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Waldina Hernandez saw a picture of a hurtling freight train on a screen — and got a new view on the harrowing journey that brought her mother to America.
Hernandez (pictured with her daughter Tiffany) showed up to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario address an audience at Career High School Monday about Enrique’s Journey, a book about one of the tens of thousands of Central American children who risk their lives each year to journey up through Mexico and then cross the Mexican‑U.S. border in search of mothers who made the trip themselves years earlier.
Nazario’s visit came at a time when Connecticut has been debating how to integrate the flood of refugee children coming here from across the border.
As a baby, Hernandez was left behind as her mother left Honduras to make that same trip to America to seek a better life for her children — the same harrowing decision that Enrique’s mother Lourdes makes in Nazario’s book.
Nazario’s book leaves the reader wondering: Is it worth it for mothers to leave behind children and risk their own lives to come north? She details how poverty- and violence-spawned immigration is “destroying” many families.
After seeing Nazario’s presentation, Hernandez offered her own answer as she lined up for an autograph from the author: Yes. Her mother made the right choice.
Hernandez herself immigrated legally, reuniting with her mother in the U.S. Hernandez immigrated legally. She came to hear often the harrowing stories of her mother’s own unsanctioned border-crossing. But seeing the slides of the hurtling freight trains, along with Nazario’s accounts of the bandits and rapists and corrupt government officials and coyotes who prevent most immigrants from completing their trips, struck Hernandez in a new way about all that her mother had endured. It brought tears to her eyes.
“It made me understand what people go through much more than than just hearing it,” she said.
Hernandez missed her mother those nine and a half years. But if her mother hadn’t made the trip, and then brought over her family, they would have been consigned to a life of poverty in Honduras, she said. Her mother’s education stopped in third grade. “If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be studying now,” said Hernandez, who is enrolled at Southern Connecticut State University.
Train Route To The Story
Author Nazario’s tale of one Honduran family over the course of packs the power to bring the fractious immigration debate in human terms. it shows the emotional struggles—and the later emotional toll—facing families before and during their voyages. Some families succeed in reuniting in the U.S., but then face a new set of struggles.
Nazario (pictured) first connected with Enrique in 2000 when he was a 16 year-old preparing to cross the Mexican border at the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo. Lourdes had left him and his sister Belky with relatives when he was 5 years old, hoping to make enough money in the U.S. to send back for her children’s education and basic needs. For 11 years, Enrique longed to be reunited with her, finally deciding to make the journey north himself, by riding on top of trains, hitchhiking on trucks and walking till his feet blistered, begging or working odd jobs to sustain himself along the way.
Nazario spent two weeks with him at the border and followed him to meet his mother in North Carolina. After a series of in-depth interviews, she twice replicated the same journey Enrique had done, starting in Honduras and eventually riding on top of seven trains 800 miles through Mexico, risking her life at every step. She carried with her a note from the Mexican president’s personal assistant asking authorities and police to cooperate with her reporting and asked an armed government group to accompany her through Chiapas, a lawless, bandit-ridden region, to protect from the “100 percent chance” she’d otherwise be beaten, raped and robbed, like most females who make the journey.
She said she still has post-traumatic stress from her experiences. At a presentation of a movie about these unaccompanied minors recently, she heard the chugging noise of the freight train and felt her heart race and sweat drip down her face.
Over the course of about four months, Enrique had been deported from Mexico seven times, and each time restarted from the beginning. But when he finally reached Lourdes in North Carolina, his problems were only just beginning. Like many Central American immigrant children who make this journey, he felt extreme resentment towards his mother for having abandoned him; he fell into old drug habits as he struggled to make a living in a new country. Lourdes felt that she had done the right thing by leaving to provide for him, and could not understand why her son was not more grateful.
“Newcomer schools,” created to meet the needs of these children, provide counseling services to mitigate emotional turmoil in newly reunited families, Nazario said. Many children do not manage to reconcile with their parents, with boys instead leaving to join gangs and girls having children with older men in order to find love and community. A “ripple effect” produced in these homes leads to the further degradation of family structures, she said.
Fewer than 10 newcomer schools exist in the U.S. today, she said.
Her book presented the complexities of the immigration debate, showing that illegal immigration both helps and hurts groups within the U.S. socially and economically. Despite the broader controversy, providing asylum for children fleeing violence in their countries should be a “no-brainer,” Nazario said. The U.S. needs to “rise to the level of humanity” and provide lawyers for these refugees, since current public funding for legal representation is just a “drop in the bucket,” she said.
She listed microloans, improved trade policies, support for governments that redistribute wealth, education for girls and investment in fair trade products as several policies toward improving political climates in torn Central American countries.
In a Q&A session after the presentation, Fair Haven organizer Lee Cruz asked what community organizations could do to help New Haven’s child refugees. Nazario suggested that groups provide opportunities for parents to get their GEDs and help their children succeed in school.
Power Of Story
“The way you can create empathy is not through statistics,” Nazario (pictured) said at a press panel, moderated by La Voz HIspana Publisher Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, that was held as the last part of that day’s activities,” but through telling stories.”
Sandy Barron (pictured at the event) has discovered the power of Nazario’s tale in reading the book with her 11-year-old son Patrick.
“He’s very interested,” she said. “It is a wonderful tool to get him out of his privileged world. He has no clue, even though he’s half-Salvadoran, that this is going on. I want him to grateful for what he has, including his citizenship.” Barron, whose family fled war-torn El Salvador when she was a child, plans to ask the principal of her son’s school to put Nazario’s book on the required summer reading list.
In the end, Nazario, in her book and in Monday’s presentations, focused not such much on whether it’s worth it for immigrants to make that journey and more on how to mitigate a crisis occurring every day, by the thousands, with brutal consequences for innocent child refugees. Her prescriptions include setting up border refugee camps with assigned judges to decide quickly whether children qualify as refugees for admission to the country; and addressing the poverty and brutality and corruption that send so many families fleeing Central America in the first place, “so these women don’t want to leave where they’re from. This is destroying families.”
The 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act gave children from Central America a court hearing before they are deported. It was supposed to combat child trafficking, but there's a strong correlation between it and the spike and dangerous child migration with coyotes.