Enrique was 5 when his mother traveled to the U.S. to earn money to feed the family. After 11 years of awaiting her return, Enrique traveled, alone, from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to be with her in North Carolina, armed only with her phone number on a piece of paper.
Enrique’s travails, as well as those of 48,000 other Central American children who, often unaccompanied by an adult, cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year, is told in “Enrique’s Journey.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning book is by Los Angeles Times writer Sonia Nazario. The emotional account lends a human face to the whole immigration debate, recounting the amazing resilience, determination and heroism of Latin American kids in their search for family members.
In his mother’s absence, Enrique lives with his uncle, who is later killed by bandits. When he sets out on an odyssey to search for his mother, he has only $57 and the clothes on his back.
Enrique travels across Mexico atop northbound trains, christened el tren de la muerte (the train of death), where travelers are raped, robbed or even killed at the hands of Mexican gangs, bandits and corrupt officials.
While atop one such train, Enrique is severely beaten, robbed and left naked. On his eighth attempt, he makes it to America.
Nazario illustrates the horrors that other immigrants suffer, including a 17-year-old girl who is raped by five gangsters, and a boy who loses a foot trying to jump from a moving train.
I emigrated from a poor country where the government has been guilty of exploiting its people. Enrique’s odyssey to El Norte across Chiapas has faint echoes from my own past. As a boy, I too illegally crossed borders in pursuit of academic opportunities, exposing myself to considerable risk and danger. I know the depths the spirit will plumb to fulfill human need. Enrique’s story reminds me that grinding poverty serves to unravel family bonds, scattering populations to the four winds.
Most people imagine immigrants as a homogeneous, amorphous mass of humanity, without discernible, redeeming qualities. We forget they’re sentient, rational beings who would rather stay at home if they could.
As Enrique’s travails show, Latin American immigrants’ journey here is a harrowing, death-defying sojourn. They come here because life at home is unbearable. To find a lasting solution to this migratory tsunami, we must explore the reasons behind it.
We want cheap labor and cheap goods – as long as they’re not inconvenient. We might build a fence across our border and enact immigration reforms for the illegal immigrants already here. Yet, if we do nothing to change the condition of the many Enriques left behind in Central America and Mexico, the current northward migration will not cease.
What Nazario describes happening to children and women riding el tren de la muerte has for a long time been well known to Mexican authorities. That they have turned a blind eye to it is tragic. That the Mexican government hasn’t tried to make the desert passage of many a little easier is inhuman, making Vicente Fox’s complaint about how Americans treat illegal Mexican immigrants here farcical.
Nazario’s account makes it clear that the only way to keep poor women and their children in Mexico and Central America is by the U.S. and Latin American governments fully engaging in a partnership to democracy, to eradicate corruption and to bring about a more equitable share of resources. Anything else is merely temporary.
Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon. He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.
