Sexual Assault In Enrique's Journey By Sonia Nazario

The story “Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros describes the lives of Mexicans in a Chicago neighborhood. She depicts the life that women endure as Latino wives through her portrayal of the protagonist, Cleofilas. For Cisneros being a Mexican-American has given her a chance to see life from two different cultures. In addition, Cisneros has written the story from a woman’s perspective, illustrating the types of conflicts many women face as Latino wives. This unique paradigm allows the reader to examine the events and characters using a feminist critical perspective.

Enrique’s Journey written by Sonia Nazario is a work of non-fiction that follows the journey of a young Central American boy to find his mother Lourdes, who left him at the age of five. Before Nazario introduces Enrique she discusses the experiences she put herself through to gain a better understanding of the travels a migrant child and adult go through in their conquest to make it to the United States. While going through the trials that many migrants put themselves through Nazario learns the stories of different migrants and begins her search for a migrant child to bring attention to their story and create awareness about the situation children migrating are enduring to find their mothers in the United States. Nazario traces Enrique’s steps to experience his full journey and to describe the details in depth upon writing about the journey Enrique took to find his mother in the United States.

Social standards may confine individuals from pursuing their own personal interests. Through the relationship between societal standards and individual interests, Sandra Cisneros’ short story, “Woman Hollering Creek,” introduces the roles of men and women in a Hispanic culture. The protagonist, Cleofilas Hernandez, is trapped in an abusive relationship with her newly-wed husband, Juan Pedro. However, Cleofilas tolerates the toxic relationship due to the social norms of her society, which reveals that the Hispanic culture revolves around a patriarchal society and that women have to be submissive to their husbands. As the story progresses, Cleofilas abandons the gender norm to lead an independent lifestyle.

There are many vulnerable populations within the United States. One of the many vulnerable populations are undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants also known as illegal immigrants according to Wikipedia (2016) is defined as “the migration of people across national boarders in a way that violates the immigration laws of the destination country” (para 1). The United States of America has one of the largest population of immigrants. In this paper, I will be discussing the multiple stressors related to undocumented immigrants as well as the programs that can be used to help alleviate those stressors.

hese women from the book “ Women Hollering Creek”, were abused and taken advantage of their own men. Sandra Cisneros explores the stories “Never marry a mexican”, Woman Hollering Creek”, and “One holy night”. The women in this stories made a mistake by being with the wrong men in their life. They became careless when they met their own men. These girls have lost their respect for themselves. They have destroyed their own self, for the guy who never really loves them. No one stood up for their rights as a woman. Love and hate made these women vulnerable.

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.

Nazario spent a total of five years reporting. To create Enrique’s Journey, she made sure to learn absolutely everything about the trip. She spent time conducting many interviews with migrant children who rode the train and recent immigrants. She spoke with Enrique and his family, and other migrants who made the same journey. She conducted hundreds of interviews with priests, government officials, shelter workers, and police officers (270). She verified dialogue and interactions by confirming them with other sources. Facts were established based on extensive research. Statistics were gathered from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics and the Pew Hispanic Center (272).

Immigration trauma has different phases, but generally begins years before the individual leaves the country. The person is usually leaving conditions deemed intolerable; poverty, unemployment, and violence, and fear for one's safety are common. The immigrant then has to endure acculturative stress, the loss of social support, and displacement. A recent study asserts that 11% of all immigrant Latinos reported political violence exposure and 76% described additional lifetime traumas (Foster, 2001). Armed with this knowledge, the clinician assessing Mario and Mary would want to screen Mario for trauma,

For many years, people from all over the world have come to the United States seeking a better life for themselves, their spouse, their children and even their children's children. However, not every immigrant comes into this country legally and many of these illegal immigrants are poor, uneducated and may be carrying contagious diseases. They may arrive here via human trafficking, smuggling or other methods. There is one thing we know for sure that many of them choose to remain silence when they become victims. The three main reasons they become invisible victims are they are not aware they are victimized, they don't know the right way to ask for help and they are afraid to be fired or even deported.

The other main character of the story is Adelina a girl who leaves her home in California to go to Mexico. Adelina is driven out of the United States because her family won’t accept her relationship with her lover, so they both decide to go to Tijuana, a city in Mexico. Not much is said about Adelina’s experienced in the United States. What we do know is that she had a family that loved her, but she decided to leave it all behind to be together with her boyfriend Gerardo. In Mexico she finds nothing but shame and misery because Gerardo could not find a job and the only way for them to make money was for her to be a prostitute. Besides having to expose her body, Adelina, is physically and emotionally mistreated by her boyfriend until it finally leads to her death when she tells him that she is going back to the United States with Juana.

A life in the city of Seguin, Texas was not as easy as Cleofilas, the protagonist of the story thought it would be. The author, Cisneros describes the life women went through as a Latino wife through Cleofilas. Luckily, Cisneros is a Mexican-American herself and had provided the opportunity to see what life is like from two window of the different cultures. Also, it allowed her to write the story from a woman’s point of view, painting a vision of the types of problems many women went through as a Latino housewife. This allows readers to analyze the characters and events using a feminist critical view. In the short story “Women Hollering Creek” Sandra Cineros portrays the theme of expectation versus reality not only through cleofilas’s thoughts but also through her marriage and television in order to display how the hardship of women in a patriarchal society can destroy a woman’s life.

The story illustrates the overlapping influences of women’s status and roles in Mexican culture, and the social institutions of family, religion, economics, education, and politics. In addition, issues of physical and mental/emotional health, social deviance and crime, and social and personal identity are

Over the last quarter of a decade, illegal immigration and enforcement have dominated mainstream policy making (Meisnner, Kerwin, Chishti & Bergeron, 2013). There has been a lot of public debate too, on whether or not the successive governments of the US have been able to effectively address illegal immigration and its enforcement thereof. However, as Meisnner et al. (2013) state, in the wake of the terror attacks of 2001, a paradigm shift appears to have been established, with the enforcement of illegal immigration taking a de facto stance. As such, as Dreby (2012) intimates, the number of immigrants who have been deported or removed from the US since 2001 has risen from 190, 000 to close to 400, 000. Considering the fact that there are more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in America, deportation on such a large scale without a doubt will result in a continuous chain reaction. One such consequence, as The New York University School of Law (2012) states, is that families are inherently broken apart by the removal of a family member. Additionally, there are other psychological and psychosocial impacts on families that are far-reaching. Because of these and many other compelling factors, this paper argues that the US should work to prevent deportations, rather than enforce them.

Although events such as San Bernardino in 2015 provide anecdotal evidence of immigrants committing acts of extreme violence, these events are extremely rare. Nonetheless, tragedies such as these inevitably grab headlines and capture the attention of millions of Americans across the country. Tragedies such as the attack in San Bernardino hold strong emotional appeal to proponents for restrictive immigration policy. However, these rare and uncontrollable events should not provide the base of logic for America’s national immigration policy as they are not a proxy for immigrant behavior as a whole. Various statistics regarding crime among immigrants may reveal an underlying reason for lower crime rates, which is that the majority of immigrants understand the implications of committing a crime and know that it would not be in their best interest as a new member of the country they wish to call home. Natives, moreover, have crime rates five times that of immigrants. This demonstrates the potential positive externalities that immigrants contribute to the social sphere by lowering the crime rate and acting as models within urban America.

Many immigrants come to the United States in search of the opportunity to have a better life. They have the willingness to work, seek out educational opportunities and to be productive members and contributors to society. Rarely do you find those instances where immigrants come here to take, destroy all that our nation has built and established. When you hear the current administration in the media use fear, as part of cultural destructiveness to destroy how our society view other cultures and diminish the worth of individuals within their own Netting, Kettner, McMurtry, Thomas, (pg. 64, 2012). By doing that the narrative around immigrants’ changes, people start to believe that immigrants are here committing crimes and a higher rate in comparison to Americans that are born here; For instance, during one of Donald’s Trump 2016 campaign speeches he said “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re