Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

In conclusion, “Enrique’s Journey” is a moving story about an incredible love of a son spending for his mom. His dangerous odyssey to reunite with his mom is unforgettable to readers. Through the journey of a little boy, the readers aware of the value of mother’s love which is above anything else to children. Because of basing on a true story, “Enrique’s Journey” somehow reflects a great hardship of the immigrants during their trip cross into the United States. The book is worth a read. I would recommend it to some of my friends who are interested in nonfiction book.

    As pointed out, Sonia Nazario’s main purpose of writing Enrique’s is to crackdown and ultimately publicise the hardships immigrants face on their perilous journey.  She provides real life examples and first hand experiences of the beatings, rape, robberies, and so much more migrants face reaching their mothers that left them when they were young.  All in all, she seems to disagree with the brutality these kids receive and writes “Enrique’s Journey” to hopefully change this issue.

Jose Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher called it a cosmic race, la raza cosmica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the world. This mixture of races provides hyprid progency, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. An “allien” consciousness is forming.

Enrique’s Journey recounts the story of a young Honduras boy’s life and his journey to join his mother after she left Central America to find work that would ultimately benefit her family. The book describes his struggles and successes within himself and with others during his crossing of the United States border.

Enrique’s story begins when his mother, who he loved and idolized, left his sister and him for the United States. While living in Honduras, his mother, Lourdes, struggled to supply Enrique and his sister, Belky, with food, clothing, and schooling. Lourdes believed leaving her children and finding work in the United States would give her children their best future. Lourdes left Belky in the care of her sister and left Enrique in the care of his father.

The entire time I was reading Enrique’s Journey, I kept asking myself, “What would I do?” If my mother left me to go to another country when I was five, would I try to find her years later? Would the abandonment and neglect by my family members lead me to resort to drugs? Would I make an eighth attempt to cross the border of the United States after my first seven attempts failed? These, and many other questions, ran through my head as I read Enrique’s Journey, the story of a Honduran teenage boy’s attempt to reunite with his mother, Lourdes, after she leaves him for the United States. Lourdes, a single mother, leaves her children with obviously good intentions— she wants to get a better job and send money back to her children, but it is hard not to resent her a little. As I was reading, I kept trying to think of ways Lourdes could have stayed with her family in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and still have sufficiently provided for them. Maybe there could have been a way, but Lourdes obviously did not think there was. Leaving her family is not easy for Lourdes; she cannot even take a picture of Enrique with her because it would make her too sad, but she feels that this is the only way to give her children more than she had.

Children like Enrique dream of finding their mothers and living happily ever after. For weeks, perhaps months, these children and their mothers cling to romanticized notions of how they should feel toward each other. Then reality intrudes. The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying. They complain that their mothers work too hard to give them the attention they have been missing. In extreme cases, they find love and esteem elsewhere, by getting pregnant, marrying early or joining

As depicted in the story, “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario, immigrants from Central America and Mexico migrate due to one of the following reasons; poverty, abuse, or seeking their parents. As mentioned in the book, “...largest number of the unaccompanied children it catches. Of those, the counselors say, 75 percent are looking for their mothers.”(17-18); ultimately, this comes to show that these children which enter the U.S. illegally follow their impulse to seek acceptance from their mother which they feel had abandoned them. Similarly, it reveals that they were unable to get rid of their trauma of getting “left behind” revealing their lack of a parental figure. In all,what differentiates Mexican and Central American immigrants is

Luis Flores Romero was just eight years old when he embarked on a journey that would change his life for the better. He was born in Mexico with his family. His family consisted of his sister who had dark hair and was tan, as well as the father who had a mustache no one would question and the mother who looked like the daughter. When Luis’s family decided to go on this journey the emotions of the father and mother became weary, due to the fact that the town where they had lived all their life would soon be gone as well as other family and friends who would be remembered. But they knew it was worth it because they heard of a better life so they continued.

Children in Honduras are many are motherless and fatherless, having no hope of spared life to a bright future; as they live in such poverty, have no choice to join a gang to be fed, looked over, doing absolutely anything to not be homeless on the streets, dead. Honduras is known as the most dangerous states in Central America in the world, so the only decision they have is to leave before any damage can happen to them. A fellow border crosser, Enrique, was an extremely poor, abandoned, damaged child with nothing but a dream to reunite with his mother who had left him to work and send money to him to have a healthy life, but that was never enough for him. He wanted to see her physically, wanting to feel loved and appreciated for once because everyone else he had back in Honduras had either left him or is completely contagious to turn Enrique to a soft child to a gang member.

It was just another ordinary Thursday for my mother in the small town of Oratorio de Concepcion in rural El Salvador. Just like any other eight year old in 1980, she got up, brushed her teeth, quickly pulled her knotted hair into a high ponytail, and left for school. The short distance she walked was filled with the sounds of worn out shoes hitting the dirt road as children ran by excited to start a new day at the town’s only elementary school. After hours of sitting in a classroom surrounded by grey concrete bricks, once the last bell rang, she would wait at the entrance gate for her younger brother and cousin. They walked back down the dirt road together while kicking a deflated soccer ball to their home where their grandmother would be waiting for them with a little snack. My mother, her older

Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario is a gripping true story which show the trials and tribulations of a foreigner trying to find his mother in the United States. Enrique is abandoned as a child by his mother, who ends up moving to America in search of a better life. This ultimately leads to the deep loneliness Enrique feels. The story is very emotional and moving because it displays the hardships a man must go through to be with his mother. That is why it could be made into a great movie, it has very persuading cinematic features to it.

Nazario decided to create the story of Enrique’s Journey because of her housekeeper. Her house keeper told her that she had

Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have abandoned their homeland for a change. Both Sacrificing Families by Abrego and the documentary “De Nadie” by Dirdamal draw on the narratives of Central Americans to humanize the experiences of those that all willing to risk and sacrifice it all, simply to secure their own and their families’ survival. Abrego provides us with the case of El Salvador’s Civil War as one of the main reasons behind migration. It was the violence of the civil war that threatened people; therefore, migration was a response for survival. Another reason was El Salvador’s weak economy. It was the limited economic growth that only kept the poor in poverty. As captured by Abrego and Dirdamal, males who

From an award winning novelist Reyna Grande, an eye-opening memoir about life before and after illegally emigrating from Mexico to the United States. After Reyna Grande’s father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to take the dangerous journey to “El Otro Lado” or America the family’s life is turned upside down. He promised to soon return to the village with enough money to build them a dream home. However, the promise became harder and harder to believe after months of being gone turned into years. Another obstacle is thrown at the family as he asked his wife to join him, forcing Reyna and her two older siblings Mago and Carlos into the household of their malicious grandmother.