The Return

Latino USA

Futuro Media and PRX

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Javier Zamora was nine years-old when he made the journey from El Salvador to the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year, nearly 20 years later, he returned to the country where he was born, to apply for a visa that will allow him to continue to live in the U.S. In this award-winning episode from our vault, we follow Javier's return in his own words: through audio diaries, archival family tape, and interviews. "The Return" is an intimate portrait of what gets left behind when we immigrate and what we can gain when we return.

This story originally aired in December of 2018.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Futuro
0:02.0	I think this is my seventh birthday
0:18.0	and this is the last birthday that I celebrated. For the eighth and ninth
0:22.8	birthdays, I didn't celebrate it. My parents were saving for me to come here. This is right
0:30.7	in our backyard underneath, like the avocado trees. And there's a party outside. Mak Macarena is playing in the back.
0:40.0	And those are my friends.
0:41.5	That's my cousin.
0:44.2	And out of all those boys, all of them have left.
0:47.7	And they're all in the United States.
0:50.2	Oh, it's my grandpa.
0:51.5	He's young.
0:52.9	He's fatter.
0:55.0	He still looks strong and very imposing. He's scary.
1:02.0	You're scary.
1:05.0	Wow, we ha, here we're reunied all. We're doing all, we have done a She's so lively, she's like her, even like her hand motions and everything, she's very lively.
1:25.7	She's like saying thank you.
1:28.3	And the weird part is that she's talking to my mom and my dad in the United States and
1:32.3	she's like, I hope that this party met your expectations.
1:37.3	Like you gave us money to provide for your kid and we hope that you met your thing that you had imagined in your head.
1:47.0	She was like my mom.
1:56.0	The coyote that brought me here, he would visit, I think, almost twice a year to see how old I was.
2:06.6	He was gauging to see if I could make the trip.
	...

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