brings me so much joy. And I get like visceral reactions. Like we went out last night and I had really good tuna and I got goosebumps, which must be something, you know, like whenever I have like a good bite of something, it either reminds me of my grandma's cooking or it gives me like goosebumps or like I feel like a warm towel is in my head. So it's like, and again, this is how the body reacts because I can, I still, I'm still healing from having extreme hunger and thirst. Thank you for that. Nachos and peace. The next question I want to ask you is about memory. The book is written in such detail that even I got flashbacks reading your book. I'm like, how can he remember so like minute details, whether it was like the way you were positioned or just like the building you saw in the background, how were you able to recollect all those memories? And you kind of touch on this a little bit, but how and where was your body storing them? You touched on that a little bit already, but how were you able to recollect all these thoughts? You know, I've given multiple answers, but I don't think I've given this one. Trust. Trust when you are a survivor of any trauma. Your brain doesn't want it to have happened. And so your brain sometimes, at least for me, has told me or has tricked me into thinking that I was making it up. Because if you doubt yourself, maybe there's still hope there. There's still hope that that thing that you're trying to heal from didn't happen. And the biggest thing in writing this book outside of like moving back to Tucson of having a green card and the ability to go back to El Salvador of using Google Earth, of like using Google to see the faces of the moon, the temperature, et cetera, et cetera. Outside of that was trusting my dreams, trusting my memories, trusting that I lived it. And that is the most radical thing because from a micro level, again, the brain doesn't want it to have happened. So it makes you doubt yourself. From a macro level, this government and the journalism, the coverage of immigrants in this country, also there's a lot of erasure that happens and you begin to believe that erasure. From 1999, I wanna say until the crisis at the border in 2014, nobody was talking about this. And as a survivor of that precise thing that nobody was talking about, it was a huge erasure. And I'll imagine not talking about something and then seeing it on every television in every newspaper, like 24 seven, that was shocking and traumatizing, which made me distrust myself even more. So from 2014 to 2019, when I was 29, that distrust was exponential. And so I've had therapy has also helped me begin to trust the narrative and the liberal neuron connections that I have in my brain and to say, yes, this happened to you and it's okay that it happened to you and you can go back into your nine year old shoes and trust that narrator, which is that little kid that is still inside of you. So trust. That's a little Javiercito for giving us this book. And for you that you're doing the work that in specific, a lot of men don't do. Like you said, like as brown men, we tend to internalize these things and just not talk about them. And then we're wondering why our back hurts our shoulders hurt. So thank you for that. And I would say not only brown men, I think it's a problem of patriarchy and power. Silence benefits the patriarchy. So we have to undo that as well. So I'll speak more on that. You know, and I've also said this and I also kind of like want to correct myself. It's not only brown men that have been taught to not like share their feelings. It's men in general, across all cultures. And I think that is just the power structure, you know, and the, which another word for me, it's the patriarchy, it's all tied together. And so it benefits those in power, which is traditionally men to not say anything and to buy into this code of silence. And I think just, and that is detrimental to making any sort of change and to really begin to speak about what we see that is wrong. And because we have learned to be silent, we just keep our mouth shut. And so it is our duty to begin to open our eyes and everything to ourselves first so then we can call shit out when it's not us. If that makes sense. That makes absolutely sense. My next question is on your preparation for writing this book. How did you knew that you were ready to write the book? And it's a two-part question, but I'll start with that one. I was extremely angry. I was so angry that, again, going back to the coverage and during the, the presidency that I lived through, you know, 2016 to 2020 were rough because, and they were rough for this particular reason as a previously undocumented person as a border crosser. I've always suspected that this government doesn't want us here, not people, the government, but nobody had said it in their own, in their words. And then we will not meet because I still can't vote, but Americans elected this president that literally was saying like the number one that most powerful person in the United States was saying that he didn't want us here. And that really hurt. I think we're all still collectively healing from that. And that not to make it about anything, but that is what us people who are traditionally oppressed and from the global South have to live with. And again, not to tie it, if you're following me, this is part of the power structure and the patriarchy because this codes of silence that has silenced me and those that look like me in this country where there's no other way different people react to it differently, my form of coping was anger. But then my therapist reminds me that anger, anger is not a primary emotion. It is a secondary emotion. So if I was so angry, that also means that I was extremely sad. I was so sad to finally be on the ground and so sad to finally be at Harvard. I was invited to be a Harvard fully paid for a year. They gave me my office. I finally had a green card. And yet this motherfucker was in the presidency. And I was so sad that I thought all these things going back to the American dream question that all these things that I was looking forward to because I truly believe that they were gonna give me happiness and that having a green card is gonna fix everything. And yet it didn't. I was in a deep depression that was translated externally as extreme anger. And so that's how I began the construction of this book from a moment of anger. It's interesting that you touch on that point. I had a mentor. She's in the PhD program at UT Berkeley and talked about how when an undocumented person gets a citizenship, it's not this joyful experience that due to them experiencing being undocumented in this country and all the shit they had to go through, all the hurdles they had to go through and are still going through that it takes away that expectation of like, well, okay, like we got some sort of relief. Thank you for touching on that. I don't know anything else to add to that. I would equate it to the similar moment. There's like just this metaphor of making it to the finish line, right? And if you follow that metaphor, once you make it to a finish line, you get this, at least I do, this vision of completeness and a reward. Usually there's like a trophy that you're going after, right? And for us immigrants, I think especially if you're actually all immigrants, but for me, I think it has a lot to do with you're a child. When you're a child, the United States gets sold to you as the best country in the world, the country that's going to fix everything. All you have to do is make it to that finish line. And that finish line is a literal line, that's the US-Mexico border. And once you get there and you live day one in this nation, you understand that you're not coming to the full house house. You don't live in Baywatch Malibu. Your parents have two or three jobs. You live in an apartment that your parents rent out to other people. You, your idea that has been sold to you in shows and Disney and television doesn't exist for you. And so the finish line equals a depression. And now that I have the privilege of having papers, it is, I would equate it as the same thing. It's like you make it to the finish line, the US-Mexico border, you get the physical green card. And then you realize that not a lot of things change. That the dream in fact is not a dream. That because you have been living the nightmare, it is very difficult to forget the nightmare and that nightmare haunts you and it will haunt you forever. And instead what you must do is think about what that means and hopefully have access to mental health so you can talk to a professional about it. And yeah, so I want to read that research because that I haven't seen many examples of as well, what happens after you get the papers, you know. Thank you for touching on that. And I guess for to like the second piece, it would be what advice do you have for undocumented writers? I'm gonna leave it at that. I'm gonna leave it open for you to interpret. If you can be truthful, be truthful. I would say from a legal perspective, I wouldn't advise you write non-fiction if you want to get papers and if you want to write about your own story. I would write poetry or fiction because, you know, and I guess, yeah, this is getting recorded and it's gonna get circled. So I'll leave it at that. But to make it short, I think I will be a forever green card holder. I don't think I would be, I can become a citizen anytime soon because of the book that I wrote. Because I have an EB-1 visa, which is an Einstein visa, a professional visa, visa given to me because I was a writer and because I wrote a poetry book. And so everything that I write will eventually, if I do want to interview and become a citizen, will be judged by a lone person because that is how fucked up the immigration system is. It is up to one person that interviews you for them to deem you worthy of citizenship or to check all the background and everything that you have said and done. So I'll leave it at that. But if I would just say that I would be as truthful as you can be and sometimes fiction is truer than non-fiction. Thank you for that. One of my, we got two more questions and then we'll open the Q&A. And you kind of touched on this a little bit. Did writing the book have any impact on your immigration risk slash status? Yes, next question. Right. So I asked you this before, but you moved back to Arizona, which is like a place where this book takes place through Nogales. Can you touch on like how that experience being so close to somewhere where it was really traumatizing for you to even be in the first place? When I was undocumented, I would have never felt safe living and even visiting Arizona. Because you know, last election Arizona was blue, but it hasn't been blue when I was undocumented. I first visited here with TPS, which is the temporary protective status. And in 2017, when I was 27, in Tucson, if you drive to some parts, you will see Border Patrol agents. If you drive a little bit south, you will see Border Patrol helicopters. And that, when I first saw it with TPS, when I was 27, was re-traumatizing. I had PTSD. I was here for four nights. I couldn't sleep those four nights. And so, fast forward. I came back when I was 29 with a green card back then. I felt a little safer. I had a therapist by then and I was with my now wife then. So I had a support system. And living here has, for lack of a better term, is exposure therapy. I exposed myself to the landscape that almost killed me. And in hindsight, I have stayed here because now I've had the ability and the privilege to build better memories than the ones I had in my mind. Tucson, for me, was the place that almost killed me before I moved here. After moving here, Tucson, I can now see is the most biodiverse desert in the world. It has the best Moscow selection, but that's nachos in the world, in my opinion. And so different happier moments. We've lived here for three years. I got married here. So I'm really taking this landscape back for my own sanity and for my own healing. We love that for you. My next question is on chosen family. Patricia, Carla and Chino were your chosen family throughout this journey. How did you grapple with this concept of chosen family as you grew up away from chosen and blood family? So I'm gonna leave it at that. It's still a struggle, you know. I strategically chose one of the epigraphs to be from this book called Sacrificing Families, written by Lacey Abrego. In the book, the gist of it is that immigration means that you sacrifice your family, your sacrificing relationships that without therapy and even with therapy are perhaps you can never rescue or repair ever again. And in this journey, I did or they chose me as their family, but because of the trauma, because of the anti-immigrant country that we live in, I genuinely did not want to speak about them and couldn't speak about them because I would break down every time that I even thought about them until I was 29 and started writing this book. So family to me is a very complicated topic. I still call in its lips, like without me wanting to, I call my grandma, mom. And I didn't see my grandma, mom for 19 years. And finally, after my seventh visit back to my country, now that I have a green card, our relationship looks something like what it used to look like. And this is what immigration does. This is what separation does. And even with my mom, you know, finally she's in therapy, but we're finally beginning, even though I lived with her since I moved to this country, it has been a wild ride with my mom. My aunts who I mentioned in the book, I don't really talk to them anymore because of the, they're anti-vaxxers. You know, they went off to defend, they're still undocumented. And when you're undocumented and you feel powerless, God and this big G God seems to take over your life. You know, we see it time and time again in undocumented families because you don't have anything. And so it's complicated. And I think these are just the realities of what it means again to be from the global south. And for lack of a better term, live as a second class citizen in this country, which is something that I think I don't hear out loud as much. If you are an undocumented citizen in this country, you're a second class citizen, you get treated as one, and that has lasting mental repercussions. Thank you for that. And the question that a lot of people have been asking is how you've been able to make contact with Chino, Patricia or Carla? No, and I love, this is the most asked question. And no, they haven't reached out. I don't know if they're still in the United States. I don't know if they're still alive. Carla is only three years older than me. So if there's anybody that has seen the book on Instagram or anything, it would be her, which makes me think that, you know, you don't want to remember your trauma. I didn't want to remember it for 20 years. And so you have to be ready to tackle that. This country would be re-traumatizing to them, especially Chino and Patricia, because they were adults. You know, I had the privilege of being a kid. Their book, their version of my story would read a lot different. It wouldn't be as naive as to the dangers that I was facing. And so I can't imagine what it would be like for them to have this kid that they helped now be all over, you know, Instagram or to like, for this book to be in a bookstore, in Target even, you know, it would be re-traumatizing. So I completely understand why they haven't reached out. And that's if they're alive, you know? And I don't want to reach out to them because that, again, it's their call. It's their agency. Thank you for that. We'll go into the Q&A. I have no further questions. Thank you so much for answering. No, thank you. This has been great. Honestly, like one of the best interview type things that I've done. Thank you for that. A lot of people in the chat are asking, what's next for Javier Samona? Is there a sequel? I don't know. I'm trying, you know, I'm trying to write a novel. I only have 20,000 words. So give me like five years to complete it. I have 13,000 words, which isn't much of what happens after. I don't think it's going to be a memoir like this. It's still going to be a memoir, but in short story. I really want to talk about what it means to live with that depression, you know, as an undocumented kid and to live with that silence and how that silence gets enacted when you don't know what's going on. So yeah, those are my two projects. Sounds good. The next question we have from the chat is from Duygu. I sorry if I put your name. I hate it when people put your my name, Duygu Daniels. And they ask if you don't mind sharing, what was it like to get to know your parents after seeing and starting to live with them again? That's what I want to write about. But a short answer is that my dad was a stranger. He left when I was one years old. And again, to bring it back to trust, I think the biggest thing that I've had to relearn is trusting anybody, you know, after trusting the strangers that I never saw again that became my family, Chino, Patricia and Carla. I have deep, deep trust issues as a grown up. And also like learning to trust my dad first. He's my literal biological dad and he's wonderful, but he took me months to consider him my father. My mom, I hadn't, I remembered and I hadn't seen for four years. And that was also weird because I expected, you know, my mom suffered postpartum and she was a young teenage mom and she didn't have access to mental health. And as a little kid, I hope that she had changed, but she hadn't. And so that was rough as well growing up. So yeah, it took a while. Thank you for that. Next question is from Natalia Martín. What impact would you like you, your book, to have on those people who might be currently considering to migrate through the desert? I don't know, you know, people don't choose to migrate. If they're considering crossing the desert, it's for a reason. I would just want to remind them of the dangers if they haven't already tried, I think. Not a lot of people are aware of what could happen and how dangerous it is. And if they have already tried and they know what it is, I would just wish them luck. That's it. Thank you for that. A lot of these questions you've already kind of answered. One of the questions is, do you still believe in Cadejo? Absolutely. You know, when, you know, survivors of trauma, and it is also like in psychological terms, it is difficult to accept that you survived, especially when you're part of a group you know, I'm still unsure whether Cele is still in the desert or hopefully he made it out. You know, a lot of cocolizo is certainly still in the desert, you know, and I always, not then, but as I got older, I was like, why me? You know, and this is also something that we don't talk about. Thousands of people die a year at the U.S.-Mexico border. Tens of thousands of Central American and other mostly now Asian Cubans and Venezuelans die trying to cross through Mexico. And as a survivor, I'm like, why? And as a spiritual person who doesn't believe in, you know, Western religion, I have gone back to what is, who could have protected me? And that would be my ancestors. And, you know, I am now at Pipil from El Salvador. And to me, getting back in touch with my native roots, my indigenous roots, of which Dacadejo is a myth, has also helped me heal. And now I know for certain that it was my disappeared uncle and his fiancé, María de Los Ángeles, and my tata, la abuela, Fina, who were protecting me, at least them three and also others. My abuelito, Capirucho as well, and they're all inside to me. They're all Dacadejo. That's who they mean to me. So, yeah, I still do. Thank you for that. Just on building up on this question. When I was immigrating myself, there was like a lot of, they would take tremendous care of the kids. They would carry me and my sister through the desert, or they would make sure that we were safe at all costs. And it was like, my mom told me that after we had crossed, they make sure that the kids crossed because they knew like, they were like a lucky charm. Like if the kids crossed, then we crossed even if they don't in a way. And when reading about Dacadejo, I'm like, you were Dacadejo to them in a way. And that's how I was able to grapple with that concept. I'm like, you in a way were also their lucky charm, or like someone looking after them. That's how I was able to process it. Now I'm like finishing in talking to you, but... I received that and I appreciate that. You know, because from a psychological point of view, group dynamics, everybody fulfills a rule, right? And what I haven't believed, and I'm beginning to believe more and more, is that I also contributed something to the group. And I'm talking about the four. You know, Patricia was nourishment and protection, Gino as well, friendship, protection, Carla also towards me, and comradity as well. And I never think about what I contributed to. But I think, and what Carol, my therapist likes to remind me, is that I was their blind hope. You know, I was so naive, but naivety that actually turned into a superpower. You know, whenever they asked, or whenever they wanted to give up this little nine-year-old kid, it was like, no, I'm going to make it. I'm going to see my parents. And so, thank you. That means a lot that you would call me. The next question is from Gabriele Steiner. Are there takeaways you hope to impart to second-gen folks? In example, American-born children of immigrants. For context, your writing has helped me tremendously to understand my mother's trauma slash history, who's also from El Salvador and came as a teenager, undocumented for I don't even know how long. Thank you for your work. I hope, you know, and again, I don't think a book like mine has existed for a reason. Trauma is difficult. Nobody wants to remember how they got here. My dad took 14 months to make it here. And I've only talked to him about a few instances of his time in Chiapas. That's it. My mom took two weeks. And she still hasn't fully told me how she got here. Oh, oh, an image that she has. And there's always one image is of her drinking water from like a puddle. And that's it. And so I hope that for the second generation, this book could just begin those conversations, those very difficult conversations. That if you're lucky, your parents going to want to share my parents don't. So I also understand and don't expect them to. Because again, everybody has their own healing journey. And so just just that, like I the takeaway would be that this is very hard. And it's very difficult to talk about. And if they talk about it, that's a huge privilege that you should share. Thank you for that. One of the other questions we have was, what was it like returning to El Salvador? El Salvador for the first time? You can actually listen about what it was like. I did an episode for Latino USA called the return. And it was because I self deported for lack of a better term, because I had to because of how I came into this country, I had to interview at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador without knowing whether they were going to say yes. And if they said no, I would have to stay in El Salvador for 10 years until I could reapply. So there was a lot of anxiety. Just that, even if I had gone back with papers, it would have been hard. But adding that uncertainty was it was fucked up. You know, I again, I couldn't sleep. It was re-traumatizing. I don't even remember much of it. And this was this was like, I went back the year after the peak murder rate in my country. So I didn't even feel safe walking to the market. Which is like two blocks away. So I just spent two months inside. So it was it was bad. We are coming to an end. Is there any words of wisdom? Anything else you would like to share with us? I'll leave it. I'll leave it open to you. I hope that people not only care about immigrant children or children from the global south. But let's not forget the adults, the parents, the grandparents. Because and like this is so this is why it's hard living right now with all these people. Because we are seeing it if you have lived it and you come from the global south and you are a brown body in this world. You would be triggered because this is the erasure that we are witnessing is the erasure that we always feel. But now it's real. They're just proving our point. And so there's always this. It seems that human beings only have empathy for children and women. What about everybody else? Why can't we just have empathy for everybody? Everybody's human and everybody deserves equality. So just and thank you all. You know, it's thank you for being here on a Thursday night. It means the world. We should do this again. You know, this was very special. And thank you everybody. Let me know to close everybody out. I would like to do an exercise. If you have a water, a water bottle or water near you. I would like to do an exercise. If you have a water bottle or water near you, please grab it. And we're going to take three sips. Let's take our first sip for our bodies, nourish our bodies first. The second one is going to be for our families. And the third one is going to be for our community. And I would like to do an exercise. our bodies first. The second one is going to be for our families. And the third one is going to be for our community, our loved ones, and the wider world for the ones we wish peace for. Thank you Javier, Anisa. Oh Javier, thank you so much. This was very special. And I know you see that love pouring in through the chat. Friends, thank you so much for being part of this. There's tonight's loop. You can pick that up. It's more everyone. Thank you. And on. Amazing. Thank you. All right.