TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Q & A with Ms. Nazario
• Enrique's Journey
• Ms. Nazario's bio

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Sonia Nazario is a reporter with the 'Los Angeles Times' who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her gripping series on the plight of a young Honduran boy trying to immigrate to the United States. That series has now been turned into the new book, "Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Unite with His Mother.' Sonia, nice to have you on the program.

Sonia Nazario: It's great to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: I've mentioned twice now that the book started out as a series in the 'Los Angeles Times.' Tell me about the series and how you came to write the series for starters.

Nazario: Well, it started out with a conversation with my housecleaner one morning and I asked her if she wanted to have more children. She's normally very chatty and suddenly she went silent and started sobbing. She told me about these four children she had left behind in Guatemala. She was a single mother. She just couldn't feed them more than once or twice a day. She had left them twelve years before. She had not seen them in that period of time and it stunned me.

How can a mother leave her children, go two thousand miles, not knowing when or if she would ever see them again? I wondered what I would do in her shoes. So it led me on this incredible journey, discovering that there are millions and millions of women from Central America and Mexico who have come to the United States in recent years and left their children behind.

Tavis: I was about to ask how common it is. You've already answered that question. It is very common. These mothers come here and leave their kids behind. I don't mean to be naïve in the asking of this question, but what is the justification for leaving the kids behind? Why do they feel so strongly about whatever is pulling them here that they come anyway?

Nazario: Well, we're seeing a lot of family disintegration in Central America and Mexico. More and more women, because their husbands beat them or they drink too much or they have mistresses or simply the marriage dissolves. So they're left with these children alone and they talk about, you know, feeding them tortillas once or twice a day, having to give them a big glass of water with a teaspoon of sugar to quiet their bellies, to quiet their cries of hunger at night.

So a priest in Honduras told me these women face a choice. They can prostitute themselves or they can head north. It is a very, very difficult decision, as you can imagine. Can you imagine walking away from your children because it's the only way that you see of offering them some hope of eating and going to school past the third grade?

Tavis: And the way you offer them hope by leaving them behind is to do what? Make money at your house, my house, and then send the check back home?

Nazario: That's right. I mean, a lot of us know these women. They clean our offices; they clean our homes; they take care of our children. That's the story of the boy I write about. When he's five years old in Honduras - Enrique - his mother leaves him and goes to the north. Very difficult decision for her. After eleven years apart, he decides - I mean, he's just desperate to be with her. He sees these other children with mothers and he wants that. He waits on Christmas Day year after year hoping she'll return and, when she doesn't, he heads off eleven years later when he's sixteen to go find her.

Like thousands of these children, he travels the only way he can, which is hanging on for dear life to the tops and sides of these freight trains that go up the length of Mexico. It is an incredibly harrowing, dangerous journey. Children are killed along the way. They lose arms, they lose legs. There are children seven years old who make this journey alone through four countries trying to reach these mothers who left them behind years ago.

Tavis: You, in fact, as a reporter went back and did the trip.

Nazario: I did.

Tavis: Tell me about the story of your actually doing this.

Nazario: Well, I found Enrique in northern Mexico and talked to him about everything he had been through. I really wanted to understand what he had been through and I wanted to put readers on top of these freight trains. I traveled more than sixteen hundred miles, half of that on top of seven freight trains the length of two-thirds of Mexico. I can tell you that every day I faced the fear of being beaten or robbed or raped.

These children are often beaten or robbed or raped several times trying to work their way through Mexico and I had many harrowing experiences. I had a branch that almost swiped me off the top of a freight train. When you fall off the train or are swiped off or thrown off by the gangsters who control the tops of these trains in southern Mexico, the train produces this sucking wind underneath as it moves forward and it pulls you into the wheels, so it's very, very dangerous.

Tavis: So the way to get along with these gangsters who control the tops of the trains is what? To pay them? How do you negotiate with a gangster on top of a train?

Nazario: You don't. Basically, I mean, that's their turf basically in southern Mexico. There are ten or twenty of them that go in a pack from the top of one car to another. They're armed with machetes and knives and wooden bats and even guns. They will strip you down and they say, "Your money or your life." They'll take your clothes; they'll take what few coins you have. They're hopped up on crack cocaine. They'll feed you to the wheels if they want to. So very, very dangerous.

Tavis: Back to Enrique. So when Enrique obviously makes it here in search of his mother, pick up the story.

Nazario: Well, as happens with many of these children, there's a brief honeymoon where, you know, the tremendous love that he has for his mother, he's pined for her all his life, he's felt alone all his life. So that really - there's this wonderful honeymoon in the beginning, but then he says, "Mom, you said you were coming back in one or two years max." This often stretches out into five or ten years.

Tavis: In this case, eleven.

Nazario: Eleven years. "You abandoned me." His mother, like many of these mothers, cannot understand that. They feel their children should be incredibly grateful for what they've done. They sacrificed what was most important, having their children by their side. All Lourdes had - his mother - was this photo album with a few photos of her son and she just can't understand this sentiment. Enrique wants his mom to get down on both knees and say, you know, "Please forgive me for leaving you" and she just can't do that because it would be negating everything that she's done her whole life.

So there's these huge conflicts in these homes, and you can see this throughout America. One in four children in our schools today is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Many of these children have been separated in the process of coming to the United States and it's a very bittersweet ending. The women end up losing what's most important to them, which is the love of their children.

Tavis: Let me go back to a question I should have asked perhaps earlier, but I'm fascinated by it now, given your last statement. When Enrique's mother, and mothers like Enrique's mother, leave these kids behind, who are they leaving them with? If you're telling me earlier that the fathers have disappeared, the fathers are beating them, the fathers are drinking, whatever they case may be - I don't mean to cast aspersions on all men who speak Spanish. I'll probably get those letters into the studio. That said, who are they leaving these kids with?

Nazario: Well, they're typically leaving them with the children's grandparents or with an aunt, sometimes with a neighbor if that isn't an option.

Tavis: So - how do I want to put this - compare for me, contrast for me, juxtapose for me how these kinds of stories represented in this book, "Enrique's Journey", fit into this debate that we see happening now about immigration? Because you hear a story like this, I don't care - you know, you got to be cold-hearted, you know, to not feel, to not understand what you're sharing in this text and yet this immigration issue is still a hotbed conversation.

Nazario: Well, I did want to - I feel that to some degree in discussing the costs and the benefits of illegal immigration, and there are obviously both, that to some degree illegal immigrants have been dehumanized and demonized. So I hope that by telling one of their stories, that would be a way of addressing that. What people along the rails say when they really see what's going on, this massive humanity coming north on top of these freight trains, oftentimes there's a hundred or two hundred or three hundred people on top of a freight train.

They say that, if you see the desperation that these people are leaving, these women who are walking away from their children, if you see the determination of these children and these women to make it through, Enrique makes eight attempts over a hundred twenty-two days. He travels twelve thousand miles. He's nearly beaten to death on top of a freight train, typical story. This enormous flow will not diminish until the United States tries to engage with these countries and really tries to work with them through trade policies and other means to create jobs.

These women say, "If I could feed my child three times a day, if I even had some hope for my child, I would stay there by their side." People do not come to the United States and leave everything they know to come to a foreign place where they can't speak the language on a whim. They do it out of desperation and, until that's addressed in these handful of countries, the flow will continue and it will increase because there is more and more family disintegration.

Tavis: You know, when you say family disintegration, that really goes against the notion of what we think or certainly read and hear about what makes the Latino community, the Hispanic community, the Chicano community so special, which is that family is really an important part. You know, trying to contrast what we hear about their community and what we think about their community, which is a family, is the ultimate. Yet this story and examples like it speak to your point of a disintegration of that family unit.

Nazario: Well, that's why, for me as a Latina, it's so tragic because it is really wreaking havoc on these families and it has a tragic ending in many, many cases. So that's why I think, in a way, it's a very moving story about what these children will do to reach their mothers, but in a way, it's a tragic story in terms of how it ends.

Tavis: If I can ask, what has happened to the relationship between Enrique and his mother as we speak now?

Nazario: Well, with most of these children, they never get past that resentment. Enrique was able to get past it after many, many years of spiraling downwards. He decides that that love he's always felt for his mother is stronger than the resentment. Today they both live in Florida and he goes over to his mother's house every morning. She gives him his morning cup of coffee before he goes off to work. He gives her a huge hug and they really love each other very much.

Tavis: Sometimes there is a happy ending to these stories.

Nazario: There is sometimes.

Tavis: Let me ask you right quick what you think the lesson - if there is a lesson. I assume there is. The lesson in this text is for Americans not with regard to the debate about immigration, but to the lesson relative to the notion of family.

Nazario: Family.

Tavis: Yeah.

Nazario: I think that it's important to try to stay together and keep your families together, and I think Americans know that. A nuclear family will do much better, will flourish, than a family that's torn apart and that lesson applies no matter if you're a Honduran family or you're an American family. Most people know that lesson.

Tavis: "Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother", winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Sonia Nazario is the author of the book which is taken from and expanded from a series of articles here in the 'Los Angeles Times.' Sonia, nice to have you on the program.

Nazario: Thank you for having me.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next, actress and comedienne, Mo'Nique. Stay with us.