Sonia Nazario: “Enrique’s Journey & America’s Immigration Dilemma” 21st Annual Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities

Using award-winning photographs, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario delves inside the world of millions of immigrant women who have come to the U.S. as single mothers, and the children they have left behind in their home countries in Central America and Mexico.  She discusses the modern-day odyssey many child migrants—some as young as seven, all of them traveling alone—make many years later riding on top of freight trains through Mexico on their quest to reunify with their mothers in the U.S.

 

Nazario, who spent three months riding on top of these trains to tell the story of one child migrant named Enrique, shares her story in the context of determination.  She discusses the role of determination in her own life as well as in the lives of the migrants she wrote about. Nazario sees immigration as an issue with many shades of gray, with winners and losers. She discusses how traditional approaches to the issue of immigration haven’t worked and offers novel solutions to one of America’s thorniest issues.

 

Nazario also will reflect on how winning the Pulitzer Prize has provided her with an incredible platform to discuss the immigration issue, and how the Pulitzer has influenced her evolution over the past decade as a journalist and increasingly as an activist.

 

The 2016 Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities is presented by Humanities Nebraska in partnership with the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues, the University of Nebraska, and the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative.