Enrique's Journey: The Story Of A Boy's Dangerous Odyssey To Reunite With His Mother (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
I learned a lot about illegal immigration from reading Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey. Nazario, a distinguished journalist for the Los Angeles Times very much takes a "features" approach in her writing, emphasizing the human stories and motivations that create the statistics.It certainly makes for a compelling read. Enrique's story starts in Honduras with his mother, Lourdes. Lourdes cannot afford to feed and educate her children, so she leaves for "el norte." Her plan is to work hard, save money, and return home. Things don't go expected: her husband marries another woman, abandons the children of this marriage to his mother, and Enrique comes to deeply resent his mother even while idolizing her. By the time he's 17, his girlfriend is pregnant, he is sniffing glue, and he has been kicked out of several households. Enrique decides to follow in his mother's footsteps. I think it would be fair to say that he feels as though without her love, he will never be complete.Migrants like Enrique travel by train. Readers from North(ern) America are predisposed to romanticize people that "ride the rails," but it's more dangerous than we might expect. In addition to gangs and bandits, Enrique has to dodge corrupt police officers and, of course, "la migra." (I lost count of how often Enrique was deported from Guatemala before he finally made it to Mexico and started getting deported again.) He is severely beaten at one point as well. Nazario emphasizes that gang rape and decapitation by train wheels are common occurrences. However, Enrique is on a quest to reunite with his mother, and he endures.It is difficult not to become discouraged while reading about all of the people that prey upon the migrants. However, Nazario highlights several instances in which people, often motivated by Jesus' teachings to care for the poor, demonstrate remarkable charity and self-sacrifice.It's also disappointing to read that life in America is not all its cracked up to be. Children that do manage to reunite with their mothers soon become disillusioned by many realities. For one, their mothers are not ideal, and they still have to work hard rather than spend time with their parents, which aggravates the children's sense of abandonment and deepens their resentment. The mothers, Nazario explains, are not inclined to apologize, viewing their actions as a sacrifice their children cannot understand. These children often turn to drugs, gangs, or pregnancy to find the love that they feel they are missing.I'm often frustrated when reading the newspaper by how easily journalists are manipulated into spreading a corporate or political message. Here, Nazario seems to have presented a balanced picture. I couldn't think of anyone that she should have spent more time interviewing, excepting perhaps policy makers. She herself follows in Enrique's footsteps, though with guards and visas. She quite effectively illustrates the hardship of this migration while also pointing out the resources that Americans spend responding to this phenomenon.In many ways, this makes for an emotional reading experience. To what extent is it informative?I would have preferred to see more discussion and consideration of Nazario's claims about immigration. She often throws out statistics about immigration, and I found myself often frustrated by the lack of detail or analysis. At times, she seems to use the term "immigrant" to refer to both legal and illegal immigrants, which I think confuses the issue. Nazario's notes are quite transparent in the sense that she explains where her claims come from, but still do not really break down how her sources conflict and compliment each other. Considering that this is not an academic text, perhaps the greatest absence is that there is no section that highlights further reading on this issue.Ultimately, I found that Enrique's Journey provided a human context for a form of migration that most newspapers outline with statistics. I did find myself thinking that I could understand why so many people would risk so much to travel illegally into the land of the free. And I was impressed by her decision to travel the rails, even if she was guarded.
I honestly wanted to love this book. I wanted to get lost in the stories of these immigrants. I wanted to feel emotionally connected to them. I wanted to cry. I wanted to smile. I wanted to feel relief. I wanted to feel SOMETHING! Unfortunately, Enrique’s Journey (2006) falls well short of being considered even mediocre in my opinion.First off, I don’t want anyone to think I’m some heartless monster. I sympathize with Central and South American people who illegally immigrate to the United States. They’re forced into a lose-lose situation (a catch twenty two in a sense). If they stay in their home countries, they get to be with their loved ones, but they’re unable to provide the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. If they enter the U.S. illegally, they’re able to make enough money to send back home to support their families, but they run the risk of never seeing their loved ones again—not to mention the risk of death or injury during the dangerous journey up north.So you’re probably wondering how I couldn’t enjoy a book with such an interesting and emotionally charged topic. To put it simply, I enjoyed the ideas of the book, but I didn’t enjoy the way the book was presented.Now, I’ve never read anything else by the author, Sonia Nazario, and I’m sure she’s a wonderful journalist; however, I found her writing completely uninspired in Enrique’s Journey. Like I said, I tried to get into the story, but I found Nazario’s prose uninteresting ad downright boring. Granted, there were a few parts of the book that had me on the edge of my seat—especially when Enrique crosses the Rio Grande—but on the whole, I thought her writing style was too straightforward (for lack of a better term). Take this paragraph from page 237 as an example:“It is spring 2004. Enrique has been gone for four years. Enrique and María Isabel have not spoken for more than four months, since last Christmas. Enrique calls his sister Belky. Go find María Isabel, he tells her. Tell her she must call me.”I don’t know anyone who would consider this “good” writing—and this continuous throughout the whole book! I felt as if I were reading Nazario’s initial outline for the story, as if she spewed out all of the things she wanted to say and published it without reworking the syntactic and paragraph structures to create flow and coherence. The story is basically a long list of actions that drone on and on and on and on.I did enjoy the last section of the book titled Afterword: Women, Children, and the Immigration Debate. Nazario does a thorough job discussing the highly politicized immigration issue in the U.S., and she highlights some troubling, yet thought-provoking statistics—for example, the fact that “nearly half of all Central American children who arrive in the United States after the age of ten don’t graduate from high school.” Unfortunately, this 20-page section of the book does not salvage the other 247 pages.
What do You think about Enrique's Journey: The Story Of A Boy's Dangerous Odyssey To Reunite With His Mother (2007)?
"Enrique's Journey" completely challenged my views on immigration and helped me identify the challenges that I face as a teacher. Sonia Nazario begins the book by providing a background of information on the immigration policies of the 80's and 90's. She then takes us to Honduras where a mother is about to leave her children so that she can come to the US and have a better life in order to provide a better life for her children. As the years go by, the mother is faced with the decision to risk her life and return to Honduras to see her children or have them risk their lives attempting to cross the US border. Her children slowly lose the respect and admiration that they had for their mother as they grow up in a country filled with corruption fueled by drug and gang violence. The story then takes us through the hardships of immigration as one of her children takes his chances and leaves Honduras for the US. Enrique's Journey is really the story of hardship and struggle of a family trying to make their dreams come true. Enrique faces the most difficult of circumstances traveling alone through the jungles of Guatemala, El Salvador and then Mexico. He joins thousands of pilgrims making the same journey on top of trains, on foot and all while avoiding the immigration agents, police officers and gang members who torture immigrants during the journey. In his attempts to reach the border, he learns about his own weaknesses, and the difficulties that his own mother faced when she made the journey. I truly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wanted to learn about the hardships of immigration. This book made me appreciate what my own mother went through when she left her country at the age of 17. I also connected with all of my students and their families who are forced to leave their loved ones and start new lives in a foreign country. I rate it 5 out of 5 stars. A must read for everyone!
—Ms. Montaño
This is a book based on a Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles, first appearing in the Los Angeles Times. It was recommended to me by many people as a story that would put a human face on the immigration crisis that has taken center stage in our newspapers and television news these days. The author experienced many things that her hero, Enrique (no last names are given to any living person to protect them from possible capture by immigration authorities) experienced so that she could truly relate his story. He made nine attempts to travel from Honduras to the United Statets to find the mother who left him and his sister when he was five years old. She was unable to feed her children and she left to seek a better life in the U.S. so she could send money home so they could have food, clothes and a chance for an education. This is a heartbreaking story of a young boy's search for love and acceptance.During the first part of the book, I wanted to give it to every person standing with a sign shouting hateful things at buses full of frightened children. To have them read the conditions in their home countries which drove them to make this harrowing journey, to find out what the journey actually entails and realize how desperate you have to be to even attempt it. Physical violence and rape are just one aspect of it. Children lose body parts in accidents with moving trains, there is travel across the desert with no food or water, hunted like dogs,...etc., etc.Enrique was caught and sent back to Honduras eight times. On his ninth try, he finally made it and actually found his mother in South Carolina, but this is not a "happily ever after" story. The difficulties children and parents face after a separation of years is incredible. The second half of the book talks about that, about statistics, about the new life in a new country and I have to admit that my head was spinning before I finished it. I no longer knew whether this migration was a good thing or a bad thing. You look at the face of Enrique at his kindergarten graduation, wanting only for his mother to be there. And then you watch what he goes through in the intervening years. The end of the book is ambiguous. We know where Enrique is, but we don't know where he will be after that.The one thing this book did for me was to make me want to sponsor a child in Honduras through Compassion International. I found Brayan, 12 years old (the age Enrique was when he decided he would save money so he could find his mother), living with his grandmother (like Enrique's sister did after their mother left) and I figured I can't make conditions better for any of this, but maybe I can help one child have a better, safer life. I highly recommend reading this book. It's not a feel good book and I doubt that anybody will find any black and white solution in it, but it definitely puts a new level of understanding on what is happening on our borders right now, and should make anyone hurling epithets at immigrant children feel ashamed of themselves (but I doubt if it will).
—Bev
I absolutely loved this book and recommend it for everyone out there. It doesn't matter what you think or feel about the illegal immigration issue, you will never be the same after reading this book. It opened up my eyes and helped me understand some of the people that I encounter every single day. It also made me realize, yet again, how good I really do have it. What would lead a mother to leave her children to come to a foreign land, to face death and struggles beyond her imagination? What would a son give to see his mother again? Read it-you won't regret it!
—Cammi
