| The seeds for Pulitzer Prize winning author Sonia Nazario, author of "Enrique's Journey," to become a journalist wereplanted when she was young and unaware. Nazario, who spoke at the Madison Civics Club October 6, was born in Madison when her father -- a biochemistry professor -- was doing post-doctorate work at the University of Wisconsin. Her family soon moved back to Argentina and then moved to Kansas where her father Mahafud taught at the Kansas State Medical Center. Upon his death in 1974, Nazario's mother moved the family back to Argentina during the height of the Dirty War where up to 30,000 people were "disappeared" by the ruling military junta. It was then that Nazario found her calling. "I was walking down a block in our neighborhood one morning and I saw blood on the sidewalk," Nazario recalled during a telephone interview with The Capital City Hues. "I asked my mother what had happened. She told me that these two reporters who lived at that home had been killed by the military. I asked her why. She said they were trying to tell the truth about what was going on there. In my own demented mind, I thought 'Oh, I want to be a journalist and tell the truth about what is going on.' So at 14 years old, I really wanted to be a journalist." After her studies at Williams College in Massachusetts and travel abroad, Nazario landed a job at the Wall Street Journal where she honed her reporting skills before moving on to the Los Angeles Times, which did more social issues reporting as opposed to the Journal's business focus. It was through a conversation with her housekeeper that Nazario learned how some Central American mothers would leave their families -- temporarily at first -- to work as undocumented workers in the United States. Due to evolving circumstances, the mothers often never returned to their families. In some cases, the children came looking for their mothers. Nazario decided to investigate the phenomenon and started out searching for children whom she could follow on their journey from Central America to the U.S. She soon realized it would be impossible to do. She then decided to interview a child first who had made the journey and then retrace the child's journey as the source of her book. After searching shelters and churches along the 2,000 mile Mexican-U.S. border, Nazario found Enrique. "A nun in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, which is just over the border from Laredo, Texas said she would put Enrique on the line," Nazario said. "I picked Enrique not because he was atypical, but because he was typical. He was a little older than the norm. He was 17 years old by then. He had started his journey when he was 16 years old. He was on his eighth attempt to get through Mexico. He had nearly been beaten to death on top of a freight train. He was going to find his mom and it was very clear that he loved her and he was intensely driven to reach her. He had the yearning all his life to be with her again. So he became the way to tell the story of these thousands of children who make this journey every year." Nazario took the trip herself to see first-hand what the children go through. "I traveled with a 12-year old boy who was traversing four countries alone in his quest to reach his mother," Nazario said. "I wouldn't have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes. Most parents in Wisconsin wouldn't let a child that age cross the street and go to school alone and here are these kids who are crossing four countries alone and facing bandits and gangsters who control the tops of the trains and corrupt cops who rob and beat them and send them back to the border. They also have to face the train itself because it becomes almost this living, breathing thing that the kids call 'La Bestia,' (The Beast). So many children and other migrants whom I saw had lost arms and legs to the train. You go into some of these shelters in southern Mexico where they take care of migrants who were mutilated by the train. You go in and see dozens of people who have no arms and legs. It's hard to describe." Outside of it being a compelling story, Nazario wrote "Enrique' Journey" to put a human face on the whole immigration debate. "The mother and child relationship is a way of having people open their minds and go inside the world of immigrants and at least see it for what it is," Nazario said. "Whether you agree or disagree with illegal immigration, anyone can understand some of the choices that these women make who like my housecleaner that morning in Los Angeles in my kitchen when she described how she had left four children behind in Guatemala and she hadn't seen them in 12 years. She was a single mother. Her husband had left her and she could only feed her children once or twice a day. At night, they would cry with hunger. She had absolutely nothing to give them. I think my intent was to put people in the shoes of these immigrants and take them inside this world of these women who come and these children who follow these women. I think any parent of child can understand why so many immigrants might make this decision if they can't feed their children and they are facing this grinding poverty and this misery." And the present situation and lack of a clear immigration solution leaves countless people with bad choices to choose from. "There is no good choice here for these mothers who leave their children, miss their childhood, and are not there by their side," Nazario said. "These women leave believing that they are doing the best thing for their child. But in the end, the kid says, 'You know Mom, you said you were leaving for 1-2 years. This stretched into 5-10 years. What happened? You abandoned me.' These women end up losing what is most important to them, which is the love of their child. It's tearing these Latino families apart." The immigration train makes stops at a lifetime of misery. |
| Author Sonia Nazario addressed the Madison Civics Club The immigration train By Jonathan Gramling |
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| (Right) Sonia Nazario hopped trains in Mexico for background on her book about immigration. |