Two books

Mira here. I just zipped through these two true stories of immigrant journeys in less than a week and thought I would share them with you. I found both at my neighborhood public library, and you can, too! If you only read one, I recommend Enrique's Journey, but both are amazing and significant.


Enrique's Journey is the story of a teenage boy from Honduras who left home to find his mother, who had gone to the United States to work eleven years before. He joins huge numbers of other Central American immigrants who have to cross through Mexico without smugglers and do so by riding on top of freight trains, just to get to the US/Mexico border. If you think that the US is hostile toward the undocumented, you should see how the folks in Chiapas respond to those entering "illegally" from the less-developed countries to the south. It is absolutely shocking what people as young as 10 go through every day--hunger, thirst and extreme weather; constant fear of being robbed, killed, or injured severely by police, bandits, gangs, locals; risk of dismemberment or death as they hop on and off the train, and try not to fall from the top; and deportation to Guatemala, which most experience multiple times before making it through Mexico. The author retraced Enrique's journey through Mexico, actually riding atop the trains--of course, she had lots of protection and resources, but it is still a very courageous act of journalism.

The trip itself is worth the read, but this book also significant because it explores the struggle behind a poor mother's impossible decision--will she leave for the US and send enough money home (if she makes it--literally and metaphorically) for her kids to eat well and attend school, or will she remain physically present with them and accept that they will almost certainly need to drop out of school to work, and will live with hunger and in grinding poverty for most or all of their lives. The author, Sonia Nazario, explores the deep scars this separation, and often times, the process of reuniting, inflicts on children and families. I highly recommend this book.

The Devil's Highway has a little different flavor--it is definitely more slang-y and less politically correct, but the story of this treacherous journey is also important. In 2001, 26 men, most from Veracruz, set out with a coyote (smuggler) to cross the border into Arizona. They were told that the walk through the desert would take 1 1/2 days and to bring water for that amount of time. But something went wrong along the way, and the group, with their 3 coyotes, wandered lost for 5 days with temperatures up to 115 degrees. Only 12 men and one coyote survived. The one smuggler, who was only 19 at the time and who had moved to a border town to work and send money south to his family (he hadn't originally intended to become a grunt for a wide-reaching smuggling racket) took the "official" blame for the tragedy and will spend the rest of his life in an Arizona prison. Sadly, it takes a whole group of people dying in the desert to make news--at least 2 people die while attempting to cross that desert every day.

The author, Luis Alberto Urrea, describes the horrific journey (including the grotesque things that happen to the body through the stages of heat stroke as the sun slowly kills) and the border policies that have pushed people to cross into more and more dangerous and desolate parts of the desert, while also managing to point us to the humanity of all involved, including the coyotes and US Border Patrol agents.

The authors of both books explore the complexity of the current immigration situation, and both conclude that until the countries of origin of these sojourners can provide jobs that allow people to support their families, people will continue to come, regardless of how tight the security, how severe the penalties, how dangerous the journey. Nazario says that she met one youth in southern Mexico who was beginning his 28th attempt to make it to the US. What if the efforts of people, leaders and ordinary folks like us, in the US were on making his hometown a good place for him and his family to stay, instead of fighting to keep him out?