Sonia Nazario says youth migration goes on(1)

By Alfredo Santana

Pulitzer Prize journalist winner Sonia Nazario said at a speech at the University of Southern California that at least 47,000 children and youth alone still migrate from Latin America every year to this country in search of their mothers, or both of their parents.

Nazario, who won the coveted award after the publication of her book Enrique’s Journey, said her work, first published in a series of stories in The Los Angeles Times, where she works as special project reporter, continues with tracing data, and reporting on immigration patters of youth who flee their homelands to try to reunite with their parents, regardless of wherever the may be in the United States.

Most of these youth come from Mexico and Central America, she said.

Enrique’s Journey centers on the story of Enrique, a young boy from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who launched a series of attempts to cross large parts of Mexico atop freight trains, in order to find, and ultimately live with her mother. In the process, Enrique was tortured and assaulted by armed gangs in the Mexican state of Chiapas, who almost beat him to death.

“I remember every time the mother of Enrique called him to Honduras, she always ended her phone conversations with an ‘I love you’, or “te quiero. It was very moving,” she said.

Nazario traveled with several immigrants atop some freight trains to capture first hand the experiences of thousands of Central American migrants en route to the United States. Many never make it, and many others end disabled, losing limbs after they wiggle, ad fall against the train wheels, trying to climb aboard the moving train. In one fast motion, they must also wrestle the ever-present Mexican immigration police. If they slip, arms and legs are often amputated.

Nazario said in the Mexican state of Oaxaca there are two or three centers who offer medical assistance, and psychological treatment to migrants who lose one or two limbs. Once, she entered to one room full of disabled migrants victims of the train. The experience left her almost speechless.

“It’s hard to describe how one feels once you enter into these rooms; they are full of severed people,” she recalled.

Nazario, born from Argentinean parents, and raised in Kansas and Argentina, said issues about immigration, hunger, poverty and Latin America have always captured her attention. So when she decided to become a professional journalist, Nazario had in mind to write about these topics.

Nazario began her career at the Wall Street Journal. She was hired by the Times in 1993, and almost immediately began writing about poverty and hunger-stricken children in schools in California.