Enrique's Journey

The book I read was Enrique’s Journey written by Sonia Nazario. She is a writer for the Los Angeles Times. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2003. This book has gotten positive reviews form People, Entertainment weekly, and many more.
What inspired her to write about this book was a conversation with her maid. Her maid told her that she had children that she left behind when they were young in Guatemala and that one of her children has recently made the journey to come find her. After hearing this she wondered what made mothers decide to leave their children at such a young age and if gifts and having money to eat every night could replace the love of a mother. She also was fascinated by the dangerous journeys that the children take to be close to their mothers. After a while she decided to take the journey that immigrant children travel but first she would have to find someone that has taken the journey. After searching for a while she found Enrique and he told her his whole story. Then she spent months traveling the routes that Enrique took and interviewing people that Enrique met. To take this journey she first had to get permission from the Mexican government and had to get armed officers for the most dangerous parts of the journey. In my opinion the purpose of this book was to show how dangerous the journeys that people take are. She met her intended purpose because throughout the book she describes in depth the mutilations that people suffer while riding the trains and the beating that people suffer from the gangsters in Chiapas, Mexico.
This book was written in a weird way. The author chose to write this book in the third person but that was not the weird part of the book. What was weird about the book was that it would be telling the story of Enrique but then jump to the story of a person that Enrique had met during his journey. For example in one part of the book the author is talking about people getting mutilated and then jumps to the story of Olga Sanchez Martinez. Olga is a person that Enrique met during his trip. She is a person that was once very sick until she went church one day and asked god to cure her. She told god that if he would cure her she would devote her time to help immigrants that have been mutilated by the train. She raises money for medicine to treat the injured immigrants.
The book starts out with the author telling the story of Enrique’s mother leaving him and his sister. Then it goes into detail about the jobs Enrique had to do in order to get money. It also goes into detail about the struggles Enrique faced with drugs and with his mother not being there. After that it describes Enrique’s decision and journey to leave Honduras to go to the United States in search for his mother. After he is in the United States it describes the struggles that Enrique faces when living in the United States. For example his struggles with his drug addiction, alcoholism, and resentment towards his mother. It ends with Enrique convincing his girlfriend to come to the United States.
The key point in this book was to show the treacherous journey that immigrants face when coming to the United States. The book does this by describing the journey in depth. For example it describes how people got their limbs torn off by the wheels of the train. It also describes the beating people endure by gangsters that board the trains in order to rob the immigrants and in some case raping women.
In my personal opinion this book is great. This book taught me the way people from Central America travel through Mexico in order to get to the border. This book tied to my topic because it tells the story of an immigrant trying to get into the United States to find his mother. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to read a great story.