Lecture: Sonia Nazario
Sonia Nazario fills the house at NYU Journalism.
Photo: Megan Thompson.
“It started as an innocent question,” Sonia Nazario, 45, told a group of New York University journalism students and faculty who had gathered, on February 28, 2006, to hear the Los Angeles Times reporter speak. She was discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother (Random House, 2006), which is being adapted into a six-part mini-series by HBO.
One morning in 1997, Nazario’s housekeeper, Carmen, asked if she planned to have children. Nazario replied by asking her the same question and Carmen burst into tears. That morning, Nazario learned that Carmen had four children in Guatemala, who she hadn’t seen in 12 years. ‘What kind of desperation drives a mother to leave her children?’ Nazario asked herself.
Nazario graduated in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in history from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She began her writing career as a freelance reporter for the Madrid-based newspaper El Pais. Later, she landed a job as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering social issues and Latin America for the New York, Atlanta, and Miami bureaus. “I worked really hard, putting in overtime on nights and weekends, to earn the respect of my colleagues at the Journal,” Nazario told the audience. Eventually, she gained their trust and was given the freedom to pursue stories of her choosing.
In 1988, Nazario took a break from journalism and went back to school to earn a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating, she returned to work at the Wall Street Journal, this time based in Los Angeles. Five years later, she joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times as an urban affairs writer.
At the Times, Nazario quickly carved out a beat covering controversial social issues, such as drug addiction, hunger, suicide, and immigration. In 1998, her story, “Orphans of Addiction,” chronicling the lives of children with drug-addicted parents, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1994, she won a George Polk Award for a series on hunger among California school children.
“The only great thing about awards is that they give you a longer leash,” Nazario said. Once she’d proven herself, her editors at the Times gave her more leeway in choosing assignments and more time to complete them.
Nazario’s conversation with her housekeeper, Carmen, sparked the idea for her book, Enrique’s Journey. Carmen had left two sons and two daughters in Guatemala with their grandmother, to travel to the United States and find work. As the single mother, Carmen couldn’t afford to feed her children in Guatemala.
When Carmen’s son, Minor, arrived in the U.S. a year later, he told Nazario about his treacherous journey and of the thousands of children who risk their lives traveling to “el Norte” in search of their mothers. Nazario immediately recognized that this was a story that needed to be told.
To research the story, she began by interviewing detainees at Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) holding centers along the U.S./Mexico border. It quickly became apparent that Carmen’s situation wasn’t unusual. In fact, according to one study she found, one out of five live-in nannies in Los Angeles have a child living in another country.
From interviewing INS detainees, Nazario also learned that many of the children left behind ultimately seek out their mothers in America. She decided she wanted to follow a child and write about his or her odyssey. “I wanted to tell [the story] from an immigrant’s perspective,” she said.
Photo: Megan Thompson.
Originally published as a six-part series by the Times, her chronicle of a Honduran boy named Enrique, who journeyed in search of his mother, riding freight trains through Central America to the United States, garnered a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Two years later, Nazario expanded the series into the book Enrique’s Journey.
“I do a lot of fly-on-the-wall reporting where you just hang out and watch things happen,” Nazario said. For Enrique’s Journey, this meant spending three months retracing Enrique’s steps. His mother, Lourdes, had left Honduras when he was five. At 17, Enrique risked his life to track her down, even though it meant traveling thousands of miles by freight train, suffering intense hunger pangs and numerous beatings at the hands of bandits and corrupt officials.
Nazario ditched her notebook after climbing on her first freight train. If you didn’t hang on with both arms, she explained, you would fall off the train. Instead, she relied on a tape recorder tucked in her shirt pocket, which meant that her interview subjects had to speak directly into her shirt, she said, grinning.
Not that reporting the story was a lighthearted affair. Female migrants riding the rails are routinely raped, said Nazario. To protect herself, she prearranged a safety system with train conductors. If she waved the red jacket she wore, the conductors would know that she was in trouble. This did little to reassure her, however. When things went wrong, she said, they tended to “happen really quickly. There was no time to wave the red jacket, so I had some close calls.”
Once, she was almost swept from the top of a moving freight train by a branch. (Migrants are frequently killed or maimed attempting to jump on the tops of moving trains.) Another time, while Nazario waited by the border to see Enrique cross, six men brandishing AK-47s and shotguns threatened her by the banks of the Rio Grande. The official-looking letter she carried persuaded the bandits to back off, she said.
While reporting, Nazario said she struggled with the moral issues of immersion journalism. During the two weeks she spent with Enrique, as he waited to cross the Rio Grande, she watched him struggle to scrounge enough money washing windows to buy phone cards to call his old employer in Honduras and his mother in North Carolina. Though she had a cell phone in her purse, Nazario never offered it to Enrique. That would have fundamentally changed the story, she said. “My main job is to convey reality,” said Nazario, “not change reality and then write about it.”
Nazario learned early on that journalism can be a dangerous profession, especially when a reporter is covering social issues, such as immigration, poverty, and drug addiction. She lived in Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s. During the war, many citizens and journalists “disappeared.”
At times, she said, the story pushed her to the breaking point. She called the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas, with its bandits and rampant crime, “the heart of darkness,” but said that a village, in Veracruz, Mexico, restored her faith in humanity because people ran out with bundles of food and water for the immigrants, when the train slowed on curves. If they didn’t have food to give, she said, they came to the tracks with silent prayers for the migrants passing by. “It is incredibly moving to experience this,” Nazario noted.
Nonetheless, on returning to Los Angeles, it took months of therapy for Nazario to shake off post-traumatic fears of being robbed, raped, or beaten by the bandits who had roamed the trains she traveled on.
At the end of her lecture, Nazario offered advice and encouragement to the crowd of aspiring journalists. “Your employer won’t always give you the time, especially when you’re young and starting out,” she said. “When they wouldn’t give me the time, I would do it on weekends and I would do it at night. And once you build up a track record, they’re more willing to give you time.”