Interviews
Author Q and A from Publisher’s Weekly:
The Train of Death
PW Talks with Sonia Nazario
by Marcela Valdes -- 1/2/2006
What inspired you to take on the story of Enrique's Journey (reviewed
on p. 51)?
A woman, Carmen, who would come and clean my house twice a month. She told
me that she had four children that she had left behind in Guatemala and had
not seen for 12 years. About a year later, her son made the journey to the
United States and described to me El Tren de La Muerte, the Train of Death.
I found it unbelievably moving: the story of children wanting, at all costs,
to be with their mothers and going through these dangerous and terrifying worlds
to reach them.
It sounds like your own research was pretty dangerous, too.
I wanted to put readers on top of the train with Enrique and to make them feel
that they were alongside him. To do that, I had to retrace his journey myself.
I did it the way he did it. Where he rode buses through Central America, I
rode buses. And where he boarded the train in southern Mexico, I did, too.
But there were times when I was afraid. There were too many close calls. There
were times when I was filthy or I couldn't go to the bathroom for hours or
was excruciatingly hot or cold or pelted by hail.
What was the most dangerous thing that happened to you?
A branch hit me square in the face while I was on top of the train and I almost
fell off. That was pretty harrowing.
It seems like many of the mothers are not prepared for how their departure
will affect their children.
A lot of these mothers believe in their hearts that they are doing the best
thing by leaving their child. [Because the mothers send money back home] their
child will not grow up in such grinding poverty. But the reality is that in
most cases the separation lasts much longer than the women believe [it will],
and the children ultimately resent their mothers for leaving them. So in the
end, for many families, it's a sad story.
It seems like a difficult pattern to break, though, because the poverty is
so devastating.
Some of the families live with a tarp over their heads and a dirt floor underneath
them. Women describe not having anything to give their children for dinner
and giving them a glass of water with a teaspoon of sugar toquiet their bellies.
The level of poverty is staggering.
How has writing this book changed your opinions about illegal immigration?
The main change for me has been to recognize that such a powerful stream will
only change if it is addressed at its source, if the economies of these countries
that are sending large numbers of people to the United States improves. I talked
to one kid in southern Mexico who had made 27 attempts to reach his mother
in the United States, and he was getting ready to make attempt number 28. You
come to believe that no number of border control guards is going to stop someone
like that.
Hispanic Magazine, 2003, "Hispanic Trendsetters"
Sonia Nazario:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s journey has taken her to new
heights.
By Sandra Márquez
Los Angeles Times journalist Sonia Nazario won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize
for feature writing for “Enrique’s Journey,” about a
Honduran boy’s trek to find his mother in the United States. Enrique
traveled 12,000 miles, mostly on top of a freight train through the Mexican
countryside, before swimming across the Rio Grande and reuniting with
his mother in North Carolina.
Nazario herself spent 3-1/2 months tracing the travels of the boy and
spent nearly two years working on the story.
Currently on leave from the Times, she is at work on a book about Enrique
to be published in English and Spanish next year by Random House. She
also serves as a consultant to HBO, which is adapting the story into
a miniseries.
Her own 42-year journey has taken her between the United States and
Argentina. Along the way, Nazario’s experiences have proven to be the best education
for her unique style of “fly on the wall” social journalism,
giving her varied lenses from which to regard reality with a nuanced
perspective.
In her mind’s eye, she can draw upon distinct experiences: as the
daughter of a college professor; an accidental activist in Argentina
during the Dirty War; a teenager waiting tables in Kansas to help support
her
family; a student at an elite liberal arts college; and a reporter for
two of the most influential newspapers in the country.
Her life, she says, has taught her what it’s like “to feel
out of sorts in a country, or to feel that you are not of a place.”
“A lot of time when I talk to Central Americans, I can talk about going
through political turmoil and talk about some of the issues that people
are going through,” she says. “I can connect culturally in
that way on many different levels with people I am interviewing. It is
a huge help.”
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Nazario attended kindergarten in Buenos
Aires before settling in a suburb of Kansas City with her family. Hers
was a
multiethnic household. She was the daughter of a second-generation
Syrian father and Polish-born mother who met in Argentina after their
families
migrated there in search of religious freedom.
In the Nazario household—father Mahafud was a professor of chemistry
and genetics and a Christian, and mother Clara was a homemaker and Jewish—politics
were debated, languages such as Spanish, Yiddish and Arabic were spoken,
and education mattered.
Nazario’s middle-class existence took an abrupt turn at age 14 when
her father died of a heart attack. Her widowed mother took her sister and
twin brothers back to Argentina at the outset of the Dirty War. Nazario
soon found herself lobbying U.S. Congress members for asylum on behalf
of a close relative who was jailed. The sight of a blood-stained sidewalk
served as destiny’s tap on the shoulder.
“I asked my mother what had happened and she said that two people had been
killed there. And I said, Why? She said that they were journalists. And
I said, ‘Why were they killed?’ And she said because they were
trying to tell the truth about what was happening here,” Nazario
says.
“Somehow, in my warped, sick mind, I decided that that would be a good profession
at that moment,” she adds wryly. “I was very idealistic about
it. I really wanted to write about what was happening in places like Argentina.
I just felt like the world somehow didn’t know. And it should know.
And it was a real awakening for a kid from Kansas.”
Within two years, Clara Nazario decided life in Argentina was too dangerous
and moved the family back to Kansas. In high school, Nazario worked
as a waitress after school and on weekends to help her mother, who
struggled
financially as a seamstress and cook.
“ I grew up in a household that really valued education. And pushed education
and all that,” she says. “But on the other hand, I have seen
the effects of working poor. And I have lived it. So I can kind of understand.”
Her good grades got her into Williams College in Massachusetts, where
she was “one of maybe five to 10 Hispanics on the whole campus.”
At graduation time, she wrote to the Page One editor at the Wall Street
Journal, whose name appeared on a contact list for career advice. During
a year abroad in Europe, Nazario had free-lanced for El País in
Spain, and she had later started an alternative newspaper on campus. In
high school, she had also managed to attend two journalism training programs
sponsored by Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company.
Within two weeks, she was hired as a news assistant in New York. She
was soon transferred to the Atlanta bureau, where she catapulted her
second
assignment—a report on Miami a year after race rioting in Liberty
City—into a front-page story and a job offer as a staff writer.
She had accomplished a major feat, but still she had to think about
it. She tried explaining to her editor that her dream was to become
a foreign
correspondent and write about Latin America.
“So I thought about it for four or five days, and I explained to him that
I would be covering the South and that this was not my mission in life.
He would just look at me and want to die,” she says.
Nazario accepted the job and began her trademark in-depth social reporting,
such as a story about why Puerto Ricans were not “getting ahead” in
the United States, told through the experience of one family. She later
moved to the Miami bureau and worked as the backup Latin America correspondent,
reporting frequently from Central and South America.
By 26, she was exhausted. She decided to go to graduate school and
earn a master’s of Latin American studies from the University of California,
Berkeley. With the change of scenery came new insight. She wasn’t
enamored of the foreign correspondent’s life and the people she had
seen “who raced from one war to the next.”
“ So I just decided that there was plenty of misery to write about in this
country,” she says.
Rick Meyer, Nazario’s story editor at the Los Angeles Times, says
she has an eye for detail and a tenacity that won’t quit. “She
really goes after sources, finds them and searches them out no matter
what it takes. She really sticks with something.”
Nazario took readers on a journey, Meyer says, and they stuck with
the story because “it’s a real narrative, in the sense that you
don’t know what will be the outcome.” It took Enrique eight
attempts before he finally made it to the United States.
Harry Pachón, president of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute,
a Hispanic think tank at the University of Southern California, says Nazario
deserves the title of “trendsetter” for her reporting.
“I think Sonia avoids the Pollyanna issues and gives us the full human dimension
of immigration and the Latino community,” Pachón says. “So
many people adopt a politically correct attitude. It’s a kind of
group mentality that is not good for the community.”
Nazario has received this praise before. Her reporting at the Times
has focused attention on the suffering of children. Her series on the
children
of drug-addicted parents was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998. Her
series on hunger among schoolchildren in California won a 1994 George
Polk Award
for local reporting—and led to an increase in the number of federally
funded school breakfasts issued at public schools in the state.
Readers had an “overwhelming” response to “Enrique’s
story,” which in addition to the Pulitzer, won more than a dozen
national awards, including the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism
Award and National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Guillermo
Martínez-Márquez Award.
She believes Enrique, who left behind a girlfriend and a baby daughter
to make his northern migration, has also benefited from the story.
HBO has paid him for the rights to his story, which he is using to
help support
his family. And he is contemplating a return trip home—for good.
“I think he likes the idea of his story being told,” Nazario says.
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