Mightier Than the Sword

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Sonia Nazario Visits The Benjamin School to Discuss Her Methods of Reporting and Non-Fiction Book, Enrique's Journey

April 1, 2014

Sonia+Nazario+speaks+to+Benjamins+Middle+School+students.

Emily Rossborough

Sonia Nazario speaks to Benjamin’s Middle School students.

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”

– Mother Teresa

This quote is the definition of why Ms. Sonia Nazario started writing about controversial topics that most journalists would have passed on. The life of a journalist is a life that only certain people can lead. Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the most recent Benjamin Diversity Book Club selection, Enrique’s Journey, has experienced the hardships of the profession.

Ms. Nazario visited The Benjamin School on Thursday, March 27, 2014. First, she went to the Upper School to speak with the Advanced Spanish class, who had read Enrique’s Journey in Spanish. She and the students discussed the book and also immigration issues in the United States. Next, she went to the Middle School and discussed her career as well as the process of writing Enrique’s Journey. Later that night, after the assembly, Ms. Nazario went to an event for the Diversity Book Club members, and they discussed everything about Enrique’s Journey while enjoying Mexican food.

The Middle School assembly was held at the Barker Performing Arts Center and Ms. Nazario talked about her career and her life before she became a reporter. She also discussed many of her stories and experiences as a reporter. Early in her career, Ms. Nazario decided to conduct a type of investigative journalism known as “fly on the wall” journalism, where journalists have a subject and they follow that subject around for however long they need without getting involved personally. Ms. Nazario decided to get into this type of journalism because of her harrowing past in her home town of Argentina. When she was a young child, her father died and she had to move from Kansas back to Argentina. In Argentina she had to walk to school, fearing every day that she would be snatched on the streets and killed. She had a hard time in Argentina. She lived there during the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976-1983. During the Dirty War, the economy crumbled, there was a terrorist dictator, and there were many terrible occurrences with the military taking people and killing them. She overcame her struggles in the end and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts.

As a journalist, one of her assignments for the Los Angeles Times was to cover the children of drug addicts in Los Angeles. The article that she wrote as a result appeared in The Los Angeles Times on Sunday, November 16, 1997. Ms. Nazario was allowed by one addicted mother to follow her and her daughter for over three months. There was one small three-year-old in the house, and Ms. Nazario had to watch this child live in a horrible environment without intervening. In the time that Ms. Nazario stayed in the drug-infested house, she was amazed by the disturbing things she saw. She saw the children sleep on the floor which was very dangerous because the house was not clean at all. As she watched, it became harder and harder for her not to intervene. However, Ms. Nazario’s motto is, as she said in her lecture to Middle School students, “If [the people she observes] are not in immediate danger, then you cannot interrupt the story.”

Eventually, however, Ms. Nazario had to take action when the child was bitten by a spider while sleeping on the floor. Ms. Nazario drove the little girl to the hospital because she was concerned. Upon going to the hospital, Ms. Nazario learned that the young girl had several infected spider bites. It was also discovered that in the past week, the little girl had lost 10 percent of her body weight, and she was now 36 pounds. Ms. Nazario indicated that, at that point, intervention was imperative because the child’s life was in danger, but doing so did tend to alter the story. At one point, Ms. Nazario was not observing the heroin den, and she came back to discover that one of the parents had allowed his child to brush her teeth with a toothbrush used by someone with HIV. Nazario’s photographer, instead of intervening, took a picture of the revolting scene. The picture received a lot of hate mail for the horrific sight of the child brushing her teeth. Ms. Nazario was even sent toothbrushes in the mail by some of her detractors. She knows that her decision to watch scenes like this without intervening is controversial, but she convinces herself to stay out of the story so that she does not change the story.

Nazario explained that it is important to not intervene in a story if people are simply “miserable.” If they are in danger, then Nazario admitted she would intervene. However, she made the important point that had she stopped covering the story and intervened in the little girl’s life to assist her, then only that little girl would have been helped. However, by maintaining the integrity of the story and getting it published, not only was the little girl helped by Child Protective Services, but countless other children were helped because people were outraged by the newspaper article. “I think it’s really hard, but I think that every profession has certain ethical rules that you’re supposed to live by, and whatever profession you eventually join you’ll have certain ethical rules,” explained Nazario. “I think the rules that journalists have are for good reasons; people have to be able to trust that we’re telling them the truth and that we’re not changing things and making them fit a certain way that we want them to be and then telling them the story. So if you don’t have people trusting you as a reporter, then you really don’t have anything.” Helping the people or giving them money, food, water, or anything they need would take away from the story. Some people may think that’s cruel and unnecessary, especially since there have been so many points in her career when she could have saved someone from having to go through so much pain and suffering. It is hard to comprehend how someone could just sit there and watch people hurt and cry and not help them avoid suffering.

“I like how she writes down [her subjects’] stories because it helps make people aware of situations, but I think she should also help them,” commented seventh grade student Noelle Matese. Some people also say that it is not fair how Ms. Nazario gets the money for other people’s terrible experiences and discomfort in their lives. She also makes money visiting countless schools and organizations like ours. But it would be unfair to characterize Nazario as an opportunist because she has used her investigative experiences to help those she writes about.

For instance, her articles have made a large difference for the state of California. She wrote an article explaining how most students in the public schools of California were not getting the federally funded free breakfasts at school simply because the schools had decided not to opt into the program. Yet this free meal was the only one many of them could affor. Nazario reported on how the students in the school would begin lining up at the nurse’s office mid-morning all complaining of stomach ailments because they were hungry. Five months after writing her article about hunger and the lack of a free meal program in the California schools, there was a new law in California to have at least two meals provided at school each day. Ms. Nazario is also on the board of the KIND charity (Kids In Need of Defense) along with Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates. KIND helps immigrant children who are facing the immigration system alone obtain free legal representation.

For Nazario, the most life-changing story she worked on was that of Enrique – a 17-year-old from Honduras who eventually became the title character of her non-fiction book, Enrique’s Journey, based on her Pulitzer-prize winning series of articles. Nazario was in search of a story of the immigrants coming from Mexico into the United States illegally. The immigrants often ride on the tops of freight trains in very dangerous and risky terrain to get from Honduras to the Rio Grande and the US border. Nazario decided to follow them, embarking on a truncated but nevertheless dangerous version of the journey they take atop the trains. Nazario also met Enrique when he had made it to the Rio Grande after many failed attempts and thousands of miles of riding the tops of trains. She asked him for an interview about his rides on the train, and she picked him as subject for her reporting because he had made it to the Rio Grande and thus seemed likely to finish his journey and prove a good subject for reporting about the entire process. Enrique also seemed an interesting candidate to report on as he was not without his flaws. He had struggled with habitual drug addiction and had left a pregnant girlfriend back in Honduras. Nazario said that initially she had been looking for a real subject to write about who was an “angel” and would highlight the sadness of the immigrants’ plight. However, she came to see the less-than-angelic Enrique as a good subject because his flaws made him real and would make the story more real to Nazario’s readers.

Enrique’s mother left him in Honduras when he was five-years-old with his grandparents and his sister. His mother left to find work in America because the poverty in their household and in Honduras was so great. His sister had a good education and was happy with her grandparents, but Enrique was not happy. After years of abandonment issues and frustration, Enrique turned to drugs for his problems and decided to depart from Honduras to find his mother. He had only his mother’s phone number and the clothes he was wearing, and left behind his pregnant girlfriend. He tried to leave the country and failed seven times. Once he reached the Rio Grande, he needed money for a phone card to call his mother to hire a smuggler so he could enter the United States. However, he had lost his mother’s phone number, and he had no money to use a pay phone. Ms. Nazario followed him around for days as he stayed in filthy conditions by the Rio Grande and worked all day every day, just for a few dollars. As soon as he made the money, he often spent it on food because he was so hungry. Ms. Nazario followed him around with her phone in her purse the whole time. She knew that she couldn’t give him the phone or the story would have been ruined.

Eventually, Enrique contacted his mother who then raised enough money to get a smuggler to sneak him into the United States. He was smuggled into North Carolina, reuniting with his mother there, but he struggled with the resentment he harbored for her because she had left him so many years ago. Speaking of her experiences following immigrant children, Ms. Nazario said, “It made me write with a lot of passion, about what these kids have been through, because [by following them] I’ve been through 1 percent [of what they’ve experienced] and I thought that it was way too much.” When asked what “fly on the wall’ story has affected her most, Nazario returned to her experience with the child of an addicted mother in LA. “I got to know that three-year-old well, so watching her go through that suffering [was difficult], and I think that the migrants I met on the trains, they were different migrants every day so… the twelve-year-old boy I rode with for quite some time, but because I knew that three-year-old so well, watching her suffering was very difficult for me, so I think both ‘Orphans of Addiction’ and Enrique’s Journey were the hardest stories I’ve done for those reasons.”

In recent months, there have been new developments for Nazario to write about. For instance, the train upon which the immigrants hitch rides has been abolished. The dangers became too dire and people were getting hurt, but what does this mean for that steady stream of immigrants? The New York Times recently wrote about this issue and discussed the advantages and disadvantages to the new rules. Also, a 12-year-old girl recently rode the trains to find a better life with her parents in America (who had illegally immigrated when she was a toddler). She went through terrible circumstances and she was passed around from person to person. Eventually, while staying in a shelter, she killed herself.

Nazario posts about these issues on her Facebook page and continues to write. Whether one feels she needs to intervene or not while she reports upon these stories, one thing is clear: she is bringing about change by simply reporting them and informing the public.

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