Sonia Nazario lecture

I attended the 3pm session on Sonia Nazario's discussion about her book Enrique's Journey. As much as I was expecting to learn something new about Enrique's trip or the author's own travels to write the book, I didn't seem to hear anything I hadn't already heard before. The main part of the discussion was merely an expanded repetition of the book's prologue, which of course every student in the room had already read for class. They displayed pictures of people she had met, other migrants, and Enrique and his family. Of course they were all very nice to see blown up large, but were mainly the same pictures that were in the center sections of our novels.

As opposed to really being a discussion about the main subject of the book, the relationship between mothers and children, and the sacrifices theses mothers have to make, it really just seemed like a pro-migrant speech to me. Sonia seems to want to make laws easier on illegal immigrants and to keep the police from being in contact with immigration officials. This was a bit upsetting to me since I have very different opinions on this topic, and do not wish to have someone attempt to sway my opinions when they are supposed to be discussing a novel. At the end there was a question and answer session in which some interesting questions were raised, but that was the only part that I heard anything new.