Promised land

AMERICANS. Foreigners.

Between these words resides one of our oldest national debates, and it follows the contours of the economy with near-perfect synchronicity. During boom times (as in the late 1990s), the argument fades; during the busts (as in the Great Depression and every downturn before and since), the nativist virus flares again.

In the post-9/11 world, security concerns commingle with economic and ethnic codes. The House of Representatives recently passed one of the most Draconian immigration bills in our history, which would provide for several hundred miles of fencing on the southern border (the Great Wall of America) while making it a felony to succor “illegals” in their often deadly treks.

On the other side, progressive “experts” and leaders of community- and faith-based organizations get the occasional sound bite. But even as they discuss the global labor economy, immigrant desire (once referred to as the American dream) and American hypocrisy, they’re almost always sandwiched between nativist harangues. The rhetoric from both sides erases those at the heart of the discussion: the immigrants themselves.

Sonia Nazario’s book “Enrique’s Journey” brings the immigrant back to the center by giving him flesh and bone, history and voice. It grew out of a 2002 series for this newspaper that won Nazario, a Times staff writer, a Pulitzer Prize. Times photographer Don Bartletti also won a Pulitzer for his work on the series.

The book tells the story of Enrique, a Honduran teenager who made several terrifying voyages to reunite with his mother, Lourdes, who had immigrated to the United States years before. (For the book, Nazario adds material on Enrique’s life after he arrives in the U.S.) Lourdes undertook her journey in the name of her family’s future -- the migrant creed that taking to the road will lead to la vida mejor, the better life. As for Enrique, the most treacherous, and longest, part of his odyssey involved hopping trains across the length of Mexico.

Enrique fits an increasingly common immigrant profile, in terms of his youth and his truncated relationship with his mother. Nazario calculated, using official sources, that some 48,000 children from Mexico and Central America travel the same path as Enrique every year, most of them seeking to be reunited with their parents and most successfully evading immigration authorities.

The great strength of Nazario’s narrative is how she complicates our notion of Latin American migrant-ness. We believe most illegals to be from Mexico; she writes of a Central American journeying across Mexico, detailing abuses by the very Mexicans who complain so bitterly about the inhumanity of U.S. border policy. We imagine migrants mostly as men; Enrique’s mother represents the exodus of women from Latin America. Mostly, Nazario renders for us a portrait of migrant as child, and of that child as both victim and survivor of the brutal road between First and Third worlds.

We meet Enrique on the eve of his mother’s departure for the States. He is 5; Lourdes is 24. Eventually, she finds work as a nanny in -- where else? -- Beverly Hills, where she cares for a child who has suffered an altogether different kind of abandonment. Her remittances arrive in Honduras, but they are not enough to ensure la vida mejor for her family. The only communication is the occasional phone call. “When are you coming home?” Enrique asks again and again, as several reunification plans fail.

Enrique dives into the street and its ephemeral escapes, like glue-sniffing. Eleven years after her departure, his mother has grown mythic in his imagination. Convinced she is his only salvation, he decides to risk the rails to once again be at her side.

The bulk of the book re-creates Enrique’s train-hopping experiences, as Dantesque a narrative as exists in the small but growing literature of Latin American migration. For months, he rides the rails, facing lethal danger, never knowing how long he’ll have to go without food or water. In a remarkable feat of “immersion reporting,” Nazario interviewed Enrique and family members and retraced his route along the rails, hopping what migrant children call el tren de la muerte, the train where death can come easily at the hands of gangsters -- who, by and large, are abandoned children like Enrique -- or by steel wheels churning over flesh. At any given time, dozens of children and adults ride inside or atop boxcars. The southern Mexican border state of Chiapas is the most dangerous leg of the trip; here, the Mexican migra, or immigration police, are almost as feared as the Mara Salvatrucha, the gang that controls the rail lines and beats tithes out of the migrants. The carnage is unfathomable:

“[A] Salvadoran was found crumpled and unconscious and by the tracks, his left arm broken. In April, a Honduran broke his foot falling from the train. Another, assaulted by someone wielding a machete atop the trains, arrived with the ligaments in his right hand severed. In May, a Honduran had a fractured right clavicle. In June, a Nicaraguan had a broken right rib. In July, a seventeen-year-old Honduran lost both legs. In August, a Salvadoran arrived with his leg hanging by a bit of skin and muscle. In October, two Salvadoran youths on top of a train were electrocuted by a high-tension wire.”

Enrique receives a brutal beating in Oaxaca; luckily, local residents come to his aid. This is a little-noted motif of migrant pilgrimages: At the darkest moments, Samaritans often appear. In one of the book’s most moving passages, Nazario describes towns in Veracruz where residents toss bundled snacks and clothes to riders as the trains roll through. She portrays people like Olga Sanchez Martinez at the Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd who care for those mutilated by the trains. Some help because Mexico’s mistreatment of Central American migrants is the ultimate hypocrisy. Others are inspired by clergy, who preach that the way people respond to migrants is a moral matter. There is no scriptural exemption from the basic human duty toward hospitality.

After several months, Enrique crosses his final border -- the Rio Grande. What he hasn’t counted on is the distance between his fantasies and the reality of a mother he no longer knows. “Enrique’s Journey” ultimately reveals a cruelly ironic twist to the migration story: that the journeys undertaken by parents in the name of their families cause these families to break apart. It is a mirror in which Americans should be able to see themselves -- since our labor economy has inspired this migration, which shames our “family values.”

“Enrique’s Journey” is not without flaws. The story seems to have suffered in the transition from newspaper to book. Cliched section subheadings (“Confusion,” “A Decision,” “A Dreaded Stop”) carry over from the original. Large portions of text have been lifted verbatim and interspersed with fresh reporting, making transitions often forced or nonexistent. What in the beginning feels like a breezy journalistic style becomes numbingly repetitive and begs for variation. And although Nazario is a tireless reporter (she worked on this story for five years), she is short on intimate detail -- the color of a T-shirt or the timbre of a voice -- which compromises the density of the work.

Truly baffling, however, is the decision to keep most historical context and analysis out of the main narrative and squeeze it into an abbreviated afterword crammed with statistics and equivocal statements on the immigration debate. Here, Nazario appears to have followed journalistic conventions that often fail today’s global stories, with their layers of history and economics, as well as the complicated relationships between writer and subject.

Nonetheless, “Enrique’s Journey” is the kind of story we have told ourselves throughout our history, a story we still need to hear. The surnames and countries of origin have changed, but the narrative of migration is an American constant. It’s too bad we forget it when we need it most, when we argue over who is an American and who is not -- a political farce that conceals the human tragedy of the modern migration story and our complicity in it.