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Summary:
In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade. Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her. Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States. Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
decent story, could use some editing of the unpleasant parts
Customer Rating:
About the first third of the book is endless stats about kids getting beaten, mutilated, raped, killed, etc. on their journeys north. But once you get past a lot of that, it was a pretty moving albeit mostly predictable story.
Justice and scholarship in Enrique's Journey
Customer Rating:
Enrique's Journey is a quick read because it is a fascinating story. I got through it over the last three evenings. Besides telling the story of Enrique's journey, the author addresses two important themes: justice and scholarship, but first the story.
The author, Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now writes for the Los Angeles Times, learns from her maid about the difficult journeys that people from Central America undertake in order to find work in the United States. As she investigates more she discovers that mothers often leave their young children at home in Honduras with family members, make the treacherous journey to the States, and then find low-paying jobs that nevertheless allow them to send remittances home so that their families can have a better life. The irony is, of course, that the children who are left behind miss their mothers even though they benefit from the money their parents send home. Enrique is one of those children who is left behind by his mother and then makes up his mind that he will go to find her where she works in North Carolina. A second irony is that to do so, he leaves his own pregnant girl friend, Maria Isabel, at home so that his daughter Jasmin also becomes fatherless. Once he finds his mother his relationship with her becomes stormy due to his pent up resentment at her years of absence. He does get his own job in North Carolina as a painter, and sends remittances back to Maria Isabel. Finally, he is able to bring Maria Isabel to visit him and they then plan to return together to Honduras to raise Jasmin together.
There is a lot of unfairness in the lives of Enrique and his mother. This includes corrupt officials in Central America and Mexico, discrimination in the United States against Central Americans, and discrimination in Mexico against the travelling Central American migrants. The important point we take away, however, is that the human spirit is strong and can triumph over injustice. This is good news for people all over the world.
Nazario's scholarship is impressive. She worked over a period of five years to document, research, and write this story. She travelled for six months in 2000 and 2003 and between May and September 2000 Nazario spent three months travelling the trains and buses on the same dangerous migrant routes from Honduras to the United States.
An Eye-Opening Ordeal
Customer Rating:
Most Americans would be shocked to know that the most difficult part of an illegal immigrant's journey from Central America to the USA is not avoiding the USA's border patrol, but a life threatening journey through Mexico. This is an eye-opening true story. The author has done extensive research, the story is the stuff of a Hollywood movie, very suspenseful, to the point where the journey is so full of obstacles that the reader will end up rooting for Enrique, a Honduran teenager attempting to re-unite with his mother already illegally in the U.S. The other surprise presented in this book is the author's social concern that Central American families are torn apart when parents go North to find work in the USA.. A deal where the material gain is at the expense of losing contact with one parent. After this book, the next time the reader sees a group of Hispanic laborers , you can not help but wonder, Have any of them gone through this similar harrowing experience?
Very good service
Customer Rating:
The service was good. I got my book before i expected it. the person who sold it to me was very nice. i love the book... =]
A story that needed to be told...but not like this!
Customer Rating:
I picked this up, only to put it down after a few pages. The author's rather melodramatic approach made the story seem more like a cheap, badly-written novel than a nonfiction account. I just didn't see any sense that the author had 'connected' with the subject, and so I couldn't connect with it, either.
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