Mar 7, 2006 3 min read

Let’s say there’s something you want, and you want it, bad.

You think about it all the time. Nothing can be substituted, and you’ll do anything to get it.

Are you willing to risk your life to find it? Enrique – last name withheld for protection – wants his Mami, and he’s willing to dodge authorities, gangsters, and criminals across thousands of miles and several countries to find her. Read about his quest in “Enrique’s Journey” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario.

Early one morning, as she was talking with the woman who cleans her home, Nazario learned something that shocked her: immigrant women from Guatemala, the Honduras, and other countries south of Mexico are coming to the United States in search of jobs and a way out of poverty. Many of those women are leaving small children with relatives, promising to return in a year, two, or five.

In many cases, the children become adults long before their mothers ever see them again.

That’s if they see ever see them again.

Delving further, Nazario found a family who was willing to tell her their story. Lourdes, the mother, left her children in Honduras years ago. Belky, her daughter, was then seven years old. Enrique, Lourdes’ son, was five.

Over the years, Enrique mourned his mother. While his grandmother raised him as best she could, he dropped out of school and started sniffing glue. On and off throughout his young life, he tried to figure out ways to find his mother.

He finally found the solution, but it wasn’t going to be easy. At the age when most American boys dream of driving a car, Enrique left his pregnant girlfriend and his family and jumped atop a train bound for Mexico City.

Eight times, Enrique leaped aboard speeding boxcars, risking death or loss of limb. Gangsters patrolled the trains, robbing, raping, and beating migrants and throwing them off the side. Migra agents constantly looked for illegal immigrants to deport. Madrinas with their machetes were an even bigger danger. Exhaustion, dehydration, and starvation were ever-present. Trust was – and still is, for these immigrants – a gamble.

So what can be done about illegal immigration? From the standpoint of Americans who don’t want to see it happening, those who do, and the immigrants who risk everything to come to the U.S., is there a solution? Nazario offers some answers, and a surprising opinion from Enrique himself.

While I liked this book, author Sonia Nazario did something in it that really bugs me: she let me loan my heart to these immigrants, she led me to care deeply, then she left me hanging. The last chapter in the book doesn’t end the story; in fact, it leaves major questions in a reader’s mind. What happened to Maria Isabel and Jasmin? Is Enrique still in the States?

Note to Nazario: don’t do this to us.

That aside, this book is worth reading, especially if you’re concerned either way about immigration. Look for “Enrique’s Journey” and settle in for a heart-racing and heart-rending trip.