Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/27/2025
7:00 pm

Location
54th Street Newport Beach
54th Street
Newport Beach , CA 92663

Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience

What is the meaning of home? At only nine years old, Javier Zamora left his native El Salvador to embark on a 3000-mile journey to reunite with his parents in the United States. Alone except for the other migrants in his group and the “coyote” hired to guide them across the border, he survived perilous trips across oceans and deserts. Javier Zamora shares his harrowing journey and explores how identity influences our ideas of home and brings humanity and warmth to the figure of the “immigrant,” stressing there are always moments of joy, love, and hope, even in the worst of circumstances. Zamora puts a face to child immigrants and the humanitarian crisis along the US-Mexico border.

“Solito” was a New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Awards, and Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography. Zamora is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship. He holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, Stanford University (Stegner), and was the recipient of Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and former OC Weekly investigative reporter and editor. He authored “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” and is the child of Mexican immigrants, one of whom arrived in the U.S. in a Chevy trunk.