"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.
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.
He 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.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States."
Great story. At times the novel purposefully felt like it was telling Enrique's story in the larger context of the 45,000 children who make this journey every year. It combined equally balanced vantage points on the immigration debate, while still giving the whole thing a face and a story, rather than just a bunch of numbers.
The novel, for me at least, also helped to personalize a lot of the things I've tended to gloss over during the last year. Things like hearing people's journeys to the states whenever on a bus for more than 2 hours, or young kids selling stuff during the middle of the week when they should be in school. It now seems to carry a lot more resonance. Now it seems as if everyone has a story hidden away. A story about relatives and loved one's abroad, or knowledge of the journey itself, and if statistics have anything to say about it they probably do.
Enrique's Journey also helps to explain, especially with regard to Central American migrants, how long the journey to the United States truly is. Many Honduran and Nicaraguan immigrants are turned back multiple times long before ever making it to Mexico City, much less the border of US. Overall, the book was a personalizing and informative. Good stuff.
Here is the link to the Pulitzer winning article from the Los Angeles Times: http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6694
Quick side note: Best article of the year, Believeland, a story about the rise, fall, and resurgence/perpetual failure of Cleveland sports told through the lens of varying intersections within the city. good good journalism, history, psychological profile, urban planning and sports story all rolled into one.
