Graduate School Public Lectures

Enrique’s Journey & America’s immigration dilemma

Wed. April 29, 2015      6:30 p.m.

William W. Philip Hall, UW Tacoma

We are no longer taking online registrations for this lecture. As a courtesy, we offer standby seating on a space-available basis beginning 15 minutes prior to the lecture’s start time.

The face of Latino migration is often assumed to be that of an adult male. But the work of Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario tells a different story, one whose protagonists are increasingly women and children. In this lecture, Nazario revisits her three-month endeavor to document in photographs one migrant boy’s journey atop trains to the United States, and discusses how current proposed immigration legislation offers more shortcomings than solutions.

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. She has won numerous national journalism and book awards tackling some of this country’s most intractable issues: hunger, drug addiction and immigration. 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, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Marquez Award for Overall Excellence. 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. Nazario, who grew up in Kansas and in Argentina, has been named among the most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business Magazine and a “trendsetter” by Hispanic Magazine. In 2012, Columbia Journalism Review named Nazario among “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years.”

For more information, contact the UW Alumni Association at 206-543-0540 or uwalumni@uw.edu.