Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

Enrique’s journey from Honduras to the U.S. unveils the innate loyalty of a loving child to their mother and presents the dangers that a migrant faces on the road with consistent angst; nevertheless, it supports the idea that compassion shown by some strangers can boost the retreating confidence within a person. In Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” he seeks the beacon of light that all migrants hope to encounter; “El Norte.” Like many children before him, it is the answer to the problems of a hard life. While being hunted down “like animals” leading to “seven futile attempts,” he is

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 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.

In the novel Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario demonstrates the onerous journey of illegal immigrants. Sonia Nazario aims for the readers to make them understand what most of the immigrants go through during their journey to the United States. By appealing to ethos and pathos throughout the book, Sonia Nazario portrays the path that Enrique undergoes to reunite with his mother.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Enrique’s Journey focuses and sheds more light and understanding on the aspects and challenges of extreme poverty, family abandonment, systematic issues of an immigration system and what one has to go through in the face of adversity. The book centers on Enrique who starts out as a young boy living in extreme poverty in Honduras with his family. Enrique is an older adolescent, Hispanic, poverty economic status, unemployed most times, and is in a relationship with one child. This case study will further look at Enrique’s personal experiences from a young child up to young adulthood and how that has shaped his development has a person from coming from such difficult environmental circumstances. This will also look at the different environmental perspectives in the micro, mezzo and macro level when pertaining to effects on human behavior.