WORD LISTS

"Enrique's Journey," Vocabulary from Prologue-Chapter 3

Thu Jun 09 13:24:50 EDT 2016
By L. Stockton (CA)
The subtitle describes the story as "a boy's dangerous odyssey to reunite with his mother." Learn the words that helped the journalist Sonia Nazario earn the Pulitzer Prize for this touching work of nonfiction.Here are links to our lists for the nonfiction narrative: Prologue-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.
poverty
She hoped she could provide her children an escape from their grinding poverty, a chance to attend school beyond the sixth grade.
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?
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.
lucid
He is lucid enough to tell Belky that he knows what he has to do: he has to go find his mother.
salvation
But Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead. Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation.
batter
The day’s work is done at Las Anonas, a railside hamlet of thirty-six families in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, when a field hand, Sirenio Gomez Fuentes, sees a startling sight: a battered and bleeding boy, naked except for his undershorts.
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.
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.
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.
attempt
This is his seventh try, and it is on this attempt that he suffers the injuries that leave him in the hands of the kind people of Las Anonas.
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.
summon
He grabs one of its ladders, summons all of his strength, and pulls himself up.
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.
callous
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.
flee
Enrique flees from car to car, more than twenty in all, struggling to keep his footing each time he leaps from a hopper to a fuel tanker, which is lower and has a rounded top.
machete
In the scrub brush, though, Enrique worries less about agents than about madrinas with machetes.
savage
The name for these men is a play on words: these civilians help the authorities, as a madrina, or godmother, would, and administer madrizas, or savage beatings.
barbed
He crawls under a barbed-wire fence, then under a double strand of smooth wire.
resist
Migrants who resist are beaten or killed.
caution
Maybe it was his extra caution, maybe it was his decision to run, maybe it was his attempt to lie flat and hide atop the boxcar, which delayed his getting off the train and gave the bandits an opportunity to target migrants ahead of him.
taunt
Boys like Enrique are called “stinking undocumented.” They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them.
victim
Migrants, who are often afraid to press charges, make ideal victims.
huddle
Many of the migrants on Enrique’s train huddle together, hoping for safety in numbers.
fate
Having avoided the fate of many other migrants, Enrique reaches Ixtepec, a southern crossroads in Oaxaca, the next state north, 285 miles into Mexico.
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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