Thesis For Enrique's Journey

Paul Celis

Dharan Jaisankar

CHI 010 A01

Enrique’s Journey Paper Rough Draft Sonia Nazario’s groundbreaking nonfiction book Enrique’s Journey brings to the forefront the reality of undocumented immigration, giving the reader insight into the true stories behind immigration through the story of Enrique, a sixteen-year-old Honduran boy who sets off on a perilous journey to reunite with his estranged mother, Lourdes, who left him eleven years earlier seeking work and a better future for her and her family in the United States. The heartwrenching exposé delves into the realities behind people’s compulsion to make the deadly trip from Central America to the United States while emphasizing the numerous challenges that undocumented immigrants face,

Faced with the prospect of having to feed two children off the meager income she earned in Honduras, Lourdes is faced with a self-imposed ultimatum, either live in constant poverty or seek the better opportunities that the United States seemingly offered, with the hope that in the future, she would be able to send back money to her children back in Honduras. Her reasoning shows that many immigrants do not make their journey out of want or greed, but out of absolute necessity, a desire to pull their children out of poverty and give them a better life. However, she is unable to return to Honduras for fear of not being able to come back to her sliver of security in America and coming home empty-handed. All the while, Enrique is similarly faced with poverty, as after being abandoned by his estranged father, he must provide for his grandmother, who he is living with “Enrique loves to climb his grandmother’s guayaba tree, but there is no more time for play… After school, Enqirue sells tamales and plastic bags of fruit juice from a bucket.” (Nazario, 11) Unfortunately, he is unable to escape the harsh cycle of poverty introduced to him at birth, thus setting the stage for his own journey at sixteen years of

A decade of separation had created a huge emotional rift between them, having lived separate lives thousands of miles apart. Enrique, who had felt a sense of abandonment after having been separated from his mother for so many years, had grown to resent her for taking away from him a normal childhood. Simultaneously, Lourdes has to come to the realization that her idealized version of Enrique as the same boy that she had known eleven years ago was no longer innocent, but an emotionally distant soul, hardened by his brutal journey on “El Tren Devorador, The Train that Devours.” (Nazario, 88) Their experiences parallel the widespread issues faced by other families that separated for similar reasons, with children unable to come to terms with their parents, who they felt had forsaken them, and the parents unable to recognize their children, who had changed with