Sonia Nazario Reflection

On Monday, November 16, at 3pm, I attended a lecture by Sonia Nazario, author of "Enrique's Journey." I was rather excited about the lecture at first; I mean, I was going to get to see the author of this great book talk about it and what she was trying to do with the novel; but when the lecture was over, I actually found myself rather disappointed. All I felt Sonia Nazario did was reiterate what I had already read. From beginning to end, even in order of the book, she pretty much summarized the difficulties and emotional roller-coasters presented in each chapter, even starting with the day described in the first part of "Enrique's Journey" when Nazario asks her housekeeper about her children. As far as I was concerned, she presented little to basically no new material and just summarized the book, which every single person in that room had - I'm assuming - already read, as it was the required reading campus wide. The only new material I even remember her presenting are some pictures I hadn't seen in the book. Even when the questions were asked at the end of one hour (and I was expecting a lengthy, in-depth, 2 hour lecture), I still felt that I could have answered the questions and the prepared questions simply reiterated a previous discussion topic. What I wanted to know were her feelings towards Enrique after learning that he was going to do the exact same thing to his daughter and girlfriend as his mother had to him. How could he possibly rationalize being able to bring his girlfriend and toddler daughter to the U.S. when his own mother couldn't even afford to bring him there? At least Enrique's mother didn't go out and sniff glue or get drunk, wasting her money on self-destructive tendencies. How does Enrique think he'll be able to do twice of what his mother couldn't when he already has problems with spending money irrationally? How can he do something - after living with the emotional consequences for most of his life - to his own daughter that he knows tore him apart? I don't want or mean to be judgmental as I have never been in the situation, but I can never find myself rationalizing drug use or hypocrisy. I wanted to know Nazario's feelings about that issue, not that a pile of vulture feces-infested trash smelled bad or that a metal train railing in near triple-digit heat was hot. I can figure these things out for myself. I know the journey was difficult - the book would be half as popular if it didn't have all these horrors in it - but I want to know Nazario's views on moral and political issues. What is Nazario's religion? Does that affect her use of the church's in the story or was that just a part that she had to put in there because it was part of the journey? Does she still keep in touch with Enrique? How is Enrique's family? How does Nazario feel about using someone else's story and gaining so much, despite original intentions of bringing the story to the public? Was anything embellished or left out for certain purposes? I want to know what Nazario thinks about her writing; not that she can read or present a lecture on something she spent a good deal of her life on. Perhaps I'm being too harsh in expecting an author with such great material to give us something more, but I guess I just expected something more than what I had already been given.