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Enrique's Journey

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Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Wed, Oct 10 2007

Enrique's Journey
By Sonia Nazaro
Random House, 295 pages, $26.95 (paperback edition, $14.95)

When Sonia Nazario of the Los Angeles Times decided to write an immigration story that would cross national borders, she put her life in danger repeatedly to obtain the truth. I have now read the book three times. My amazement at her courage (some might call it foolhardiness) has not diminished. Nor has my amazement at the techniques she used.

The idea for her investigation began germinating in 1997, during a conversation with Maria del Carmen Ferrez, who cleaned Nazario's Los Angeles home every other week. By then, Nazario, nearing age 40, had established herself as a feature writer at the Wall Street Journal before joining the Los Angeles Times. She lived comfortably with her husband and could have spent the rest of her career without choosing to risk her physical safety.

During the conversation with Carmen, Nazario learned about four children left behind in Guatemala, dependent on wages from cleaning houses in the United States. She had not seen them in 12 years. She lacked the money to pay a smuggler to guide her children across the U.S. border. She also worried about their safety in a crime-infested Los Angeles neighborhood. Most of all, she worried about the dangers of the journey itself from Guatemala to Los Angeles. During her own journey in 1985, Carmen had been robbed and left without food. She had heard stories about consequences worse than that, including rape, accidental death, and murder.

Conversations between Carmen and Nazario continued. In 1998, Nazario learned that Carmen's son Minor had decided to make the dangerous journey from Guatemala. He was age 22, and longed to see the mother who left him behind at age 10 so that she could provide food, clothing and education from far away. Unlike many, perhaps most, who attempt the journey, Minor reached his mother.

The more Nazario learned about children left behind and their attempts to enter the United States illegally because of longing for their parents, the more coherently her plan evolved. She would locate one of those children (other than Minor), learn everything she could about the journey, and then replicate it to provide readers with close-up knowledge.

Furthermore, she would seek a subject for her book who made the journey through Mexico in a common but extremely dangerous way-by riding on top of freight trains. Nazario would ride El Tren de la Muerte-the Train of Death.

Her research informed her about “the gangsters who rule the train tops, the bandits along the tracks, the Mexican police who patrol the train stations and rape and rob…the dangers of losing a leg getting onto and off of moving trains.” Nazario felt fear, but she kept planning. “As a journalist, I love to get inside the action, watch it unfold, take people inside worlds they might never otherwise see. I wanted to smell, taste, hear and feel what this journey is like. In order to give a vivid, nuanced account, I knew I would have to travel with child migrants through Mexico on top of freight trains.”

To find just the right migrant for her narrative, Nazario interviewed immigrant children held by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in jails and shelters throughout California and Texas. She also contacted directors of shelters and churches in Mexico, along the 2000-mile border with the United States. Eventually, Nazario met Enrique, who had started his journey in Honduras, hoping to reunite with his mother in North Carolina. Nazario's planning became more specific.

She vowed never to get onto or off of a train while moving. (She violated her self-imposed rule once.) A newsroom colleague introduced Nazario to Mexican government authorities, resulting in a letter from the personal assistant to Mexico's president. The letter asked police to cooperate with Nazario's project. That piece of paper kept Nazario from being jailed three different times; helped persuade a migrant rights group to provide protection for her on some of her train rides; and led four freight operators to tell conductors about Nazario's mission so they could spot check her welfare.

Starting in Honduras, Nazario interviewed Enrique's relatives and visited his haunts. “I took buses through Central America, just as Enrique had done. In Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas, I boarded a freight train. I took the same path along the rails, traveling up the length of Mexico on top of seven freight trains. I got off where he did, in San Luis Potosi, then hitchhiked on an 18-wheeler from the same spot in the northern Mexico city of Matehuala, where Enrique had hitched a ride to the U.S. border.”

In addition to her lessons on high-risk reporting, Nazario discusses how she structured her narrative, how she decided whether to use real names or aliases for her subjects, and numerous other specifics. Whether Enrique will end up reunited with his mother provides the tension for non-journalism readers. For journalists, how Nazario saw the story to its logical end constitutes a book within a book.