Enrique’s Journey: Prologue Summary & Analysis

Nazario opens the book by describing the moment that inspired her to find Enrique’s story. One Friday morning at home in Los Angeles, she gets into a conversation with her housekeeper Carmen on the topic of raising children. She soon discovers that Carmen has four children that she has had to leave behind in Guatemala. Carmen has not seen them for 12 years.

Carmen explains her story to Nazario, telling her that her husband left her for another woman, that she could not provide for her children alone, and that she finally decided to come to the U.S. to better the lives of her children. She also knows that the separation has put an emotional strain on her relationship with her children and that there have been many downsides to her decision to leave Guatemala. She tells Nazario that her situation is common amongst Central American and Mexican mothers facing poverty with few alternative options.

The next year, Carmen’s eldest son, Minor, driven by his uncertainty about his mother's love for him, arrives unanticipated in Los Angeles after embarking on a journey to reunite with her. Nazario hears about his trip and, following up, learns about the dangers he faced hitchhiking through Guatemala and Mexico. Interested in the story of Carmen and Minor, Nazario investigates the reasons motivating the difficult choices each has made, and discovers how common their story is: how many other single mothers have left their families to come to work in the Unites States in order to send financial support back home, eventually to be followed by their own children desperate to reunite with their mothers.

Nazario outlines the changes in immigration to the United States in recent years, with about 700,000 immigrants entering illegally per year. Furthermore, the transforming family dynamics in Latin America, most importantly the rise in divorce rates in recent times, has resulted in an increase of single women immigrating to the U.S. to find work. In the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. experienced a similar period of increased immigration, with single mothers from the Caribbean seeking work in New York City, New England, and Florida. Later in the 1980s, the same phenomenon occurred, this time with Central American mothers heading to Washington, D.C., Houston, and Los Angeles. Nazario points out how the growth of immigrants in the U.S. has led to their demonization. She hopes to restore their humanity by taking a close look at one immigrant’s story.

Nazario decides to learn as much as she can about the treacherous journey that children like Minor make, and talks to young people who have made the journey and now live in jails and shelters in California and Texas. Many have made their journey atop freight trains through Mexico, which these migrants have come to call The Train of Death. They have had to survive against corrupt cops, bandits, and gangsters looking to mercilessly exploit them.

Nazario’s plan is to experience for herself the trip that young migrants make to reunite with their mothers. Before embarking on the journey herself, she decides to retrace the steps of one boy who had already made it to northern Mexico. Looking for a child who would provide the story for the book she wants to write, Nazario finds out about Enrique from a nun at a church in Nuevo Laredo, near the Rio Grande in Mexico. She travels there to talk to him about his experience. From Enrique’s description, she begins to reconstruct the journey of the many children who follow the same route. Then, following Enrique’s path, Nazario traverses 13 of Mexico’s 31 states and travels atop trains for much of the journey. She interviews many of his family members, other migrants, and compassionate people whom Enrique encountered along the way.

Nazario’s reconstruction of the journey requires her to face serious danger, witnessing the near death of migrants jumping trains and hearing the testimonies of rape victims. She takes great risks to research and retrace Enrique’s path. However, though she was often miserable, exhausted, scared, and in danger along the way, Nazario makes clear that, unlike the migrant children, she always had the option of just stopping, of simply escaping from the hellish journey and going back to her established life in Los Angeles.

Towards the end of the prologue, Nazario lays out her own background to show the ways that she relates to these stories. Herself the child of immigrants, she understands the desire for new possibilities. Furthermore, her father’s death during her adolescence makes her sympathetic to difficult family situations.

Nazario ends by describing her awe at the tenacity of the young people who make this journey and at the difficulty that immigrant single mothers face. And she comments that the greatest loss to these disconnected families is the disintegration of trust that occurs between the child and parent because of their separation, a breach that can never be fully repaired.