photo from enriquesjourney.com

Title: Enrique's Journey                  Lexile level: 830L
Author: Sonia Nazario                     Grade level: 6th
Genre: Nonfiction                             Interest level: 9th-12th
Pages: 285

     Enrique loved his mother, Lourdes, with all his heart. As a tiny boy, he would cling to her skirt and hated for her to go anywhere without him. But trying to raise Enrique and his older sister, Belky, in poverty in Honduras, filled Lourdes with dread. She did not want her children to go hungry and she wanted them to be able to finish school, have better clothes, toys and birthday parties. Lourdes had to make a choice - stay with her children in her two-room wooden shack, or travel to the United States in order to make the money needed for her children to have better lives. She leaves her 7-year-old daughter, Belky, with her mother, and 5-year-old Enrique with his father, and goes north.
     For 10 years, the children receive gifts and money from their mother. They go to school. They speak to Lourdes on the phone and listen to her make impossible promises to visit for birthdays and Christmases. When Enrique is 15, getting into drugs and trouble, and can no longer bare living without his mother, he decides to embark on the very dangerous journey on the trains of Mexico to the United States to find Lourdes.
     Enrique's journey includes riding the trains that leave countless migrants crippled if not killed, dodging the police and immigration officers who often demand bribes, taking beatings from bandits and gangsters, and often going hungry. Most children who, like Enrique, take the trains to reunite with their mothers never make it to the United States. Will he?
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This book can easily be taught in a variety of subjects.

In math class, students can track how many days and miles Enrique travels throughout the story. Line graphs can illustrate his distance from his home in Honduras and it would be visual how many times he was sent back to Guatemala. Students could also track his finances.

In Social Studies, this book could easily be used for discussions of life in Central America and Mexico. Using the CIA's World Factbook, students can understand how a country's economy effects its individual citizens by taking a close look at the living conditions of Enrique's family and neighbors and seeing that Honduras has a 60% poverty rate and a vastly uneven wealth distribution.
Then, of course, there is the conversation of the stigmas and stereotypes a person takes on as a migrant and the legal processes of [legally] migrating to another country.
Questions to ask:

• How are migrants viewed in the United States? How does that compare to the Mexicans' view of Central American migrants in Nazario's book? 
• What about the current issue with Syrian refugees? How are these refugees similar/different from migrants like Enrique & Lourdes?
• Why don't they just come to the United States legally with a Green Card or Visa? (Answer: because they do not qualify) Why don't people like Lourdes & Enrique qualify? Should something be done about this?

Each of these questions can be addressed in the form of an essay to satisfy ELA Common-Core standards.

More Lesson Ideas Directly from EnriquesJourney.com