news-record.com

GREENSBORO — We don’t know his last name. Just his first.

Enrique.

He was no more than 16, a kid from Honduras, when he started clinging to the tops and sides of trains so he could cross the border of Mexico and find his mother in North Carolina.

Enrique tried eight times. He traveled a combined 12,000 miles. He got robbed and beaten badly. He was hungry, thirsty and constantly afraid that he’d slide off the train — or get thrown off — and lose an arm, a leg or his life.

Jeremy Tyson and Lindsay Widenhouse remember those details.

They read about Enrique this fall. So did at least 1,500 of their classmates as part of UNCG’s all-campus read. “Enrique’s Journey” is about immigration, one of the most emotional issues of our time.

But it’s also about family. Tyson and Widenhouse get that.

Widenhouse is 21, the oldest of three, a daughter of two Raleigh attorneys. Tyson is 20, one of four children, the son of a single mother who worked as a sales representative in Charlotte for J.C. Penney.

They once viewed immigration only through their billfolds. They saw illegal immigrants as taking jobs Americans wanted. Or they wanted. So, when they heard anyone say, “Send ’em home!” they didn’t think much about it. Or they agreed.

Not anymore.

Enrique’s story, written by award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario, got them thinking. They saw the determination of one boy who risked his life to walk into a trailer somewhere in North Carolina and say to his mother, “I’m here.”

He got there on his eighth try.

His mother had left him with relatives so she could make enough money to send home and help her family.

Enrique hadn’t seen his mother since he was 5.

Says Tyson: “It makes my life look like a fairy tale. Things were hard. ... Hey, my mom struggled. But I didn’t have to worry about going out and selling things because I didn’t have money to eat.”

Says Widenhouse: “It’s hard to pass judgment on them now. They didn’t come to take my job away from me. They have a family back in their country, and they need to send money to their kids so they can get a pencil for school.”

Says their classmate, Christian Mendoza: Enrique is a lot like me.

Mendoza is from Tegucigalpa, Enrique’s hometown. Like Enrique, he grew up poor. And everywhere he looked, he was surrounded by poverty.

He’d walk downtown and see an elderly woman without a left leg who asked him for money, or he’d step onto a basketball court, see a group of kids sniffing glue and ask them why.

“We don’t want to feel the hunger,” they told him.

At age 15, Mendoza came to North Carolina to live with his mother. He couldn’t speak a word of English.

Mendoza got legal status when his mother married a Vietnam veteran from Sanford.

And today, he’s 22, a UNCG senior getting ready to graduate.

He understands Enrique’s story well.

“I’ve heard my classmates say, 'They need to get a job over there (in Mexico or Central America)!’ But it’s so much more complicated than that,” Mendoza says.

“They see the numbers, the figures, but they don’t see the faces, and I wish they would see themselves in those faces and deal with an immigrant for 10 minutes and ask them their story.

“It’s not about taking jobs,” he says. “It’s about survival.”

Hispanics are flocking to North Carolina, and according to one group pushing immigration reform, illegal immigrants are costing our state more than $1.2 billion a year.

So, with Hispanics being North Carolina’s largest immigrant population — 636,000 statewide with 30,000 in Guilford County — you know who’s in the bull’s-eye of this often angry debate.

Then there’s Enrique, the boy with the broken teeth from a bad beat-down.

Nazario found him 11 years ago at a Texas mission. She interviewed him for a few weeks and retraced his steps.

It wasn’t easy.

She traveled 1,600 miles on the top of a train car, 50 feet long. She got hit in the face with a branch, didn’t go to the bathroom for 16 hours, got pelted by hail, wilted in 105-degree heat and got chased by thugs.

And she had armed guards she had hired with her.

When she got back, she had nightmares and went through therapy. She spent five years reporting, writing and rewriting Enrique’s story. Her work paid off.

She turned Enrique’s story into an award-winning, six-part series for the Los Angeles Times, a book for Random House and fodder for at least four films currently under discussion.

But what Nazario remembers most? The e-mails. Particularly from college students.

“They say, 'This is a complicated issue, and I was raised racist and anti-immigrant, and this book has forced me to question some of the values I was raised with,”’ she says. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Widenhouse and Tyson have experienced a value shift, too.

But for Mendoza, it’s different.

Right now, he’s submitting applications to law school. He wants to become an attorney and go back to Honduras because he still remembers the one-legged beggar and the crew of hungry kids sniffing glue to forget.

So, he wants to go home, to help.

He knows there are more Enriques out there.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com