Bestselling author Sonia Nazario visited campus Sept. 23 to hold a reading and discussion of her book “Enrique’s Journey: The story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother.”
In addition to speaking about the topics mentioned in her book, Nazario addressed many issues plaguing Latin American society today.
Hosted by the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Committee on Lectures, Films and Concerts as well as the Diversity Action Team, Nazario transformed the Hixson-Lied Auditorium as she painted the scene of desperation and dedication. She explained how the scene lead young Enrique — and as many as 100,000 Latin American children each year — to leave his home in Honduras and battle adversity in order to reunite with his mother working in the United States.
Nazario received the inspiration for “Enrique’s Journey” following a conversation she had with her housekeeper. In this conversation, Nazario learned that while living in Guatemala as a single mother of four, her housekeeper found it very difficult to feed her children.
“[She said] I could feed my children in the morning and sometimes midday, but at night [the children] cried with hunger,” Nazario said.
Troubled by this sight, Nazario’s housekeeper left her children with their grandmother and ventured to the United States in order find sufficient work. Despite the housekeeper’s success in finding a job and providing for her children, she hadn’t seen her children in 12 years.
Nazario found it difficult to imagine “what kind of desperation would cause a mother to make that decision,” but upon looking deeper into the matter she learned that “millions of women just like her housekeeper come to America because they cannot feed their children.”
For this reason, Nazario felt it was important to share Enrique’s story and show to “what great lengths children will go to reunite with their mothers,” and she also hoped attendees of her book reading would leave with “a better understanding of immigrants and what’s pushing these people out of their home countries.”
Assistant Director of Multicultural Affairs Luz Colon-Rodriguez thought that bringing Nazario to Creighton would be “a great opportunity for [Nazario] to come talk about her book and some of the immigration issues cropping up around America and especially here in Nebraska.”
Colon-Rodriguez said she feels it is important for students to attend book readings such as this because these events “get students talking.”
“A large part of being a college campus is being able to talk and dialogue in regards to what’s actually going on in the world,” Colon-Rodriguez said. “People often have a lot of misconceptions and assumptions about immigrants and I think Sonia cleared some of those up.”
Colon-Rodriguez had some advice for students considering attending events like this in the future.
“Come with an open mind and ready to actually talk,” she said. “Just come and listen to another perspective. You might learn something or you might not, but you can’t claim you were ignorant of the other side.”
Nursing freshman Christina Koutnik attended Nazario’s book reading upon the recommendation of her RSP leader and found this event to be very beneficial, and she said she gained respect for immigrants living in the U.S.
“I really want to read [“Enrique’s Journey”] now after listening to the author. She was amazing and her experiences were really interesting,” Koutnik said.
Koutnik said she feels she received a great deal of knowledge from attending this event, and hopes that as the word about book readings gets out more, a greater number of students will attend future readings.
“I’m really glad my RSP leader told me about this,” she said. “I was really impacted by a lot of the things the authors said, and I feel if I read the book, I’ll be impacted a lot more.”