Pultizer Prize-winning author of Enrique’s Journey Sonia Nazario recently met with ninth graders in the Global Perspective course at Colorado Academy to discuss the issues that affect illegal immigration from Central America into the United States.

 

Enrique’s Journey, which is required reading in high schools and colleges across the country, details a young boy’s journey to reunite with his mother in the United States. Like other migrants, Enrique travels atop trains from Honduras to Mexico, facing abuse, theft, and hunger along the way.

 

Nazario, also an award winning journalist, rode seven trains to recount Enrique’s experience. Likewise, when speaking with CA students she said understanding the immigration issue "takes empathy," citing some of the atrocities migrants face in order to escape their often corrupt communities. “I call it a refugee crisis and not an immigration one,” she said.

 

Nazario’s lecture was the second for students, who also heard about defectors that risk their lives to escape North Korea. Says Global Perspectives teacher Paul Kim, “Migrant narratives are important in education because they help us better understand how to engage in a world where cross-cultural exchange is a part of our everyday lives in increasingly connected and interdependent contexts.”

 

Students created their own "migrant narratives" in the form of six-word essays. “Sorry, identification is necessary for citizenship,” read one. Others read:

• “Xenophobia and ethnocentrism makes outsiders ‘illegal’.”
• “Children crying: another leaving, for better.”
• “Ample opportunity for all industrious, where?”
• “You fear me before understanding me.”
• “A distant tomorrow, so real today.”

 

Global Perspectives is a required freshman course that seeks to create a context for understanding the modern world and the diverse global perspectives that inform it.