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"Enrique's Journey" by Sonia Nazario, Prologue–Chapter 3

Thu May 05 16:37:43 EDT 2016
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
Enrique's mother left Honduras to find work in the United States; eleven years later, Enrique embarked on a dangerous journey to reunite with her. In this powerful nonfiction account, journalist Sonia Nazario recounts his experiences.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Prologue–Chapter 3, Chapters 4–6, Chapter 7–Afterword
venture
She left them there when she ventured north as a single mother to work in the United States.
relegate
Or I could stay by my children’s side, relegating another generation to the same misery and poverty I knew so well.
desperation
What kind of desperation, I wondered, pushes children as young as seven years old to set out, alone, through such a hostile landscape with nothing but their wits?
mundane
We kept the windows closed so neighbors could not hear any discussion that strayed from the mundane into anything vaguely political.
traverse
To follow Enrique’s journey, I traversed thirteen of Mexico’s thirty-one states.
migrant
Until my journey with migrant children, I had no true understanding of what people are willing to do to get here.
determination
With each step north, I became awed by the gritty determination these children possess in their struggle to get here.
endure
They are willing to endure misery and dangers for months on end.
resolve
They come armed with their faith, a resolve not to return to Central America defeated, and a deep desire to be at their mothers’ sides.
deliverance
Although in the United States the women struggle to pay rent and eat, in the imaginations of their children back home they become deliverance itself, the answer to every problem.
dote
Enrique clings to his daddy, who dotes on him.
careen
Enrique’s uncles careen off the road.
lucid
He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.
sully
Worse, he is sullying the only thing her family owns: its good name.
salvation
But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation.
futile
Giving Enrique clothing will be futile, Carrasco thinks, if he can’t find someone with a car who can get the boy to medical help.
mangle
The migrants most badly mangled by the train run up bills of $1,000 to $1,500 each when they end up at a public hospital one and a half hours away.
corrupt
Enrique has already had other run-ins with corrupt Mexican cops.
extort
Four of five migrants who arrive at the Albergue Belen shelter in Tapachula have already been robbed, beaten, or extorted by police, says the shelter priest, Flor Maria Rigoni.
callow
Six months ago, the first time he set out to find her, he was still a callow kid.
perilous
Now he is a veteran of a perilous pilgrimage by children, many of whom come looking for their mothers and travel any way they can.
mausoleum
After a day and twelve miles, police caught him sleeping on top of a mausoleum in a graveyard near the depot in Tapachula, Mexico...
culvert
He has slept on the ground; in a sewage culvert, curled up with other migrants; on top of gravestones.
cower
Once he was deported at 2 A.M. and spent the night cowering, sleepless, near the border guard station, afraid for his life.
bandit
Arriaga’s Red Cross workers retrieve, on average, ten migrants per month who have fallen or been beaten up by bandits or gangsters.
frenzied
Already, Enrique has four jagged scars on his shins from frenzied efforts to board trains.
cunning
Enrique guesses there are more than two hundred migrants on board, a tiny army of them who charged out of the cemetery with nothing but their cunning.
callus
His hands would turn numb and callous after hours of hanging on.
derail
Enrique was once on a train that derailed.
din
Migrants at the front of the train, nearest to the locomotive, call back a warning over the train’s deafening din.
elude
Of the half-dozen checkpoints Enrique has eluded in southern Mexico, he fears La Arrocera most.
pelt
As he runs, three agents follow on the ground, pelting him with rocks and sticks, an experience many migrants say they have here.
machete
In the scrub brush, though, Enrique worries less about agents than about madrinas with machetes.
barbed
He crawls under a barbed-wire fence, then under a double strand of smooth wire.
resist
Migrants who resist are beaten or killed.
taunt
Boys like Enrique are called “stinking undocumented.” They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them.
tourniquet
The medics applied two tourniquets.
wallow
She is impatient with those who wallow in pity.
travail
She thanks God for giving her strength to get through the day’s travails.
critical
Blending in is critical. Migrants clip labels off clothes from Central America. Some buy Mexican clothes or ones sporting the name of a Mexican soccer team.

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