Quotes from Sonia Nazario

I figure when I die, I can't take anything with me. So why not give?

There is a clear pattern in U.S. history: When we need labor, we welcome migrants. When we are in recession, we want them to leave.

Chiapas, he says, is 'a cemetary with no crosses, where people die without even getting a prayer.

Enrique will be left with his father, Luis, who has been separated from Lourdes for three years.

During that time, in between train rides, they sleep in trees or by the tracks, they drink from puddles, they beg for food.

One Honduran teenager I met in southern Mexico had been deported to Guatemala twenty-seven times. He said he wouldn't give up until he reached his mother in the United States.

Mothers) They lose their children's love. Reunited, they end up in conflict homes. Too often, the boys seek out gangs to try to find the love they thought they would find with their mothers. Too often, the girls get pregnant and form their own families. In many ways, these separations are devastating Latino families. People are losing what they value the most.

Lourdes has decided. She will leave. She will go to the United States and make money and send it home. She will be gone for one year - less, with luck - or she will bring her children to be with her. It is for them she is leaving, she tells herself, but still she feels guilty.