Essay --

Enrique’s Journey is a novel that recreates the amazing true story of a boy named Enrique’s adventure to reunite with his mother. The story begins with describing the families living conditions in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The characters introduced in the story are Lourdes, Enrique’s mom and his little sister Belky, who is seven years old. The family starts out living in one of the poorest neighborhood in the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. Lourdes can barley affords to provide food on the table for her children, let alone herself. The young twenty four year old mother works constantly doing other peoples laundry, making and selling tortillas, selling used clothes and plantain fruits around the neighborhood. The long hours of work she puts in daily, does not do any justice to her family she is raising alone. From the start, Lourdes is confident that she will be unable to send her kids to school for much longer, she won’t be able to keep food on the table, and won’t be able to give her children the life they deserve; so she makes the decision that many young mother’s in foreign countries do; she decides to move to the United States. In the United States she plans to find a good job, make a decent amount of money, and send money and gifts back to her children so they can live a happier life. Lourdes leaves without saying goodbye to her children, because she is too weak to do so. She leaves Belky, her daughter, with her sister to live with. And she leaves Enrique with Enrique’s dad who left them two years prior for another family. Enrique is left with extreme confusion and sorrow. The book includes actual research that has been doing about immigrants journeys to the United States, and how brutally harsh they can be. â€Å"They must make an ill... ... of ‘la migra’, which are the Mexican immigrant authorities. Finally, on his eighth attempt Enrique makes it to the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, near the border of the United States. He eventually makes enough money to pay for a phone call to his mother. By this time he had memorized her number. Thankfully, he mother finds a way to hire a smuggler to help him get across the Rio Grande. Successfully, stripping down to his johns, and the help of a blow up inner tube, Enrique finds swimming across the freezing Rio Grande Water where his smuggler helps him to a fresh pair of clothes, and a ride to take him to his mother. He finds himself taken to someplace in Orlando, Florida where he eventually is reunited with his mother after Lourdes’s boyfriend goes to pick him up. Enrique’s dream has finally come true. Soon, Enrique’s his dream is shattered with reality.