The 2007 Annual Lorraine W. Frank Lecture
Sonia Nazario
"Enrique's Journey and
America's Immigration Dilemma"
To share the human stories that underlie on-going issues, AHC was honored to present Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Enrique's Journey, as the 2007 featured presenter for the 17th annual Lorraine W. Frank Lecture in the Humanities.
Sonia Nazario, a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her many national awards. The newspaper series upon which Enrique's Journey is based won more than a dozen awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Marquez Award for Overall Excellence.
View more multimedia clips and photos
of Sonia's lecture here.
In this astonishing true story, Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. In a Publishers' Weekly interview with Nazario, she talks about what inspired her to write this book:
"A woman, Carmen, would come and clean my house twice a month. She told me that she had four children that she had left behind in Guatemala and had not seen for 12 years. About a year later, her son made the journey to the United 
States and described to me El Tren de La Muerte, the Train of Death. I found it unbelievably moving: the story of children wanting, at all costs, to be with their mothers and going through these dangerous and terrifying worlds to reach them."
Below she describes the research she did to understand Enrique's story:
"I wanted to put readers on top of the train with Enrique and to make them feel that they were alongside him. To do that, I had to retrace his journey myself. I did it the way he did it. Where he rode buses through Central America, I rode buses. And where he boarded the train in southern Mexico, I did, too."
Help Build the Lorraine W. Frank Fund
Donations to the Lorraine W. Frank Fund endowment in memory of Lorraine W. Frank will be used to support and continue the annual lecture.
