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7. The Girl Left Behind
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Enrique’s Journey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Abandonment
Perseverance and Survival
Compassion and Faith
Humanization and Dehumanization
Immigration
Summary
Analysis
Smugglers bring Maria Isabel through Mexico by bus, bribing immigration and other officials as necessary. She arrives in Florida within a few weeks of leaving Honduras. Jasmin lives with Enrique’s sister Belky, who lives with her common-law husband, and who explains to Jasmin that her parents have both gone to the United States and are not returning but hope to one day bring her to the United States. Maria Isabel and Enrique call Jasmin at least once a week. However, Jasmin thinks of Belky’s husband as her father. Belky gives birth to her own baby, a son, on July 31, 2006.
The “business” of illegal immigration, and the corruption of the system built up to control immigration, is again on display in the way that having some money allows Maria Isabel to make a journey that took Enrique 120 days and nearly cost his life in a relatively easy few weeks. At the same time, Maria Isabel and Enrique clearly have not been able to bring Jasmin to the US as quickly as they had hoped, and Enrique’s emotional connection to his daughter—at least as far as his daughter sees it—is slight.
Themes
Not long after Nazario publishes the articles on Enrique’s journey that come to make up this book, the TV show Don Francisco Presenta airs an episode about Enrique, Lourdes, and Nazario. Don Francisco surprises his guests by also flying Belky to the show on a temporary visa. This is the first time that Lourdes has seen Belky in eighteen years, and also the first time that all three of Lourdes children have met. A week or so later, Belky flies back to Honduras and her son.
The reunion at the television show is a feel-good story. Which, of course, is why the television show did it (business again). But there is something sobering in the way that the television show is able to just whisk Belky from Honduras to the US when Lourdes, Enrique, and even Maria Isabel had to struggle. And yet there is also something hopeful in Belky’s return back to Honduras to her son, whom she never had to abandon.
Themes
