Dimensions
150 x 232 x 24mm
In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
Five year old Enrique is like many young Hondurans. His family is too poor to feed the children and to keep him in school, so his mother leaves Honduras to work in the United States with the promise that she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again and begs for his mother to come home. Finally, after eleven years of separation and patience, he decides he will go find her.
Enrique sets off alone from Honduras, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone number. With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother's side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds the only way he can, by clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains of the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte – The Train of Death.
Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope – and the kindness of strangers.
