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Nazario, Sonia. Enrique's Journey: The True Story of a Boy Determined to Reunite with His Mother. Delacorte Press New York, 2013.

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#1 - January 29, 1989 Enrique's Mom Leaves

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#1 - January 29, 1989 Enrique's Mom Leaves

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Lourdes, Enrique's mother leaves Tegucigalpa the capital of Honduras to go to America. Lourdes will look for a job to better sustain her children in Mexico. This is the beginning of Enrique's infamous journey to the U.S.

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Enrique is now seven years old and his mother has successfully made it to the U.S. and is living in Las Angeles where she has trouble looking for jobs that suit her. Lourdes still has enough money to ship essentials to the children. At this point Enrique is wondering when his mother will come back.

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Lourdes gets into a toxic relationship with a man from the Honduras named Santos. Eventually Lourdes gets pregnant and Santos spends all their savings in a bar and eventually gets deported. After Santos' deportment no one has heard from him since. Lourdes is now left with a baby girl named Diana and no job to support her kids in Mexico.

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Lourdes now has a job at a Mexican Restaurant and now can reliably support her family. Enrique is now older and is beginning to hang out with bad influences in school. Known as a bad kid in school he's also one of the smartest, being able to graduate elementary. The previous guardians of Enrique which were his two uncles have been murdered which lead to him living with his grandma.

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Enrique now fifteen goes to the funeral of his uncles, which is when he notices a girl. After many loving acts of romance, after asking her for the third time she finally agrees to be his girlfriend.

Quote 1

"...Enrique notices a shy girl with cascading curls of brown hair...She has an inviting smile, and warm manner." (41)

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Enrique is beginning to feel angry and frustrated because of his mother's absence. Because of Lourdes not being home Enrique has turned to glue and paint sniffing to relieve himself of the emotional pain he has. Being turned down by everyone he knows except for Maria he decides to try to find his mom via train hopping.

Quote 2

"On March 2, 2000, he goes to Grandmother Agueda's house. He stands on the same porch that his mother disappeared from eleven years before. He hugs Maria Isabel and Aunt Rosa Amalia. The he steps off." (50)

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El Tren de la Muerte (The Train of Death): Freight train hopping from Mexico to U.S.

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Migrants take a gamble on board the ‘death train’ – DW – 07/21/2018

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Migrants call it “The Beast”: the freight train on which penniless Central Americans hop rides to cross Mexico on their way to the US. They risk being kidnapped, injured or even killed on the dangerous journey north.

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It has been 3 weeks since Enrique has left and now he's in Oaxaca a state in Mexico. Enrique is battered with life threatening injuries and finds himself asking a local field hand for help. Out of pity the worker helps Enrique and we find out his name is Sirenio Gomez Fuentes.

Quote 3

"His right shin is gashed. His upper lip is split. The left side of his face is swollen. His eyes are red, filled with blood. He is crying. He dabs at open wounds on his face with a filthy sweater he found on the tracks. It is Enrique. He is seventeen. It is March 24, 2000." (53)

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Being one of the worst immigration checkpoints, Enrique's train is now heading towards it. Enrique decides to lie flat on the top of the train to avoid being spotted by the immigration officers. Eventually, Enrique hops off the train to avoid the train stop, after doing this he runs around the stop which is about 2-3 miles. After crawling under electric fences and barbed wires Enrique gets food from a local, then hops on the train as it leaves.

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La Arrocera (Immigration Checkpoint): One of the worst La Migra checkpoints.

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A DREADED STOP
Each time the train slows, Enrique goes on high alert for la migra.

Immigrants wake one another and begin climbing down to prepare to jump. If the train speeds up again, everyone climbs back up. The movement down and up the ladders looks like a strangely choreographed two-step.

But slowing down at Huixtla, with its red and yellow depot, can mean only one thing: Coming up is La Arrocera, one of the most dreaded immigration checkpoints in Mexico.

Enrique has defied La Arrocera before. This time, he arrives in the heat of noon. Tension builds. Some migrants stand on top of the train, straining to see the migra agents up ahead. As the train brakes, they jump.

The train lurches sideways. Enrique leaps from car to car, finally landing on a boxcar. The train stops. He lies flat, face down, arms spread-eagle, hoping la migra won't see him. But several agents do.

"¡Bajate, puto! Get down, you whore!"

"No! I'm not coming down!"

There is no ladder all the way to the top. Maybe they won't come up after him.

"Get down!"

"No!"

The agents summon reinforcements. One starts to climb up.

Enrique scrambles to his feet and races along the top of the train, soaring across the 4-foot gaps between cars. As he runs, three agents follow on the ground, pelting him with rocks and sticks, an experience many immigrants say they have here. Stones clang against the metal. Enrique flees from car to car, more than 20 in all, struggling to keep his footing each time he leaps from a hopper to a fuel tanker, which is lower and has a rounded top.

He is running out of train. He will have to go around La Arrocera alone. It may be suicidal, but he has no choice. More stones ping off the train. Enrique scurries down a ladder and sprints into the bushes.

"¡Alto! ¡Alto! Stop!" the agents shout.

As Enrique runs, he hears what he thinks are gunshots behind him.

Except in extraordinary circumstances, Mexican immigration agents are barred from carrying firearms. According to a retired agent, however, most have .38-caliber pistols. Some of the shelter workers tell of migrants hit by bullets. Others tell of torture. Before long, Enrique will meet a man whose chest is pockmarked with cigarette burns. The man tells him that a migra agent at La Arrocera branded him.

In the scrub brush, though, Enrique worries less about agents than about madrinas with machetes. The name for these men is a play on words: These civilians help the authorities, as a madrina, or godmother, would, and administer madrizas, or savage beatings. Human rights activists and some police agencies say the madrinas commit some of the worst atrocities--rapes and torture--and are allowed by authorities to keep a portion of what they steal.

Enrique runs on. He crawls under a barbed wire fence, then under a double strand of smooth wire. It is electrified. At night, Guillermina Galvez Lopez, who lives at La Arrocera, hears the trains and, not long afterward, the piercing screams of immigrants, wet from the swampy grass, who run into the wire.

"Help me! Help me!" they wail.

Ten times in 10 months, train riders have carried to her front door men and boys without arms, legs or heads. In 1999, Clemente Delporte Gomez, a patrolman with Grupo Beta Sur, the government's migrant rights organization, watched a young Salvadoran slip on railroad ties near La Arrocera. Train wheels cut him in two at the midriff. Delporte saw the Salvadoran's heart flicker three times. Then it was still.

Enrique knows he has plunged deep into bandit territory. At least three, maybe five swarms of robbers, some with Uzis, some on drugs, patrol the three-mile dirt paths that immigrants must use to go around La Arrocera, authorities say. They seem to operate with such impunity that Mario Campos Gutierrez, a supervisor with Grupo Beta, thinks the authorities collaborate.

Before taking these paths, migrants hide their money. Some stitch it into the seams of their pants. Others put a bit in their shoes, a bit in their shirts and a coin or two in their mouths. Still others bag it in plastic and tuck it into intimate places. Some roll it up and slip it into their walking sticks. Others hollow out mangoes, drop their pesos inside, then pretend to be eating the fruit.

Enrique figures he doesn't have enough money to bother.

Last time he sneaked past La Arrocera, he was lucky because he was careful. He stuck with a band of street gangsters. This time he is alone. He focuses on the thought that will make him run the fastest: "I cannot miss the train."

If he misses the one he just left, he knows he will be a sitting duck, waiting for days in the bushes and the tall grass until another one comes.

Enrique races so fast he feels the blood pounding at his temples. The grass, growing in three-foot tentacles, lassos his feet. He stumbles, gets up and keeps running. He passes an abandoned brick house. Half the roof is gone.

The house is notorious. Not long before, Grupo Beta had found a bed of bricks inside, covered with emerald green leaves from a plant that looked like a bird of paradise--and two soiled pairs of panties crumpled on the dirt floor. Women are raped here, most recently a 16-year-old assaulted repeatedly over three days.

Many are gang-raped, including a Salvadoran woman, four months pregnant, who was assaulted at gunpoint by 13 bandits along the railroad tracks to the south. Nearly one in six immigrant girls detained by authorities in Texas says she has been sexually assaulted during her journey, according to a 1997 University of Houston study. Some girls journeying north cut off their hair, strap their breasts and try to pass for boys. Others scrawl on their chests: "TENGO SIDA. I have AIDS."

Enrique does not stop. He reaches the Cuil bridge, where the railroad spans a 40-foot stream of murky brown water. This, migrants and Grupo Beta officers say, is the most dangerous spot. Bandits haul mattresses up into nearby trees, eat lunch and wait for their prey. As immigrants cross the bridge, the bandits drop out of the limbs and surround them. Other robbers hide along the tracks above and below the bridge, which is thick with bushes and vines. One fishes in the river or cuts grass with a machete, like a fieldworker, and whistles to the others to set a trap.

Just a month before, bandits ambushed five Salvadorans as they crossed the bridge at 4 a.m. They tried to run. The bandits shot one in the back. Four months later, three Salvadorans and a Mexican, all in their 20s, were killed. The Salvadorans, their hands tied behind them, were shot in the head. The Mexican was stabbed. All they had left was their underwear.

Enrique dashes across the bridge and keeps running. Mountains stand to his right. The ground is so wet that farmers grow rice between their rows of corn. He can feel heat and humidity rising from the loamy earth. It saps his energy, but he runs on.

Finally, he stops, doubled over, panting.

He is not sure why, but he has survived La Arrocera. Maybe it was his extra caution, maybe it was his decision to run, maybe it was his attempt to lie flat and hide atop the boxcar, which delayed his getting off the train and gave the bandits an opportunity to target migrants ahead of him.

He is desperate for water. He spots a house.

The people inside are not likely to give him any. Chiapas is fed up with Central American immigrants, says Hugo Angeles Cruz, a professor and migration expert at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Tapachula. They are poorer than Mexicans, and they are seen as backward and ignorant. People think they bring disease, prostitution and crime and take away jobs. Some cannot be trusted. People in Chiapas talk of being robbed by migrants with guns and knives. They tell of an older woman who welcomed an immigrant into her home and was beaten to death with an iron pipe.

Boys like Enrique are called "stinking undocumented." They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them. Some use slingshots. "Go to work." "Get out! Get out!"

Drinking water can be impossible to come by. Migrants filter ditch sewage through T-shirts. Finding food can be just as difficult. Enrique is counting: In some places, people at seven of every 10 houses turn him away.

"No," they say. "We haven't cooked today. We don't have any tortillas. Try somewhere else."

"No, boy, we don't have anything here."

Sometimes it is worse. People in the houses turn the immigrants in.

Enrique sees another migrant who has managed to make it around La Arrocera. He, too, needs water badly, but he doesn't dare ask. He is afraid of walking into a trap. To immigrants, begging in Chiapas is like walking up to a loaded gun.

"I'll go," Enrique says. "If they catch someone, it will be me."

He approaches a house and speaks softly, his head slightly bowed. "I'm hungry. Can you spare a taco? Some water?" The woman inside sees injuries from the train-top beating he took during his last attempt to go north. "What happened?" she asks. She gives him water, bread and beans.

The other migrant comes nearer. She gives him food too.

A horn blows. Enrique runs to the tracks. Other immigrants who have survived La Arrocera come out of the bushes. They sprint alongside the train and reach for the ladders on the freight cars.

Enrique climbs up onto a hopper. The train picks up speed.

For the moment, he relaxes.

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A DREADED STOP Each time the train slows, Enrique goes on high alert for la migra.

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Enrique arrives up North to the fields of Veracruz and is now a third of the way there. After moving past a 20 ft statue of Jesus, Enrique arrives at a town where people gather by the tracks holding something that looks like rocks. But fortunately these people are here to help him as they throw water and food. This changes Enrique's perspective of a world that hates migrants.

Quote 4

"...a dozen people, mostly women and children, are rushing out of their houses along the tracks, clutching small bundles. Some of the migrants grow afraid. What are these people holding? Will they throw rocks? ... They toss up a roll of crackers." (96)

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Enrique is now in Mexico City the capital of Mexico which is not too far from Texas. He makes friends with two boys who are also migrants, they eventually depart leaving Enrique alone again. Now searching for food and money, he finds an old bricklayer who pays Enrique. The kind man gives Enrique advice to take a bus to Nuevo Laredo a town which is right next to the Rio Grande the river that separates the U.S. from Mexico. With the help of a kindly trucker Enrique hitchhiked his way to Nuevo Laredo.

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Nuevo Laredo: The town that Enrique is currently at in the book and which plays a critical milestone in his journey.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Nuevo Laredo, city and port of entry, northern Tamaulipas estado (state), northeastern Mexico. It lies along the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across from Laredo, Texas. The city serves as a commercial centre for the regional cattle industry and as a natural gas production centre. It is the site of numerous maquiladoras (foreign-owned manufacturing plants) that produce electronics and other consumer goods for export. As a major port of entry, Nuevo Laredo also provides a variety of products and services for tourists. A highway and a railroad linking San Antonio, Texas, with Mexico City, to the south, pass through Nuevo Laredo. Pop. (2010) 373,725; (2020) 416,055.

World Data Editors.

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Nuevo Laredo | Description, Economy, & Facts

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Nuevo Laredo, city and port of entry, northern Tamaulipas estado (state), northeastern Mexico. It lies along the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across from Laredo, Texas. The city serves as a commercial centre for the regional cattle industry and as a natural gas production centre. It is the

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It is May, 2000 and Enrique left Honduras almost two months ago. He is now staying at a migrant campsite run by a drug addict called "El Tirindaro". Enrique plans on calling his mom but requires 100 pesos or $5 USD, he'll have to get a job because it's too risky to beg for money in Nuevo Laredo. Enrique works washing car windows for tips but in eight hours only made $2. He constantly hears the sounds of La Migra catching immigrants on the other side of Texas each night.

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Enrique has called Lourdes and we find out she is in North Carolina. After a heartbreaking call, it is now time for Enrique to complete his journey across Mexico and enter the US. Enrique's mom pays El Tirindaro to take Enrique across the Rio Grande into the US. After using tubes to cross the river, El Tirindaro helps Enrique to a car driven by a male and female. They get him new clothes and drop him off in Orlando, Florida where Lourdes' boyfriend will pick up Enrique.

Quote 5

"Enrique smiles to himself as though in a dream. He can hardly believe he is in the United States of America." (154)

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Lourdes' boyfriend finally arrives at Lourdes' home in North Carolina. With a heavy breath and an overbearing sense of nervousness Enrique hugs his sister he finally met. When Enrique asks his little sister, Diana, he finds out his mom is in her room fast asleep. He enters the room and finally embraces his half-asleep mother, the feeling he feels is love and a sense of his journey finally being complete.

Quote 6

"Inside, the room is dark. On a queen-size bed, under a window draped with lace curtains, his mother is asleep. He jumps squarely onto the bed next to her. He gives her a hug. Then a kiss.

'Your're her, mi hijo.'

'I'm her,' he says." (161)

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What was a heartfelt and overall good ending was not what Enrique would've expected. All the rage and emotion that Enrique felt when he was alone in the Honduras with an absent mother never left him even now. He would take out that anger and argue with Lourdes about her leaving him behind and that everyone would've been better off if she stayed. Ending in Enrique barging out the house and going to a nearby grave-yard where he lays on top a mausoleum. Reminding him of the time he slept in a grave hiding from La Migra. Eventually, he returns to the trailer the next day and apologizes.

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Enrique finds out he's a father and that Maria Isabel gave birth to Jasmin their new child. Lourdes constantly scolds Enrique which angers him because he believes that because he hopped trains and did dangerous things that he is responsible for himself. Enrique now plans to return to Honduras to take care of his child. Enrique is resenting his own mother more and more, eventually he takes pleasure in enraging or annoying her.

Quote 7

"Day after day, they argue. Enrique loves to contradict his mother, to set her off, even when he knows she's right." (172)

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Enrique's Biography

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Enrique currently lives in Jacksonville, NC with his mother Lourdes. He married Maria Isabel, his girlfriend from Honduras. She had followed him to the U.S and had two children. Enrique…

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Maria Isabel is left alone in Honduras as Enrique is in the U.S. She gets into an argument with Enrique's family in South America that she ends up leaving to live in an old shack. With the pressure the family has put on her because of the family's jealousy that she gets income from Enrique, she left crying and in emotional pain.

Quote 8

"Maria Isabel has come to hate Enrique's family. One day, after too many criticisms from them, she offers up Jasmin."

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It's Enrique's third year in America and he decides to change himself for not only himself, but for his family and Maria Isabel. He decides to quite every drug and alcohol addiction and loses weight. With all this improvement he realizes that when he argues with Lourdes it hurts himself more than it hurts her. Fixing his life he plans on marrying Maria Isabel when he gets the chance.

Quote 9

"He realizes he can no longer wallow in what happened in the past. He's not hurting his mother as much as he's hurting himself." (182)

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Maria Isabel left Jasmin with Enrique's family in the Honduras to embark on her own journey up to the U.S. Using money that Enrique is sending to pay for bus fares she eventually makes it to the borders where Enrique pays a smuggler to migrate her over the borders. Leaving Jasmin she begins to ponder whether or not her mother would come back. But it is reassured when Enrique's sister says that Jasmin will go to the U.S. one day.

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A interview of Enrique and his wonderful journey

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In 2013, author Sonia Nazario visited Enrique in jail in Florida, where he was being held pending deportation. Here are snippets from that interview.

In November 2015, Sonia answered questions at Sam Houston State University with Enrique's mother Lourdes Pineda. Here are clips from that Q&A session.

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Jasmin is all alone without her two parents to care for her. She is now with Belky, Enrique's sister in Honduras awaiting her mother and father to return one day. But sadly learns that they'll never return. What makes Jasmin's experience different from Enrique's is that Belky reassures her that one day she'll go meet them again one day.

Quote 10

"Jasmin, left with Enrique's sister Belky, asks, 'Auntie, is my mommy coming back?'... Belky tells Jasmin no, but that her parents will have her with them in the United States someday."

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Belky leaves Jasmin with the rest of Enrique's family to take care of her. Because, Belky plans on visiting Lourdes and Enrique in the U.S. This is the biggest moment in the family's life, because all have not been in the same room in years. When Belky finally meets Lourdes she says that she's never seen her mother in 17 years. It is now that we find out that Belky was pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy in Honduras. Remembering the pain she felt not having a mother, she decides to go back to her son to take care of him.

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Belky leaves Jasmin with the rest of Enrique's family to take care of her. Because, Belky plans on visiting Lourdes and Enrique in the U.S. This is the biggest moment in the family's life, because all have not been in the same room in years. When Belky finally meets Lourdes she says that she's never seen her mother in 17 years. It is now that we find out that Belky was pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy in Honduras. Remembering the pain she felt not having a mother, she decides to go back to her son to take care of him.