Enrique's Journey To America Quotes

Immigration affects families in many different ways. In the book “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario, family is a core element. After Enrique’s mother leaves for the U.S., the whole concept of their family gets distorted. The walking out of Enrique’s father and the abandonment of his grandmother help to disband the family even more. Enrique also threatens to repeat the same mistakes his family made with his daughter when he considers leaving her behind in Honduras. Family is the central theme in Enrique’s Journey because of his relationship and resentment with his mother, the rejection of his father and grandmother, and Enrique’s decision to leave his daughter, Jasmin, behind.

Throughout the book Enrique is troubled by his motherless childhood. This has lead him to be risky in life because he feels like he has less to live for. This is how he felt on the first few chapters and these feelings stayed with him for the rest of the book. When Enrique was in honduras mentally he was falling apart. This lead to drugs and stealing.

Enrique’s mother’s decision of leaving couldn’t have been any worse, “She walks away. Donde esta mi mami? Enrique cries, over and over. Where is my mom? His mother never returns, and that decides Enrique’s fate” (Nazario 5). His mother leaving without saying a word to him was heartbreaking because he had no idea she was leaving forever. Enrique became unhappy and had to grow up with this feeling inside him which later caused him to make poor decisions. Being left by his mother, Enrique had to stay with his grandma and “every year on Mother’s day, he [made] a heart shaped card at school and [pressed] it into her hand. “I love you very much grandma”… but she is not his mother” (Nazario 12). The growing love for his grandma caused him to consider her as his mother. Since Enrique was young and didn’t understand why his mother had left him, he blamed her for not being there for him. Nazario hopes to persuade readers to feel like they need to dwell on the topic of immigration and notice that it is still happening

(Nazario 30). The author further shows portrays immigrants asking “Why didn’t [God] protect them?” and “Who will ever marry them like this?How will they ever work, much less till a field again?” (Nazario 90-91). In these quotes, the readers are able to notice the desperation and worry the immigrants carry.

2. Selena and her brother don 't seem to be as bothered by the difficulties the father describes.  Why do they not share his feelings?

When Isabel tries to talk to him, he is so traumatized and exhausted and sick that he didn’t answer Isabel’s calls. Instead, this is what Isabel describes his silence as, “He did not hear me, or could not. He was insensible of his own name or where he was” (pg. 236).

The author creates a mood of being irritating by her “…awful grandmother…” and brothers “…Alfredito and Enrique…” who are occupied playing outside as “… a B-Fifty-two bomber…” [paragraph 5] and her grandmother with a “… long, long list of relatives … names of the dead and the living into one long prayer…” [paragraph 10]. Including, the imagery provided in the short story described the character’s actions by watching her grandmother pray while she counts her grandmother’s mustache hairs. Later, an unknown lady and man start talking to her brother asking if she could take a picture, than judging by their looks, they assume they do not speak English but only

“His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him” (Martinez, 3). And so it starts, the story of a nineteen year old Mexican- American girl named Mary (Maria; as he only chooses to call her), who helps out and eventually falls in love with Jose Luis Alegria, a Salvadoran refugee. Martínez's story of María is told against the backdrop of the 12-year civil war in El Salvador. Maria and Jose Luis develop a friendship that slowly turns into a typical novella love affair. Through their relationship, both characters are forced to confront the violence of their

She is still planning on coming home in the next few years, little does she know that she will never return to her hometown in Honduras. She calls every year, she talks to Enrique, hearing the changes in his voice as he ages. She receives begs from her mother and he children asking her to please come home, the calls never last long.

The novel, ‘Enrique’s Journey’ follows the difficult quest of a Honduras boy in search for his mother after she is forced to leave her starving family in order to find work in the United States. Lourdes, Enrique’s mother, knows she will not be able to afford to send them to school, and they would be forced to grow up in poverty as she did when she was a child. Finding work in the United States was Lourdes only way of being able to send money in order to support her family. As a boy, Enrique and his sister Belky are were also split apart from one another, leaving Enrique completely alone. Over the years, Enrique often shuffled from one home to another, eventually spending most of his young life with is grandmother, while his sister sets out to get her education and is well cared for by their aunt. After the depression sinks in for Enrique, he turns to drugs for comfort and begins to rebel against his grandmother. She eventually kicks him out and he is faced with the sobering reality of being completely alone. Frustrated with his mother, and the circumstances he faces in life, Enrique embarks on a

In the book “Enrique's Journey” Enrique is left behind by his mother, so that she can go to the States to earn money to support her family, this lead to the bases of the story being that Enrique being without his parents is left alone, and being in his fallen state he is drowning himself in his own depression in his fallen state, consequently leading him to vow to travel north to the states in order to reunite with his mother, and at a young age he set out across Mexico on the trains

At the age of five she abandon him and his sister in search of the American Dream. Enrique begins his voyage young, motivated and optimistic, when in reality travelling to America was more dangerous than he had ever anticipated. With several failed attempts, finding his mother became a nearly impossible challenge he was ready to accept. With many setbacks like drugs, love, violence, and uncertainty, his travels prolonged. Finally, in the end Enrique and his family made it to America; however their dream turned into a harsh

Many Hondurans fantasize of a lavish life in American. The sad truth is, is that is only a fantasy. Very few will make it rich in America, and that was true for Lourdes and Enrique. In America, Lourdes works a series of menial jobs that are continually disappearing. She lives in a small trailer and can never seem to raise enough money to have her children smuggled over the border.

Mother and child get to be repelled. Enrique drinks more, and spends the vast majority of his cash at topless bars. He doesn 't send enough cash to Jasmín. María Isabel sits tight for his telephone call every Sunday, and is in some cases excessively passionate, making it impossible to talk via telephone. Enrique 's family in Honduras, including his grandma, sister, and three aunties, continually censure María Isabel 's mothering. They say the child is grimy, severely dressed, and too thin. They blame María Isabel for squandering the cash Enrique sends by purchasing her mom heart and asthma pharmaceutical, and by purchasing herself hair color. María Isabel, having lived the vast majority of her life in complete neediness, feels defended in spending a touch of cash on herself and her mom. She starts to profoundly despise the obstruction of Enrique 's family.

Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban tells the story about three generations of a Cuban family and their different views provoked by the Cuban revolution. Though part of the same family, an outsider might classify them as adversaries judging by relationships between one another, the exiled family members, and the differentiations between political views. Although all of these central themes reoccur over and over throughout the narrative, family relationships lie at the heart of the tale. The relationships between these Cuban family members are for the most part ruptured by any or a combination of the above themes.