39 pages • 1 hour read

Enrique's Journey

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapter 6-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Immigration and Family Separation

Enrique’s Journey addresses the impact of immigration on families. Thus, it provides an alternative to common immigration narratives, which focus on ideological talking points designed to win political arguments. Studies show that an increasing number of unaccompanied minors are crossing the US-Mexico border. Like Enrique, many of these children undertake the trip north to find their mothers. Poverty and high divorce rates in Central America and Mexico leave many women unable to provide for their children. These women face hard choices: They can either remain in their home countries and watch their children suffer or immigrate to the US and send money home to support them.

Though many mothers who choose to immigrate have good intentions, abandonment has a lasting impact on children. It leaves them confused, hurt, angry, and resentful. Some abandoned children cope with drugs and alcohol. Many have problems regulating their emotions. Abandoned children have mixed feelings toward their mothers. On one hand, they idealize their mothers and yearn to be reunited with them: “In their absence, these mothers become larger than life. Although in the United States the women struggle to pay rent and eat, in the imaginations of their children back home they become deliverance itself, the answer to every problem. Finding them becomes the quest for the Holy Grail” (7). On the other hand, children lash out at their mothers for leaving them behind: “Children act out, doing everything possible to push their mothers away. It is their way of testing whether their mothers really love them, whether they can trust them, whether their mothers will abandon them again” (280).

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These mixed emotions complicate reunions between children and their mothers, as the example of Enrique and Lourdes demonstrates. Their story encapsulates all these difficulties: Enrique feels isolated and forgotten in Lourdes’s absence, and eventually falls to addiction. Then, after his long and treacherous journey to reunite with her in the US, their reunion is disappointing. According to Nazario, the disintegration of families is the biggest downside to immigrating to the US from Central America and Mexico, and this is apparent in Enrique and Lourdes’s fractured bond. The book suggests that these ruined relationships—which cause harm to communities and create a cycle of abandonment, illustrated by Enrique and María Isabel’s choice to leave their daughter in Honduras—are too high a sacrifice. Thus, Nazario stresses foreign aid as a strategy to help developing countries provide opportunities for their citizens, so there is no need for families to separate.

Positive and Negative Attitudes Toward Migrants in Mexico

Central American migrants are met with compassion or disdain depending on where they are on their journey. In the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, for instance, people treat migrants with kindness and generosity: “‘People in Oaxaca and Veracruz are more likely to help,’ says a train engineer. ‘It’s just the way we are,’ says Jorge Zarif Zetuna Curioca, a legislator from Ixtepec” (103). Many believe this spirit of generosity is rooted in the Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous cultures. The church further promotes this attitude by preaching mercy and charity. People in Oaxaca and Veracruz stand up for migrant rights and house migrants in churches and on private property. In addition, people in these states run alongside trains, throwing bundles of food to migrants.

Enrique benefits from the kindness of strangers when a woman and boy toss him a plastic bag filled with a dozen bread rolls. According to Nazario, people in the towns of Encinar, Fortín de las Flores, Cuichapa, and Presidio are particularly known for their compassion toward migrants. Fernando Antonio Valle Recarte, a young Honduran migrant, confirms Nazario’s assessment: “Here,’ he says, ‘the people are good. Here, everyone gives’” (104). Oaxaca and Veracruz are unlikely places for this kind of generosity. According to a World Bank study from 2000, 42.5% of Mexico’s population lives on $2 or less a day; in rural areas 30% of children under the age of five are so malnourished that their growth is stunted. The people who live along the train tracks are often the poorest, yet they are among the most likely to give migrants food.

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Not all Mexicans are as generous as the people of Oaxaca and Veracruz. For example, people in Mexico City fear migrants: “We don’t trust them,” says a soft-spoken woman named Rodríguez who explains that six migrants robbed and beat a local man, putting him in the hospital for several months. She continues, “They tied his hands with barbed wire. They took his money, his watch, and his clothes. They beat him over the head with a machete. They left him naked” (127). Before this incident, Rodríguez offered migrants food and help. After, she kept her doors closed. Her neighbor explains the logic: “Por uno pagan todos. One sins, and everyone pays” (127). Enrique’s experiences in Mexico City bear this out. When he knocks on doors begging for food, he is met with edginess and hostility.

Perseverance and the Will to Survive

Perseverance and strength of will are key to this book, which features individuals who demonstrate incredible determination, including those who immigrate to the United States and those who aid migrants on their journeys. This theme is established early in the text, when Nazario expresses astonishment that her housekeeper Carmen has four children in Guatemala whom she has not seen since immigrating to the US 12 years prior. Nazario is struck by the choice many mothers must make between remaining with their children in poverty or leaving them behind to better provide for their needs. She wonders, “How do they make such an impossible decision? Among Latinos, where family is all-important, where for women motherhood is valued far above all else, why are droves of mothers leaving their children? What would I do if I were in their shoes?” (xii).

The revelation that Carmen’s story is not unique inspires Nazario to write Enrique’s Journey. Although abandonment leaves children with enduring emotional scars, it takes a certain strength of will for parents like Carmen and Lourdes to pursue better opportunities in the US. Success is not guaranteed upon arriving, as Lourdes’s story demonstrates, but she endures despite obstacles, taking whatever job she can find, even working as a fichera, to provide monetary security for her children.

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The children of migrants who journey to reunite with their parents also demonstrate remarkable determination. The trip is arduous for adults and even more so for children like Enrique. Nazario describes the many obstacles that stand in Enrique’s path, including corrupt police officers, la migra, and bandits. He travels through 13 Mexican states, including the most dangerous—Chiapas—before crossing the Rio Grande on an inner tube in the dead of night. It takes Enrique eight tries to reach the US. In Chapter 2, Nazario describes his seven failed attempts, each of which presents challenges. Enrique faces hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, fear, and loneliness. Getting on the freight trains is dangerous, as is staying on. On Enrique’s third trip, police rob him and turn him over to immigration officials, who put him on a bus to Guatemala. On his seventh attempt, a gang of men beat and rob him before trying to throw him off a moving train. Enrique sustains serious injuries during this attack, including a severe concussion, lesions, bruises, and two broken teeth. Despite his injuries, Enrique pushes forward, only to be picked up by la migra and deported to Guatemala again. Enrique vows to keep trying even in the face of these obstacles. His love for his mother, and his desire to be reunited with her, explains his willingness to endure.