By MIKE MONTALTO
September 25, 2014
During late June and July, media outlets across the United States reported on an increasing number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into Texas. The reports focused on significant spike in the number of minors who were making the journey from Latin America to the United States.
According to an article on the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s website, these unaccompanied minors have spread throughout the United States. The site features a table documenting the number of undocumented and unaccompanied minors living in each state.
Many of the states with high numbers make geographical sense, including Texas, Arizona and California, but considering its small size and distance from the Mexican border, it was shocking to see New Jersey was home to 2,171 unaccompanied minors.
One way to localize this story would be to take the streets in communities near my hometown with high numbers of undocumented immigrants, like Red Bank, Freehold and South Amboy.
Aside form my personal knowledge of these towns, I could check with census.gov to get more information on the demographics of each community, and maybe even find information about what parts of the town large numbers of undocumented immigrants live in.
In these communities specifically, I would first ask questions around churches, specifically if there was a Catholic Church in the town. Most of the Hispanic population practices Catholicism, so maybe a priest or a nun would know about an unaccompanied minor in the community.
Another place to get a lead on where an undocumented minor could be living would be at a library. An minor immigrant would likely have no way to access the internet, but would probably want to do so to stay in touch with family, or even search for their family if they don’t know where they are. Today, all library’s have public computers, so if I could ask the librarians if they noticed any young undocumented immigrants in the library recently.
Once I got in touch with a unaccompanied immigrant, communication could be a problem, since I don’t speak any Spanish, but I would want to localize my story by finding out where the child came from, why they chose to come all the way to New Jersey, and how they got here.
Maybe I could even uncover a story as moving as the one told in Sonia Nazario’s book, Enrique’s Journey.
On the book’s website, enriquesjourney.com, the most compelling visual image hits you as soon as the page loads. The cover of the book, a young boy who is assumed to be Enrique is riding on top of a train, looking forward. It makes you wonder what kind of journey he must have had, and what made him so determined to make it to America.
If the website did not have this top banner artwork, and simply started with the links on the top of the page, the viewer would not be nearly as compelled as to what took place on Enrique’s journey and the plight of undocumented immigrant children.
Hi Mike,
I’d like to see more of your research that you could do online. Perhaps, include links to Census.Gov and the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s website, to engage in a more profound analysis. Along with a case study of an undocumented child migrant, these would be an excellent ways to emphasize with this demographic, especially to those that don’t identify with it.
You describe Enrique’s Journey briefly, but to strengthen your potential to captivate a story similar to Sonia Nazario’s book, you could utilize the story or plot to your advantage.