At Length with Steve Scher

At Length with Sonia Nazario

Prior to her Graduate School Public Lecture, Enrique’s Journey & America’s Immigration Dilemma,  Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist Sonia Nazario sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.

Recorded on April 29, 2015.

Sonia Nazario has spent more than 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. In 2003, her story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S., entitled Enrique’s Journey, won more than a dozen awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Expanded into a book, Enrique’s Journey became a national bestseller, winning three book awards, becoming required reading for incoming freshmen at 70 colleges and scores of high schools across the U.S. In 2012, Columbia Journalism Review named Nazario among “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years.”

In this conversation with Steve Scher, Nazario discusses her fraught and illuminating journey accompanying Central American minors making their way to the United States atop Mexican freight trains. She exposes the obstacles these children face, “often robbed, raped, beaten or kidnapped along the way,” and the consequences if they are caught, “detained in detention cells for months before their fate — often deportation.”