Personally, I think one of the most intriguing parts of the book happened before Enrique's story even started--in the prologue. Sonia Nazario offers the reader a snapshot of her daily life, recounting a Friday morning in 1997 when her maid, Maria del Carmen Ferrez, arrived to clean the house as usual. They strike up a conversation that is seemingly normal, but snowballs into something much larger for Nazario. She asks Carmen about her children, and she discovers that most of them have been left in Guatemala. Her teenage son, however, hitchhiked through Mexico to reach her. Carmen further informs her that "many immigrant women in Los Angeles from Central America or Mexico are just like her-- single mothers who left their children behind in their home countries," (xi). Nazario is shocked. She asks her son, Minor, about his journey and discovers more about the perilous flight many children choose to take to be reunited with their mothers. She asks herself why many mothers choose to abandon their children this way, and how their sacrifices impact their children at home. In addition, she wonders what kind of desperation these children must feel to sacrifice their lives to be with their mothers again. These questions sparked by this one conversation become something much larger for Nazario: an all consuming quest to highlight the stories of immigrants fleeing their home countries. As we find out later in the book, thousands of children are killed, dismembered, raped, beaten and robbed on this journey north--and Nazario decides to throw herself into their shoes. Although she received her degree in Latin American studies and was the member of an immigrant family herself, this conversation with her maid brought her to an entirely new level of curiosity and drove her to dedicate years to the cause of others in her situation.
On a daily basis, we are inundated with statistics and news stories of wars, disease, national economical difficulties, turmoil, and of course, the occasional medical miracle or day-to-day hero. Some stories last for months, even years, and impact the world on a global scale. Even then, all we seem to experience are the people on tv telling us about them, or words printed on newspapers. In other words, we almost never experience them directly. However, by a twist of fate or mere circumstance, something happens that lets us encounter this on a first person basis, submerging is into this world of problems on a different level. Personally, I experienced this when my close friend's mother died of cancer earlier this year. She was stage four for many years or her life, and her end was drawing nearer and nearer. I thought I was ready to help my friend with this, to be there for him emotionally and offer my words of comfort to help. However, when the day did come, I felt so insignificant. Furthermore, seeing his family sitting there during the funeral, a family of a 14, 13, and 8 year old all by themselves, it really hit me. You read and see movies about death, disease and cancer, but for me, I never really grasped the concept until I witnessed it emotionally through my friend. Similarly, I think it was this one firsthand experience with her maid that drove Nazario to go on this massive quest, to allow millions of others to glimpse this journey as well on a personal level, separate from statistics, laws and policies, and need coverages. Like Sonia, I'm sure many of us were familiar with this issue before reading this book, but were drawn in much more emotionally throughout the course of it. Have any of you had a similar instance in which a popular issue was made much more real to you on a personal level? Do you think lawmakers in our country should also try to see this issue on a more firsthand level, or do you think it's safer to remain separated for the good of the country?
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