Javier Zamora is the author of the memoir, and his nine-year-old self is the memoir’s first-person narrator and protagonist. A little more than two decades after the events narrated in the memoir, Zamora had spent little to no time reflecting on what he had done and what had happened to him. It was through therapy that he was first able to confront those memories and write about them. Zamora has lived in the US for more than double the time he lived in El Salvador, but he wasn’t able to get a green card until 2018, which meant he had to grow up with the fear of being deported for most of his life. Zamora is an accomplished individual; he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. He also lived most of this life in the US as an undocumented immigrant. His life and work show the complexities of the immigrant experience in the US.

The narrator-character Javier is a nine-year old boy living with his grandparents and his aunt Mali in La Herradura, El Salvador.