Having a parent taken away from you at any age is a very traumatizing event. One would feel even more terrible about this type of situation if they did not know why the parent left them. It would make the child wallow in self-pity and make them wonder why their parent did not love them enough to stay with them or to at least tell them why they had to leave them. That was the exact situation Enrique’s mother left him in when she went to the United States to find work for the betterment of the lives of her children. She tried her hardest to keep working in Honduras but the pay was just not good enough for her to support Enrique and Belky, her two children. The book Enrique’s Journey was written by Sonia Nazario in an attempt to shine some light over the journey young immigrants undertake in order to find their parents or in quest of a new and better life. The book is thrilling through and through and does not let the reader take his eyes off of it for a second. The author helps readers understand the struggles these people go through with the use of real life examples, tone and word-choice, non-biased approach, and well written dialogues.
After the departure of his mother, Enrique was constantly perplexed. Between thinking that his mother did not love him enough to stay with him and thinking that he had done something wrong, he grew up living a very shaky life. When his mother left him, he had to be taken away from his only remaining family, Belky, his sister. His mother did not want to leave both of her children with her sister and her own mother as it would have been too much trouble. She made sure Enrique would go live with his dad while she was away even though they had long been separated. As time goes by Enrique starts missing his mother less but he can never forget her. He will never be able to forget his mother. He frequently asks his dad, “When is she coming for me” (Nazario 7). As a child not having his mother there for him at his early ages was one of the reasons why he decided to take upon the journey to go find his mother.
When Lourdes, Enrique’s mother finally made it to the United States, it was not as easy as she had thought. She thought she would have been able to find a job and a place to live fairly easily, but it did not go so smoothly. At first she could only send about $100 to her children so they could get some nice toys and clothes, but she was not living in favorable conditions and needed to set aside some money for herself. Lourdes finds a boyfriend because she thinks it would be easier to live with a man. She would have less bills to pay, a place to stay, and she could start sending a little more money to her kids back in Honduras. It was going as planned for the most part until Lourdes got pregnant and Santos, her boyfriend, does not claim responsibility and ignores her. With all the responsibilities piling up on top of Lourdes, she ended up losing her job and had to start working as a “fichera”, girls who had to get men to buy drinks, basically prostitutes. After working as a fichera she got a better job with the help of a friend, and was able to get another one later on to finally be able to make $1,000 per month. However, at this point she does not want to save money to get a coyote to take her children across the border because she knows about the existing dangers and does not want them to have go through that. On top of that, many of the coyotes are cowards, who at the first sight of trouble would abandon what they signed up for and run the other way. She then decides that she wants to become a legal American resident so that she can bring her children into the United States legally.
Back in Honduras, Enrique and Belky have started to grow up and understand more about the reason why their mother had to leave them while they were still kids. Nonetheless, they still harbor a feeling of resentment towards her because they feel that she did not care enough about them if it was so easy for her to leave and start a new life without them. Although they get the gifts and the money that their mother sends them, and they go to school way longer than the other kids of their age, all they want is to be with their mother. Enrique started sniffing glue but his habit escalated and he started doing other types of drugs. It even got to a point where his drug dealer threatened to kill his cousin because Enrique had not paid him back for the drugs he used. Things were starting to look really bad until he started thinking about what it would be like to be with his mother after all the time they spent apart. He thought that if he could only be with his mother that all his problems would go away and he would not have to worry about anything else. He was sorely mistaken.
As he went about his journey North, Enrique had to ride atop freight trains, run away from corrupt cops and la migra, the Mexican immigration officers. He tried eight times before finally being able to get to Mexico. The only difference this time was that he was part of a small encampment and that they were all looking out for each other as their journeys came together.
I went through a reality check after reading Enrique’s Journey. Somewhere, at this exact moment, a poor kid was risking his life to come to the United States for the possibility to meet a parent or to have a better life. A young woman was being raped because that was just ‘part of the journey’. “One by one, during an hour and a half, each of the five bandits goes into the cornfield and rapes Wendy” (Nazario 97). If just being a certain gender automatically puts you in jeopardy no matter how old you are, then there is something seriously wrong with this world. I really liked reading the book because it did not leave anything out, and brought the readers the full experience on what these kids go through on a daily basis. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone willing to gain more knowledge about immigration journeys from people in countries in South America. It makes you think about how fortunate some of us are to have grown with both of our parents in our lives. The way this relates to history is that it will be a process that will not stop anytime soon. Kids will keep losing their lives trying to get to their parents in the United States while the parents think they are doing what is best for their children by going away and working for them. Until a better immigration system is put in place, this cycle will never end. Even if they did not have a lot of money, just the simple fact of being there for their kids is a privilege a lot of these men and women who come to the United States do not have.
Enrique’s Journey is a very powerful book that tells the story of what countless immigrants go through during their lifetimes. Whether it be having their parents leave them at an early age so they could go find a job in the United States and hopefully get enough money to have a coyote smuggle them in later, or just kids who have had enough of living poorly and want to better themselves by going to a country where they say everything is possible. In Enrique’s case, after finding his mother in the United States, all his problems did not go away as he thought they would. He had fits of angers because the damage his mother left on him as a child was psychological. He grew up thinking that he was not loved and that is what ultimately drove him to doing drugs and finding out for himself by coming to the United States. Enrique got to meet his mother, his step-sister, and they were all reunited with Belky in the United States; but if you think about it, a lot of the kids who go on these journeys never make it to the end. They will either get sent back by la migra, die while being raped by bandits, or just slip and fall off a train wagon. Even after being reunited with Lourdes after so long and spending time with her, the same thoughts go through Enrique’s and Belky’s heads, “… The love of a mother is something you cannot replace with anything else” (Nazario 246).