{"product_id":"enriques-journey-isbn-9780812971781","title":"Enrique's Journey","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn astonishing story that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about immigration reform in the United States, now updated with a new Epilogue and Afterword, photos of Enrique and his family, an author interview, and more—the definitive edition of a classic of contemporary America\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Based on the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, this page-turner about the power of family is a popular text in classrooms and a touchstone for communities across the country to engage in meaningful discussions about this essential American subject.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eEnrique’s Journey\u003c\/i\u003e recounts the unforgettable quest of a Honduran boy looking for his mother, eleven years after she is forced to leave her starving family to find work in the United States. Braving unimaginable peril, often clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains, Enrique travels through hostile worlds full of thugs, bandits, and corrupt cops. But he pushes forward, relying on his wit, courage, hope, and the kindness of strangers. As Isabel Allende writes: “This is a twenty-first-century Odyssey. If you are going to read only one nonfiction book this year, it has to be this one.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eEnrique\u003ci\u003e’s Journey\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Magnificent . . . \u003ci\u003eEnrique’s Journey\u003c\/i\u003e is about love. It’s about family. It’s about home.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] searing report from the immigration frontlines . . . as harrowing as it is heartbreaking.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e (four stars)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Stunning . . . As an adventure narrative alone, \u003ci\u003eEnrique’s Journey\u003c\/i\u003e is a worthy read. . . . Nazario’s impressive piece of reporting [turns] the current immigration controversy from a political story into a personal one.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Gripping and harrowing . . . a story begging to be told.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] prodigious feat of reporting . . . [Sonia Nazario is] amazingly thorough and intrepid.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“A remarkable feat of immersion reporting . . . [Gives] the immigrant . . . flesh and bone, history and voice . . . The kind of story we have told ourselves throughout history, a story we still need to hear.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compelling . . . Nazario doesn’t pull any punches.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eDallas Morning News\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A meticulously documented account of an epic journey, one undertaken by thousands of children every year . . . [Nazario] covers both positive and negative effects of immigration, illuminating the problem’s complexity. . . . In telling Enrique’s story [she] bears witness for us all.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compelling . . . drama, pathos, and [the] hot topic of illegal immigration.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe San Diego Union-Tribune\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Astounding . . . I am unaware of any journalist who has voluntarily placed herself in greater peril to nail down a story than did Nazario.”\u003cb\u003e—Steve Weinberg, former executive director of investigative reporters and editors, \u003ci\u003eThe Baltimore Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A story of heartache, brutality, and love deferred that is near mythic in its power.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Magazine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eEnrique’s Journey\u003c\/i\u003e] personifies one of the greatest migrations in history. . . . Much of the book is a thriller . . . a 12,000-mile journey worthy of an Indiana Jones movie.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Orange County Register\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Riveting . . . expert reporting . . . Nazario puts a human face upon a major issue. . . . The breadth and depth of [her] research is astounding.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A heart-racing and heart-rending trip.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Daily Nonpareil\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A story readers won’t soon forget.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTu Ciudad\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gripping . . . astounding . . . viscerally conveys the experience of illegal immigration from Central America . . . [Nazario] has crafted her findings into a story that is at once moving and polemical.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This portrait of poverty and family ties has the potential to reshape American conversations about immigration.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Insightful and beautifully written and sheds a great deal of light on the horrific journeys immigrants risk to find a better life. Highly recommended.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a harrowing odyssey that depicts one young man's attempts to reunite with his mother and the social and economic issues involved in illegal immigration.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gripping, heroic and important, \u003ci\u003eEnrique's Journey\u003c\/i\u003e captures the heart. Most Americans or their forebears came to the United States from other countries. They experienced difficult journeys and wrenching family separations-all in the hope of finding a better life in this new land. Enrique's story is our story, beautifully told.”\u003cb\u003e—Edward James Olmos\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSonia Nazario\u003c\/b\u003e, a projects reporter for the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times,\u003c\/i\u003e has spent more than  two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her dozens of national  awards. The newspaper series upon which this book is based won the Pulitzer Prize  for feature writing, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, and the Grand  Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Nazario grew up in Kansas and Argentina.  She is a graduate of Williams College and has a master’s degree in Latin American  studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Los Angeles with  her husband.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy does not understand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e His mother is not talking to him. She will not even  look at him. Enrique has no hint of what she is going to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLourdes knows. She understands,  as only a mother can, the terror she is about to inflict, the ache Enrique will feel,  and finally the emptiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What will become of him? Already he will not let anyone else feed or bathe him. He loves her deeply, as only a son can. With Lourdes, he  is openly affectionate. “\u003ci\u003eDame pico, mami. \u003c\/i\u003eGive me a kiss, Mom,” he pleads, over and  over, pursing his lips. With Lourdes, he is a chatterbox. “\u003ci\u003eMira, mami. \u003c\/i\u003eLook, Mom,”  he says softly, asking her questions about everything he sees. Without her, he is  so shy it is crushing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Slowly, she walks out onto the porch. Enrique clings to her pant leg. Beside her, he is tiny. Lourdes loves him so much she cannot bring herself  to say a word. She cannot carry his picture. It would melt her resolve. She cannot  hug him. He is five years old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They live on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, in Honduras. She can barely afford food for him and his sister, Belky, who is seven. She’s never  been able to buy them a toy or a birthday cake. Lourdes, twenty-four, scrubs other  people’s laundry in a muddy river. She goes door to door, selling tortillas, used clothes, and plantains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She fills a wooden box with gum and crackers and cigarettes, and she finds a spot where she can squat on a dusty sidewalk next to the downtown  Pizza Hut and sell the items to passersby. The sidewalk is Enrique’s playground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey have a bleak future. He and Belky are not likely to finish grade school. Lourdes  cannot afford uniforms or pencils. Her husband is gone. A good job is out of the  question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLourdes knows of only one place that offers hope. As a seven-year-old child,  delivering tortillas her mother made to\u003cbr\u003e wealthy homes, she glimpsed this place on  other people’s television screens. The flickering images were a far cry from Lourdes’ s childhood home: a two-room shack made of wooden slats, its flimsy tin roof weighted  down with rocks, the only bathroom a clump of bushes outside. On television, she  saw New York City’s spectacular skyline, Las Vegas’s shimmering lights, Disneyland’s magic castle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lourdes has decided: She will leave. She will go to the United States  and make money and send it home. She will be gone for one year—less, with luck—or  she will bring her children to be with her. It is for them she is leaving, she tells  herself, but still she feels guilty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She kneels and kisses Belky and hugs her tightly.  Then she turns to her own sister. If she watches over Belky, she will get a set of  gold fingernails from \u003ci\u003eel Norte. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eBut Lourdes cannot face Enrique. He will remember  only one thing that she says to him: “Don’t forget to go to church this afternoon.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is January 29, 1989. His mother steps off the porch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe walks away.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“¿Dónde  está mi mami?” \u003c\/i\u003eEnrique cries, over and over. “Where is my mom?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e His mother never  returns, and that decides Enrique’s fate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a teenager—indeed, still a child—he  will set out for the United States on his own to search for her. Virtually unnoticed, he will become one of an estimated 48,000 children who enter the United States from  Central America and Mexico each year, illegally and without either of their parents.  Roughly two thirds of them will make it past the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Many go north seeking work. Others flee abusive families.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost of the Central  Americans go to reunite with a parent, say counselors at a detention center in Texas  where the INS houses the largest number of the unaccompanied children it catches. Of those, the counselors say, 75 percent are looking for their mothers. Some children  say they need to find out whether their mothers still love them. A priest at a Texas  shelter says they often bring pictures of themselves in their mothers’ arms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  journey is hard for the Mexicans but harder still for Enrique and the others from  Central America. They must make an illegal and dangerous trek up the length of Mexico. Counselors and immigration lawyers say only half of them get help from smugglers.  The rest travel alone. They are cold, hungry, and helpless. They are hunted like  animals by corrupt police, bandits, and gang members deported from the United States.  A University of Houston study found that most are robbed, beaten, or raped, usually  several times. Some are killed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They set out with little or no money. Thousands,  shelter workers say, make their way through Mexico clinging to the sides and tops  of freight trains. Since the 1990s, Mexico and the United States have tried to thwart  them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, the children jump onto  and off of the moving train cars. Sometimes they fall, and the wheels tear them apart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They navigate by word of mouth or by the arc of the sun. Often, they don’t know  where or when they’ll get their next meal. Some go days without eating. If a train  stops even briefly, they crouch by the tracks, cup their hands, and steal sips of water from shiny puddles tainted with diesel fuel. At night, they huddle together  on the train cars or next to the tracks. They sleep in trees, in tall grass, or in  beds made of leaves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome are very young. Mexican rail workers have encountered seven-year-olds  on their way to find their mothers. A policeman discovered a nine-year-old boy near  the downtown Los Angeles tracks. “I’m looking for my mother,” he said. The youngster  had left Puerto Cortes in Honduras three months before. He had been guided only by  his cunning and the single thing he knew about her: where she lived. He had asked  everyone, “How do I get to San Francisco?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Typically, the children are teenagers.  Some were babies when their mothers left; they know them only by pictures sent home.  Others, a bit older, struggle to hold on to memories: One has slept in her mother’ s bed; another has smelled her perfume, put on her deodorant, her clothes. One is  old enough to remember his mother’s face, another her laugh, her favorite shade  of lipstick, how her dress felt as she stood at the stove pattingtortillas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Many,  including Enrique, begin to idealize their mothers. They remember how their mothers  fed and bathed them, how they walked them to kindergarten. 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e CONFUSION\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Enrique is bewildered. Who will take care of him now that  his mother is gone? Lourdes, unable to burden her family with both of her children,  has split them up. Belky stayed with Lourdes’s mother and sisters. For two years,  Enrique is entrusted to his father, Luis, from whom his mother has been separated  for three years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Enrique clings to his daddy, who dotes on him. A bricklayer, his  father takes Enrique to work and lets him help mix mortar. They live with Enrique’ s grandmother. His father shares a bed with him and brings him apples and clothes.  Every month, Enrique misses his mother less, but he does not forget her. “When is  she coming for me?” he asks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lourdes and her smuggler cross Mexico on buses. Each  afternoon, she closes her eyes. She imagines herself home at dusk, playing with Enrique  under a eucalyptus tree in her mother’s front yard. Enrique straddles a broom, pretending  it’s a donkey, trotting around the muddy yard. Each afternoon, she presses her eyes  shut and tears fall. Each afternoon, she reminds herself that if she is weak, if  she does not keep moving forward, her children will pay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lourdes crosses into the  United States in one of the largest immigrant waves in the country’s history. She  enters at night through a rat-infested Tijuana sewage tunnel and makes her way to  Los Angeles. There, in the downtown Greyhound bus terminal, the smuggler tells Lourdes  to wait while he runs a quick errand. He’ll be right back. The smuggler has been  paid to take her all the way to Miami.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Three days pass. Lourdes musses her filthy  hair, trying to blend in with the homeless and not get singled out by police. She  prays to God to put someone before her, to show her the way. Whom can she reach out  to for help? Starved, she starts walking. East of downtown, Lourdes spots a small  factory. On the loading dock, under a gray tin roof, women sort red and green tomatoes.  She begs for work. As she puts tomatoes into boxes, she hallucinates that she is  slicing open a juicy one and sprinkling it with salt. The boss pays her $14 for two  hours’ work. Lourdes’s brother has a friend in Los Angeles who helps Lourdes get  a fake Social Security card and a job.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe moves in with a Beverly Hills couple to  take care of their three-year-old daughter. Their spacious home has carpet on the  floors and mahogany panels on the walls. Her employers are kind. They pay her $125  a week. She gets nights and weekends off. Maybe, Lourdes tells herself—if she stays  long enough—they will help her become legal.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; The story of a boy's dangerous odyssey to reunite with his mother; With a new Epilogue by the author; National bestseller","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302347296997,"sku":"NP9780812971781","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812971781.jpg?v=1767726303","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/enriques-journey-isbn-9780812971781","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}