Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15441 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-02
• Released on: 2007-01-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780812971781
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Soon to be turned into an HBO dramatic series, Nazario's account of a 17-year-old boy's harrowing attempt to find his mother in America won two Pulitzer Prizes when it first came out in the Los Angeles Times. Greatly expanded with fresh research, the story also makes a gripping book, one that viscerally conveys the experience of illegal immigration from Central America. Enrique's mother, Lourdes, left him in Honduras when he was five years old because she could barely afford to feed him and his sister, much less send them to school. Her plan was to sneak into the United States for a few years, work hard, send and save money, then move back to Honduras to be with her children. But 12 years later, she was still living in the U.S. and wiring money home. That's when Enrique became one of the thousands of children and teens who try to enter the U.S. illegally each year. Riding on the tops of freight trains through Mexico, these young migrants are preyed upon by gangsters and corrupt government officials. Many of them are mutilated by the journey; some go crazy. The breadth and depth of Nazario's research into this phenomenon is astounding, and she has crafted her findings into a story that is at once moving and polemical. Photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School Seeking to understand why Latina single mothers leave their children to come to the U.S., and why many children undertake the hazardous journey to reunite with them, Nazario traced one family's story. Enrique was determined to find his mother, who left him in Honduras when he was five. At 16, after seven attempts to make it to Texas, robbed by bandits or police, beaten, jailed, and deported again and again, he finally reached the Rio Grande and earned enough to call her. She sent him money to pay a coyote to smuggle him across the border and the two were reunited, but they are strangers now, their relationship strained. Meanwhile, Enrique's girlfriend in Honduras bore his child. Ultimately, she joined him, leaving their three-year-old daughter behind. Mothers leave their children to send back money for better food, clothing, and schooling, yet years of separation strain family ties. The author retraced Enrique's journey by traveling on top of trains, hitchhiking, taking buses, facing the dangers the teen faced. Photographs and interviews with him, family members, other children, and those who provide aid along the way document the hazards of migration. Descriptions of rapes, beatings, and jailing of immigrant children and accounts of those who suffered loss of limbs falling from freight trains are graphic and disturbing. But no one can doubt the authenticity of this reporting. Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Joseph Campbell would recognize Enrique's Journey. It's the stuff of myth. A lone child embarks on a terrible journey through a landscape of monsters and villains. His goal is noble, almost chivalric -- he travels through hardship and dangers to find his mother, lost in the far mysteries of the north. To add another layer to the story, it contains a vehicle right out of a fairy tale: a Fury-haunted freight train known as El Tren de la Muerte -- the Train of Death.

Sonia Nazario, however, is not writing myths: Enrique's Journey is true.

The story begins in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where Enrique's mother, Lourdes, supported several children by selling tortillas and gum on the street. It was a small step up from begging or picking garbage to live. One day, Lourdes saw visions of Las Vegas on a customer's television screen. It was a revelation -- she could risk everything and try to earn enough money to save her children from grinding poverty. But to do so, she had to leave them behind, like thousands of mothers before her. And like thousands of those mothers' children, when Enrique's sorrow grew too great to bear, he followed her north. When his mother left, Enrique was 5 years old. He made his own journey 11 years later.

Told in an immediate, sometimes flashy, present tense, the story clacks along, seeming to accelerate as we read. The details of the journey are at turns astounding and wearying, ghastly and lyrical. Nazario has tried to pace the book like a good novel, with climaxes building in force and dread the farther Enrique travels -- and the closer he gets to the United States. One knows the whole time that his trouble will really start only when he reaches the border.

Just 16, Enrique clambered aboard the first train out of Tegucigalpa. It carried him into a Latino hell as blood-red as those found in Cormac McCarthy's fever dreams. He was immediately assaulted by violent men who fashioned a noose from a coat sleeve and tried to lynch him, then beat him and threw him from the train. Bloody and ill, he staggered barefoot down the rails, falling into the hands of hard people who offered no succor. The surreal absurdity of the Third World seemed to be trying to eat him alive.

The grim details accrue. "In Las Anonas, the Red Cross retrieves a seventeen-year-old Honduran boy who lost his left leg," writes Nazario. "They pick up three immigrants mutilated by the train in as many days. One loses a leg, another his hand; the third has been cut in half. Sometimes the ambulance workers must pry a flattened hand or leg off the rails to move the migrant." Enrique thought things were bad at home, but he could never have imagined a journey like this. When Enrique asked one rancher for a drink, he was told, "Get lost." If the riders were not careful atop the train, even in sleep, low branches could snag them and catapult them to their dooms.

How does Nazario know all this? In 2000, she received a phone call from a humanitarian group tending to incarcerated, undocumented entrants. She met Enrique in Nuevo Laredo and spent the next two weeks listening to his story. She traveled to Tegucigalpa, boarding the same train and repeating Enrique's journey so she could experience what he had. And yet, despite what must have been a harrowing trip of her own, Nazario keeps the focus on Enrique, a microcosm of the massive exodus pouring over the borders of our nations -- plural. Enrique's journey, after all, is not simply a story of "illegal immigration" into the United States; he first illegally entered Mexico through its southern border. Mexico is even less willing to harbor these desperate Central Americans than we are. Enrique's suffering and bravery become universal, and one cannot fail to be moved by the desperation and sheer strength of spirit that guides these lonely wanderers into the night-lands.

Of course, the border will continue to trouble the dreams of anyone who is paying attention. Nazario points out, rightly, that the median age of the lone traveler is dropping. The face of illegal immigration shifts constantly: Now that all the men are gone, as some villagers joke in Mexico, the women have followed. Nazario writes in her preface: "Each year, an estimated 700,000 immigrants enter the United States illegally. Since 2000, nearly a million additional immigrants annually, on average, have arrived legally, or become legal residents. . . . In recent decades, the increase in divorce and family disintegration in Latin America has left many single mothers without the means to feed and raise their children." No one knows the exact number of mothers coming north without their children, but a University of Southern California study shows that 82 percent of nannies and one in four housecleaners are women with children left alone in their home countries. And now that these mothers have come north, their children are following. It is now common to find 15-year-old walkers caught in the border patrol nets. But this is a catch-and-release sport, and these fingerlings are tossed back into the bigger pond of Mexico to try their migration again.

Why is this allowed to happen? The undocumented worker can be hired for wages far lower than the American worker; moreover, their presence tends to depress the minimum wage. They lower production costs, they serve as union busters, they save money in terms of benefits, and they are a pliant and compliant workforce. The paradigm has shifted from under-the-table cash payments to formalized employment. Any border patrol agent can explain to you how money withheld from the undocumented worker's paycheck pours into state and federal coffers. For example, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, illegal workers donate $6.4 billion annually to Social Security. But these illegal workers will never collect benefits from that program. On the other side of the tattered fence, the Mexican government appreciates the stunning $17 billion in remittance money -- money sent home from that maid who cleaned your house, that fast-food cook who salted your fries -- that arrives each year.

Why does the problem continue? Follow the money. Everybody wins -- except the abandoned children. Who can blame them for trying to save themselves the only way they've been shown? The U.S. government's slipshod attempts to bolster security at the borders have made the passage more deadly. In the madness of the harsher border, drug lords and gangsters rule the day. Any border patrol agent will tell you that criminal elements are on the rise -- as are violence and the terrible toll of deaths due to heat, cold, misadventure and homicide. The death train is running all night, and it makes stops in Tegucigalpa, Mexico City, Juarez, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.

It would be unfair to spoil the end of the adventure. But it is safe to say that Enrique's Journey is among the best border books yet written. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Los Angeles Times, it is a stirring and troubling book about a magnificent journey undertaken by a lone boy in a terrible, terrible place. It's not about invading the United States or stealing social services or jobs from American workers. Enrique's Journey is about love. It's about family. It's about home.

Reviewed by Luis Alberto Urrea
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating
This is a fascinating book concerning the flood of young Central Americans coming to America and the treacherous journey they must undertake. But it looks at the influx of illegal aliens into America in a new light. These youths who travel by train up to 1,600 miles north through Mexico are coming to find their Mother's who have left them years ago to have money to support their kids back in Nicaragua, Honduras or Guatemala. Years before these mothers faced raising kids as a single mother as the tight Catholic families in these countries are pulling apart. With limited jobs, these women smuggle to America and send money back. But the emotional toll on these kids is traumatic and many choose to journey to America, many at an age much too young.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author rode the trains and researched completely the significant danger in the first state of Chiapas where the risk of being robbed, raped or killed is the greatest. The next state shows the true spirit of the Mexican people as many bring food and clothing to this rag-tag group of refugees. Great detail is spent describing areas to avoid and relationships with smugglers, police and "la migra", the immigration police.

The final part of the journey across the river to America is also traumatic and great detail is spent on different ways of crossing, many involving paying "coyotes" significant money to cross with no guarantees they will not be robbed.

But this book does not end there as finally Enrique finds his mother in North Carolina. But is she really a "Mother" since she hasn't seen her son in about 10 years? Obviously their relationship is unique and the book delves in to the difficulty.

You will be educated on a significant human rights issue effecting America. On so many levels this is a book that needs to be read and whatever your current thoughts on immigration on our southern border, this will "humanize" the issue, give you greater insight and probably change or soften your position. Is there an answer? Probably not. We are blessed in America and these people want just a small piece of this dream and are willing to risk everything to change the future of their family.

I do have one complaint about the book. The ending. I would have liked a better or more complete resolution. But this isn't fiction, it's real life. Read this book to learn. It is a fast read as it is so engrossing.

Moving, Gripping
In an excellent book based on the famous news feature series by the same journalist, the trials and tribulations of immigrant populations in economic, social, cultural, and emotional contexts is well highlighted. It is sheer coincidence that I happen to read this book the same day the US Senate reached a "compromise" on immigration reform. Lost in political debates of immigration, is the sheer human facets of the people involved. This book (just as the series did a few years ago) provides a human side to relate to when politicians/"experts" debate about immigration. The author is very careful not to condone illegal immigration by focusing on the human tolls of the people trying to get to the U.S. in any form, irrespective how miserably the previous several attempts have failed. Using the story of one teenager's quest for finding his mother as the central theme, the book explores the motivation of those who make such seemingly improbable decisions, the dangers of the travel itself, the role (or lack thereof) of governments, religious/charity organizations, communities along the travel route, and the misery from which these 'optimists' are trying to escape from. Any amount of objective analysis will not take away the immense emotional impact the book will have on a reader - the strains of motherhood and the pensive childhood of those left behind are exposed without any sensationalism. The sheer gravity of the story is compelling enough.

Written in a simple, yet powerful, narrative style, the author clearly enables the reader to imagine the journey described in the book. An absolute must-read, and perhaps one of the best non-fiction books. You will never view immigration as a political issue again (whether thats good or bad, is upto you)..guaranteed.

Compelling and deeply moving
Every year, thousands of Central American children journey up through Mexico on "the train of death" to join their mothers in the U.S. Along the way, they are robbed, raped, and murdered by gangs, maimed by the trains, and generously aided by many who are very poor themselves. Nazario, a pulitzer prize winning reporter for the LA Times, spent months traveling with these children at great personal risk. She tells their compelling and deeply moving story with a clear and simple style.