During that time, I spent a total of six months, in 2000 and in 2003, in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and North Carolina. The initial travel was done for a newspaper series for the Los Angeles Times. Subsequent travel and interviews would expand the series into this book. I found Enrique in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in May 2000. I spent two weeks with him there and rejoined him at the end of his journey in North Carolina. Then, based on extensive interviews with him in Mexico and during three visits to North Carolina, I retraced each step he had taken, beginning at his home in Honduras. Between May and September 2000, I spent three months working my way north through Mexico just as Enrique had, riding the tops of seven freight trains and interviewing people Enrique had encountered, along with dozens of other children and adults making the same journey. I walked around immigration checkpoints and hitchhiked with truckers, exactly as Enrique had. To retrace Enrique’s steps, I traversed thirteen of Mexico’s thirty-one states.
