Sonia Nazario
Author and Journalist
Sonia Nazario
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2015
Time: 4 PM
Place: Ballroom D, Strand Union Building
Title: Enrique’s Journey: Child Migrants and the U.S. Response
Sponsoring department: Modern Languages & Literatures
Cosponsors:
Summary:
Using award-winning photographs, Sonia Nazario takes you inside the world of millions
of immigrant women who have come to the US as single mothers, and the children they
have left behind in their home countries in Central America and Mexico. She discusses
the modern-day odyssey many child migrants—some as young as seven, all of them
traveling alone—make many years later riding on top of freight trains through
Mexico on their quest to reunite with their mothers in the US. Nazario, who spent
three months riding on top of these trains to tell the story of one child migrant
named Enrique, shares her story in the context of determination.
Nazario will also discuss the role of determination in her own life as well as in
the lives of the migrants she wrote about. Unlike many who speak on this topic, Nazario
sees immigration as an issue with many shades of gray, with winners and losers. She
discusses how traditional approaches to the issue of immigration—proposed by
both the left and right—haven’t worked and offers novel solutions to one of
America’s thorniest issues.
About the speaker:
Sonia Nazario is an award-winning journalist whose stories have tackled some of this country’s most intractable problems, including hunger, drug addiction and immigration. She is best known for “Enrique’s Journey,” her story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S. Published as a series in the Los Angeles Times, “Enrique’s Journey” won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2003. It was turned into a book by Random House that became a national bestseller and is now required reading at hundreds of high schools and colleges across the country.