Arcadia University Bulletin

Arcadia University’s new first-year and transfer students are reading the national bestseller Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario this summer, and the author will visit campus on Wednesday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m. in Stiteler Auditorium. Her talk is free and open to the public.

Nazario’s book is based on her Los Angeles Times newspaper series of a boy’s dangerous travels from Honduras to find his mother in the United States. Sixteen-year-old Enrique crosses Mexico by clinging to the tops of freight trains. In Mexico, he faces beatings and mugging by gang members, extreme hunger and thirst, and the constant threat of jail or deportation. He is caught seven times by Mexican police and sent back home. Nazario has spent 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have tackled some of this country’s most intractable problems: hunger, drug addiction, and immigration.

Her 2002 Los Angeles Times newspaper series with photographs by Don Barletti 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. In 2003, Barletti was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his photographs.

Nazario has been named among the most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business Magazine and a trendsetter by Hispanic Magazine. She is now at work on her second book.

“It is our tradition to ask new students to read a book during the summer, with the expectation that they will be part of a small discussion group during New Student Orientation in August,” says Dr. Norah Shultz, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Vice President for Undergraduate Education. “First-year students will meet with their Learning Communities, and transfer students will meet in small groups with other transfer students.”

The community can buy Enrique’s Journey at a discount and contribute to a good cause at the same time by purchasing the book on Amazon.com using Arcadia’s Summer Reading link (www.arcadia.edu/summerreading ). A percentage of the proceeds will be credited to Arcadia University and donated to a charity that fights global hunger.