Mothers Depicted In Enrique's Journey

There isn’t and will never be an exact number on how many people cross the border each day, however, it is estimated that a million people cross it on a daily basis. And a percentage of those individuals who cross the border are mothers; mothers who leave their children behind in hopes to providing more for their children while seeking work in the United States. In Enrique’s Journey, by Sonia Nazario, it demonstrates the physical, mental, and harsh conditions a single Central American mother, Lourdes, encounters on her journey to the United States. Although Nazario’s purpose of her writing was to shed light on the issue of immigrating mothers, I argue that Lourdes’s decision to migrate to the United States exemplifies the failure of a deontological ethic that led to the resentment and devastating damage to her children. Lourdes’s decision to leave her children in Honduras caused more damage than good; the act of leaving itself was wrong. At the age of twenty-four, Lourdes was a single mother struggling to provide for her children, Enrique, 5, and Belky, 7. “They have a bleak future. He and Belky are not likely to finish grade school. Lourdes cannot afford uniforms …show more content…
You can hide and run, but you can’t get away because I have a jeep.” (Mora 1) Symbolically, the badge means border patrol has authority over the Mexican woman. The sunglasses indicate they have the ability to watch her in the blazing sun. The jeep conveys that they can move faster to catch anyone because unlike the immigrants, the patrol officer is not on foot. Stanza I ends with “I can touch you wherever I want but don’t complain too much because I’ve got boots and kick-if I have to, and I have handcuffs. Oh, and a gun.” (Mora 1) Boots, kick, and handcuffs signify that border patrol has power and legal protection from doing what they want with the crossing immigrants and a gun to even shoot if the patrol officer