Include any revisions your instructor asked you to make. How would you feel if your mother, whom you were very close to, left you at a young age and never came back? Unfortunately, statistics say that fifty-nine percent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are from Mexico. In "Enrique's Journey" there were many human rights issues. The author of this novel, Sonia Nazario, clearly illustrates a real-life conflict of immigration and how it roughly affects the daily life of people trying to maintain a living within the U.S. and Mexico.
The book is the story of Enrique, a Honduran boy whose mother, Lourdes, was abandoned by her children’s father and who made the difficult choice to leave her eight-year-old daughter and five-year old son to come north. Nazario gives us a view inside the most difficult choice a mother can make: whether to abandon her children to the care of relatives in order to be able to provide a better life for him. The powerful economic forces of globalization in the developing world boil down, for Lourdes, to the simple choice of whether she can continue to tell her children to lay on their stomachs, because that way they can fall asleep in spite of their hunger pangs. And yet, Nazario gets us to fully appreciate the human costs of the decision to come North for the family members left behind. While Enrique has shoes and the ability to attend school, which his mother could not have afforded to give him if she had stayed, he feels the constant loneliness for his mother’s love and is shuttled from relative to relative as he begins to act out, drops of school, and turns to glue-sniffing.
I didn’t like or trust him, because I believed he took my mother from my father. I was still under the impression, it would only be a matter of time before my mother would steal, lie and take from him as she did from her family. Well I was wrong. Four years later, this man has become my stepfather. He was able to help bring my mother back to her children.
The minimum wage was far lower than the livable wage, however, welfare reform was expecting people to become independent through these unlivable minimum wages. True independence with minimum wage was never a possibility and the lives of the impoverished only became more dire. Due to the low minimum wage, Ehrenreich was forced to find a second job, even with the advantage of starting with an ample sum of money. Also, like others she met that lacked welfare support, these jobs were in terrible settings. Descriptions of these settings, including no breaks, slippery floors, abundant second-hand smoke, and more, reminds one that the factories of the Industrial Revolution have returned.
. At the age of sixteen her father learned of her reluctance to accept her heritage, and placed into motion a radical plan. Instead of sending her to dance camp in Aspen, he sent her to Mexico. Reluctantly, she did as her father asked and found that he was right. She loved everything about Mexican culture, and returned to the States with a newly found apparition for her Latino roots.
A lot of them come here not to stay, but just to work so that can provide a better live for their family in Mexico. Most of the people in the film said that “It was hard for them to leave their family behind but they had to do it. It was the only way they could provide for their family”. By them come to the United States and work and send money home back to their family is also helping to stimulate the economy. Mexicans who came to the U.S. send home nearly “25 billion dollars in 2008”.
Workers provided economic prosperity for elite of Mexico such a business owners and the international companies using cheap Mexican labor. Additionally, the CTM, Mexico’s labor union did little to help the workers cause. Workers were uniformed of health and safety risks due to lax industrial hygiene practices. Almost no recourse was available to attain fair compensation, safe working conditions, etc. They were easily kept subjugated due to their low education and need for work, just like the rural peasants of the
When living in a big city you barely have time or the money to spend for yourself especially if you’re a single parent. Being raised by a single mother there were a lot of things we didn’t have that the other kids had. Now I understand where all of the paycheck went to but if my mother had some money left over she would spend it on us. In other countries just having a house, a farm, and some livestock they considered that being rich but that doesn’t really have an impact here in the United States. Here you have to have some education and a good paying job and wear brand name clothes but there are some citizens who may look high class but they just dress well to make other people assume that they are.
“She said that my life is being subsumed by yours and that it’s as though I’ve joined some sort of eco-cult and you are the cult leader” (Beaven-75). When Colin contacted his family, he received a similar reaction. His plan was “instead of two three-day trips at Thanksgiving and Christmas” they would “take one weeklong trip for one holiday and stay home and relax for the other” (Beaven-82). His mother did not understand because “the train will run whether you are on it or not” (Beaven-82) and that his sister would be devastated that they would be missing his baby shower. I can only imagine what my family would do if I said something to them like Colin and Michelle did to theirs.
Descending from difficult households, both my parents moved from Mexico to the United States in hopes to build better lives for my brother and I. Living alone in a foreign country has never been easy, however. My parents have built our lives from scratch with no outside family support. When I was young, my dad was always switching from menial job to menial job in hopes of find something better. My mom always helped out as best she could, at times selling coke and candy to neighbors, but her primary concern was always taking care of her children.