I was a born rabble-rouser. My nickname at three years old was La Granuja, Spanish for the troublemaker. In my first drawing, I held two glasses full of whiskey. When I finished one, I’d drink the other, I told my mother. That contrarian streak drew me to journalism.
When I was 13, my father died suddenly of a heart attack in Kansas, where I grew up. My mother moved our family back to Argentina, where both my parents were from. Her timing was terrible. It was the beginning of the so-called dirty war. The Argentine military was about to take power and “disappear” — a euphemism for “kill” — 30,000 people. Some of those murdered were friends, including a 16-year-old who had all the bones in his face broken.
While walking in our Buenos Aires neighborhood with my mother one morning, I saw a pool of blood on the sidewalk. “What happened?” I asked. She said the military had killed two journalists. “Why?” I asked. She said the journalists were trying to expose the truth. Though just 14, I knew instantly I wanted to write stories, to be a truth-teller. I had seen what happened in a society where information was suppressed and people didn’t understand what was going on.
Because of the terror I lived through as a teenager, I often saw issues in simple strokes, as black or white, good or evil. But I soon learned most issues have shades of gray. The more you know, the murkier things get. I also learned that journalists must keep their opinions in check. Once, in my early 20s and working at The Wall Street Journal, I drove up in my Mazda for a dinner with the chairman of Dow Jones & Co., the newspaper’s owner. The car’s bumper sticker read, “US out of El Salvador!” My bureau chief almost ripped my head off, and rightfully so. The most powerful storytelling doesn’t pull the reader by the nose.
The best assignments made the hair on my arms stand up when I heard about them. If they moved me, they might move others — to read to the end, to act on what they read. I looked for stories that made me mad, sad, disgusted, hopeful. I looked for stories with universal themes — revenge, redemption, greed.
I won the Pulitzer Prize for a series called “Enrique’s Journey” in the Los Angeles Times. At home in Mexico and Central America millions of single mothers were too poor to feed their children enough or to see them study past the third grade. Millions of them moved to the United States, leaving their children behind out of love. They found jobs and sent money home. But the children yearned to be with their mothers and set out on their own to find them.
An army of children, about 48,000 a year, was passing through Mexico and entering the United States unlawfully. Without money, many came the only way they could: grasping the tops of freight trains that traveled up the length of Mexico. They faced gangsters prowling the train tops, bandits alongside the rails, corrupt cops, all trying to rob, rape or even kill them. Many died or lost limbs. The youngest boy I heard of traveled alone across four countries. He was seven.
I wrote about these children through the story of one boy, Enrique, whose mother left him in Honduras when he was just five. Eleven years later, he set off to find her. I found Enrique in northern Mexico, spent two weeks with him, and then took the journey he had made. I traveled three months and 1,600 miles, half the time atop freight trains. What I witnessed changed me. Children who had lost arms or legs were trying to reach the United States and find opportunities I took for granted.
As a reporter, I had often circled back to immigration as a topic. I have migration in my blood. My father, born in Argentina, had parents who had fled persecution in Syria. Before World War II my Jewish mother left Poland, where she was born, for Argentina. Relatives who didn’t leave were gassed in Auschwitz. Of the four children my family, only I was born in the United States.
There were few immigrants in Kansas when I was child. I straddled two worlds, identifying with the outsiders. My parents, who spoke English with heavy accents, sat with friends in the front yard of our home sipping mate, a green tea they passed around Argentine-style in a gourd that everyone drank from. They roasted whole goats in the yard. Most people in Kansas didn’t do these things.
In journalism, I often tried to put readers in someone else’s shoes. I did this through immersion reporting, being a fly on the wall. I loved watching action unfold and describing it in detail. Being in the middle of the action, I could put reader there, too.
“Enrique’s Journey,” a six-part newspaper series that I expanded into a book, takes readers inside the life of an immigrant family and explores its choices and their consequences. More than 80 universities picked it as the book for all incoming freshman to read and discuss.
When students write me, they often begin: I was FORCED to read your book. Then their tone softens. They say they knew no immigrants growing up, but were taught to hate them. This story of one boy’s journey to be with his mother changes their perspective. They often say: You know the immigration issue. How can we fix this mess?
These readers prodded my inner rabble-rouser into action, and the Pulitzer Prize gave me a platform. I have spoken about immigration before the U.N. General Assembly and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I tell them the standard solutions from left or right — border enforcement, guest-worker programs, pathways to legalization — have failed. Any true solution must come from addressing the exodus at its source: Central America.
I became involved in other ways. In immigration courts in LA, I saw that children as young as 7 had to argue their own asylum cases. Most had no attorneys when they faced government lawyers and losing a case meant being returned to a violent country. I joined the board of a nonprofit called Kids in Need of Defense, which has recruited nearly 11,000 lawyers nationwide for children in asylum proceedings.
I became a voice — one of many — for immigrant children who come to this country alone. It gave me legitimacy and a chance to act on what I had found through my reporting.