Review by Ana Rosa
Somewhere, in a small town in Central America or Mexico, a child is studying a photograph of his mother who left for “el Norte” when he was barely old enough to remember. But he does remember. Perhaps he will sleep in her bed tonight, or bury his face among her discarded dresses, or even attempt to conjure her memory by daubing on her perfume, as if the lingering scent could call her back. But the years pass and his mother never returns, so the child can’t help but wonder if she ever really loved him. As time passes, the loneliness and longing for his mother never leaves him. So one day, he sets out to find her on a solo journey that will take him thousands of miles from home, traversing the continent entirely on his own. He will carry with him just this worn and much-handled photograph, along with a single piece of paper containing his mother’s phone number in some distant American city. To reach her, he will hitch a ride on “El Tren de la Muerte” — The Train of Death —along with thousands of other children like him, all searching for their mothers or trying to escape the grinding poverty back home. During the journey, some of these children will be swept off the trains onto the tracks, where many will lose their lives or their limbs. Others will be hunted down like animals by police and violent gangs of thugs and thieves. Most are likely to be beaten, robbed, bullied, and possibly raped (especially if the child is a girl), and all of them will be frightened, hungry, thirsty, cold and desperately alone. Many will make the trip more than once — Enrique attempted the same journey seventeen times — and all due to a desperate longing to be united with the mother who left them behind, who is now little more than a distant memory — an idealized image in a photograph.
This is Enrique’s story and the story of thousands of immigrant children like him. Sonia Nazario tells their stories in a very intimate and moving portrayal of one child’s story in Enrique’s Journey. She informs us that some 48,000 children from throughout Latin America attempt this dangerous crossing into the United States every year. Most come looking for their mothers, who were forced out of necessity to leave their children behind while they look for work in the United States. Some of these mothers find jobs taking care of other mothers’ children and cleaning their homes.
I remember meeting one such mother when I worked for a refugee organization in San Francisco. She was a Peruvian living with her five-year-old daughter in the Tenderloin, one of the seediest and most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. She had left a son behind in a small pueblo near Lima when he was little, and he had grown to be a teenager in her absence. She hadn’t seen Ramon in over five years, but of course, she thought about him all the time. Elena and I met twice a week to help her adjust to American culture and learn English for her job. One day, I got to her apartment after walking past the numerous drug dealers and prostitutes that inhabit the Tenderloin. Her daughter Yosselin cautiously answered the door. When I walked in, Elena was sitting on the floor, crying and cradling the phone with both hands. Her son had just called her to tell her that he was near the border of Mexico and Arizona. He was preparing to cross over. Elena was frantic. Even with my limited Spanish, I could tell that she was trying to convince him not to cross. “Es demasiado peligroso!” (too dangerous), she told her son. (Thousands of immigrants die every year crossing the merciless Arizona desert.) Ramon made it safely to his mother’s side in San Francisco, but thousands of immigrant children never do. I can never forget the events of that day. It was a tremendous education for me. And this is a story that gets played out every day in the immigrant community — yet, it’s a story seldom told in the mainstream media.
This is truly a remarkable story. Sonia Nazario won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, which was first serialized in the L.A. Times. To get to the heart of the reasons why immigrants choose to make this dangerous crossing, Nazario undertook the same treacherous journey herself. She went from Tegucigalpa in Honduras to North Carolina, riding the rails on “El Tren de la Muerte” along with hundreds of other children. Following in Enrique’s footsteps, she finally meets his mother, whom she interviews, along with the family he left behind. Enrique’s Journey has been compared to Tom Sawyer or an American-style Odyssey by some critics. But this is a true story. And it’s a story you should know — the kind of story that seldom gets told. If I could recommend just one book that everyone should read, it would be this one. Enrique’s Journey provides something often missing from the debate around immigration: a very real and human perspective on the lives of immigrants in the United States — a study in courage and sacrifice.
