La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Listening to Javier Zamora sing one of his poems at Maple Hall to a Meringue beat during this month’s Skagit River Poetry Festival, you would be surprised to learn he had traveled more than 3,000 miles on foot, by bus and boat, across rivers, deserts, through barbed fences to reunite with his parents. At nine years old. Solito. Alone.

Two months of travel, abandoned by his “coyote,” held at gunpoint by a farmer while gulping water from a hose after crossing the Sonora desert, peeing orange, living in cages, his backpack of clean clothes, toothbrush and water stolen, arrested by La Mi...