Francisco CantúCritiques

A thought provoking memoir of Cantu's time with the Border Patrol. He was raised along this beautiful border but felt a great need to better understand it. I loved his dedication page: "To my mother and grandfather, for giving me life and a name, and to all those who risk their souls to traverse or patrol an unnatural divide"; for that is what the border is, an unnatural divide between two amazing cultures who can only clash because of preconceived ideas and xenophobia.

Well written!

“One of my principal goals in The Line Becomes a River was to create space for readers to inhabit an emergent sense of horror at the suffering that takes place every day at the border. In narrating my own gradual participation in the various degrees of violence inflicted in the fulfillment of our nation’s immigration policies and enforcement practices, I sought to leave room for readers to construct their own moral interpretation of the events described.” – Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River

Francisco Cantú is of Mexican American descent and has lived and worked for many years along the US-Mexico border. In this memoir, he recounts his experiences as a former border patrol officer, an intelligence agent, and friend of an illegal migrant trying to return to his family in the US. This book provides a description of the issues related to the border from different perspectives. Along the way, the author provides historical context, humanizes the people involved, and brings it to a personal level by examining the dynamics within his own family.

He explores the actions of border agents, cartels, coyotes (guides), smugglers, and regular people looking for a better life. There are no easy answers to the border problems, and this book does not try to solve them. Rather, it offers insights to assist in understanding them. Highly recommended.

Call him Paco. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money as a Fulbright fellow, and nothing particular to interest him in academia, he thought he would join the Border Patrol and see the desert part of the world. As a writer, Francisco Cantu sets up not the immigration treatise that press reports had prepared me for, but a quest in the manner of Moby-Dick.

This is no policy thesis--Cantu wants to experience the frontier as an ordinary border cop. His discussion of the narco wars is just a Melvillesque midsection discursion, like something told on the quarterdeck before the white whale finally surfaces (avast there! spoilers ahead). Throughout his journey searching for drug smugglers, Cantu documents the humanity of others as he struggles to retain his own. He imagines coming to terms with the border through coexistence, as St. Francis tamed the wolf; instead the toll the border claims on migrants claims his dreams and puts other relationships at a distance. His voyage then takes a strange turn: Cantu abandons la migre, only to approach the border beast again soon enough.

As news reports try to address border myths (this story was tucked inside my library copy of the book), I wanted to see the wicked criminal justice issues firsthand. Cantu's most bracing contribution comes in his narrative not as a border agent, but as the friend of a family swallowed up in an Operation Streamline deportation procedure. Only when he learns the dark choices that migrants accept do we truly know the nature of the beast.

nonfiction (an academic takes a job as border guard to learn more about the nuanced repercussions of border policy)

“Ik blijf proberen om over te steken”
Dit is zeker geen boek om vrolijk van te worden. Ik dacht verkeerdelijk dat het om een roman ging, maar dit is docu-fictie, blijkbaar gebaseerd op de eigen ervaringen van de auteur. Francisco Cantu focust op de grensproblematiek tussen de Verenigde Staten en Mexico, en hoe de kleine mens daarin vermalen wordt, zowel de Mexicanen die wanhopig proberen de VS binnen te komen, als de grensbewakers die ‘in het systeem zitten’. Cantu is zelf half van Mexicaanse afkomst, en is gebiologeerd door die grens, in die mate zelfs dat hij mét een universitair diploma op zak toch 4 jaar voor de Border Patrol, de Amerikaanse grenspolitie gaat werken. Dat levert schrijnende taferelen op over haveloze vluchtelingen in de woestijn, misbruikt door de drugstrafikanten en dikwijls ook hard aangepakt door de grensbewakers, al blijken die ook hun menselijke kantjes te hebben.
Cantu brengt niet alleen de kleine en grote verhalen van ellende, maar last ook korte betogen in over de geschiedenis van de grens, over de terreur van de narco-maffia in Mexico, en over de onverbiddelijke logica van de Amerikaanse migratiewetten. Allemaal erg ontluisterend.
Persoonlijk had ik het wat moeilijker met Cantu’s eigen verhaal, zijn obsessie met die grens, die zich dikwijls ook uit in heel intense dromen, en waar hij onder andere Jung bij haalt om ze te analyseren. Die persoonlijke focus overtuigde me niet helemaal, ze doet wat geforceerd aan.
Hij sluit af met het aandoenlijke en schrijnende verhaal van zijn Mexicaanse vriend José die al 30 jaar illegaal in de VS woont en er een gezin heeft gesticht, maar zich een hele hoop miserie op de hals haalt als hij zijn stervende moeder aan de andere kant van de grens gaat bezoeken. Cantu registreert het allemaal, niet-moraliserend, met nuances aan beide kanten, en weet daarmee de verscheurdheid van de migratieproblematiek én zijn eigen verscheurdheid treffend te illustreren.½

This is not a view of the persons trying to enter the USA from Mexico as it sees the cynicism and inherent capitalism that affects non-rich human lives. This is a first-person depiction of the war which rages from the USA against Mexicans, the group of nationality which is most abused in everyday northern America, and is being "thwarted" from entering the USA.

Cantú worked as a US border patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. As such, and seemingly being an open-minded humanitarian, he's seen a lot of shit happen. Everything from finding half-dead persons dying from thirst while trying to (illegally) entering the USA, to seeing border politics basically going from there not being a border, to capitalism of the 1980s entering the picture, to how Bush/Obama/Trump want it all to be, caused a state where US border patrol is made up of persons who want to protect their country with pride, while behaving like human beings towards those trying to get into the US.

Still, as such, violence and callous behaviour is often normalised, as is violence towards border patrol staff.

Cantú is a born writer. His level-headed style of description, rhythm, and laying out facts is both seldom seen and deeply valuable. I'm left with a sense of enrichment from having read this book, even though I have read a bunch of others that have been about trafficking around different parts of the globe; his human views and views on humans provide the reader with ample info.

The slightly bad side with this book is that the facts pile up almost like a kind of fact-after-fact recount, which novice writers can be prone to delve into. Still, considering how this is the author's first book, it is a veritable tour-de-force which should receive more press than it has.

Examples of the short and packed sentences:

Robles’s eyes seemed to detach from his surroundings, as if his gaze had turned inward. A year after that, he continued, I chased another man to the banks of the Colorado River. He ran out into the water and was swept away by the current like it was nothing. And I’ll tell you what I did. I swam into the river and I battled to keep him afloat even as I inhaled mouthfuls of water, even though I can’t remember ever having been more tired. I saved that man’s life, and still, there’s not a single day I don’t think about the one I took before it.

The writing that's not entirely about patrolling is also good:

After completing the course of fire, I shot at a smaller target with my own .22 caliber pistol. As I paused to reload, a yellow bird landed atop the target stand. I waited for it to fly off, but the bird continued hopping across the top. I started to walk downrange to scare it off, and then I stopped. I looked around. The range was empty. It occurred to me then that perhaps I should shoot the bird, that I should prove to myself that I could take a life, even one this small. I dropped the little bird with one shot. I walked over and picked up its body and in my hands the dead animal seemed weightless. I rubbed its yellow feathers with my fingertip. I began to feel sick and I wondered, for one brief moment, if I was going insane. At the edge of the firing range I dug a small hole beneath a creosote bush and buried the bird there, covering the fresh dirt with a small pile of stones.

I liked this bit, which probably best of all paragraphs in the book shows the weariness and paranoia that follows any line of work where one's colleagues and the work is congealed and one doesn't separate easily from that mess:

The dentist silently jotted his notes in my file. So why’d you leave the field? he asked. Won’t you be bored? I began to feel annoyed with his questions, concerned that I was somehow telegraphing cowardice or insecurity. It’s kind of a promotion, I said, it’s a chance to learn something new. Another side of the job, you know? The dentist looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I used to have an office job, he told me, there’s only so much you can learn at a computer screen. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Look, I finally said, I don’t know what else to tell you. I thought it would be nice to have a break from the field, to live in the city for a while. All right, all right, he said, holding up his hands. I feel you. I’m just trying to make sure you don’t grind your teeth out.

In summary: an easy read that may reveal more to life than you know where desperation meets bureaucracy in the most insane ways.

Cantu tells how his experiences working for the border patrol affected his life and subsequent career. Personal recollections interpersed withextensive discussions about the violence faced by Mexican citizens today.

Extraordinary. Cantu has a unique perspective on immigration and an undeniable gift for writing. As a well-educated Mexican-American Cantu is not the person you expect to see working the border for ICE, and that is perhaps why he does it, over his mother's passionate objections and with full knowledge that he has other choices. The experience though, it breaks him. I have a feeling he might spend the rest of his life exorcising those experiences. His voice is precisely the voice we should be listening to when it comes to immigration policy, Of course that is not going to happen in America 2020.

The book is engrossing, informative and heartbreaking. I recently read The Men We Reap, and though I thought well of the book in general, I was bothered by the lack of support for the author's premises regarding this country's war on Black men. I feel like the author was right, but I wanted some hard information. I had a similar issue here, though to a lesser extent, but generally Cantu shied away from universal pronouncements, so it did not bother me as much. I might take off a half star for that, but honestly most of this is a six star read so it still gets a 5. Of course the people who should be reading this won't, but that does not negate its quality and importance.

The Line Becomes a River is at times a well-written, even lyrical, memoir about the author's experiences as a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. Although Francisco Cantú is of Mexican descent, he chose to join this controversial—to put it mildly—institution in order to "better understand" the U.S.-Mexico border.

After an intriguing start, I thought this book faltered badly. It read like an uneasy mix of Cantú wanting to tacitly admit that his mother was right (she counselled him repeatedly against joining the Border Patrol) and wanting to hold everything terrible he was complicit in at arm's length. To me, it was telling that at one point Cantú repeats discredited, sensationalist takes on behavioural genetics. This kind of reductive evo-psych nonsense tends to get trotted out any time people want to avoid indictments of systemic injustice. (Women just be like that, right! etc.)

My suspicion is that in joining the Border Patrol, in trying to "better understand" the border question, Cantú was really seeking to avoid the uncomfortable truths he was told by his mother and by his college professors (he repeatedly mentions a feeling that what he studied as an International Relations major in college wasn't grounded in reality). Throughout the book, Cantú tells us that he wants to understand things more deeply, but doesn't really do the work to show that. An unsettling read, on a number of levels.½

I think perhaps Francisco Cantu' has an interesting story to tell about why he chose to join the border patrol and why he later chose to leave it - unfortunately, for me this book wasn't it. To me this felt a bit like a rough draft - like an author just starting to organize his thoughts, waiting for an editor to help shape it into a cohesive narrative. I wish I could have read THAT story, but what I was given was this one. I picked it up because I was interested in why someone with Cantu's Mexican-American heritage would choose to enter service as a border patrol agent. I never felt like we were given the real answer to that question. The narrative certainly had interesting moments, but as a whole it never came together for me.

Recommended by Vicky S

Beautifully written, like a polished journal, and absolutely crushing, especially the author's friend Jose's story, which makes up the ending of the book: Jose, a hardworking, married father of three, undocumented but living in the U.S. for 30 years, went back to Oaxaca to visit his mother before she died, and was unable to cross back into the U.S. to be with his wife and three boys.

See also: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli

Quotes

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? (33)

[1892] ...the commission's report noted "the grasping and overreaching action of the United States settlers" and "the kindness and courtesy of the Mexican officials." (61)

It's my job, I told [my mother], and I'm trying to get used to it, I'm trying to get good at it. I can figure out what that means later.
You know, my mother said, it's not just your safety I worry about. I know how a person can belong lost in a job, how the soul can buckle when placed within a structure. (76)

As border crossings became more difficult, traffickers increased their smuggling fees....As smuggling became more profitable, it was increasingly consolidated under the regional operations of the drug cartels. Every surge in border enforcement has brought a corresponding increase to the yield potential of each prospective migrant. (93)

Manny Fernandez for the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/04/us/texas-border-migrants-dead-bod...

Molly Molloy, New Mexico State University research librarian and professor

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of a crushing cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror....To comfortably exist at its periphery (Juarez), I found myself suspending knowledge and concern about what happened there, just as one sets aside images from a nightmare in order to move steadily through a new day. (130-131)

In their ongoing attempts to understand the roots of human violence, scientists have identified a genetic deficiency [monoamine oxidase A, MAOA] that predisposes certain MEN (emphasis added) to acts of hostility. (146)

What Have We Done by David Wood: Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by "sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion....Moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do." (150-151)

[When the third generation begins] to look around for something that makes them unique...they begin to search for an inheritance, to look back for the traditions that make them special, and often they realize it isn't there. They realize something has been lost along the way. (193)

All these years...it's like I've been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now...it's like I'm starting to crane my head upward, like I'm finally seeing the thing that crushes. (222)

There are thousands of people just like [Jose], thousands of cases, thousands of families. Millions, actually - the whole idea of it is suffocating. (229)

...we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without choosing it, it becomes normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are. (230)

Some politicians in the U.S. think that if a mother or father is deported, this will cause the entire family to move back to Mexico. But in fact, the mothers and fathers with the best family values will want their family to stay in the U.S., they will cross the border again and again to be with them. So you see, these same people, the ones with the most dedication to their family, they begin to build up a record of deportation...and it becomes harder and harder for them to ever become legal. In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens. (Jose, 237)½

Audiobook read by the author.

Cantú studied international relations in college. He was raised primarily by his mother, a Mexican immigrant and U.S. Park Ranger, in the Southwest U.S. He joined the border patrol because, “I spent four years in college … learning about the border through policy and history. I want to see the realities of the border day in and day out. I know it may be ugly. I know it might be dangerous, but I don’t see any better way to truly understand the place.” In this memoir he examines what he learned, what puzzled him, what distressed him, and what haunts him still.

Cantú writes with a stream-of-consciousness style. He uses no quotations marks and there is little exposition. At times the change in time/setting is quite abrupt and made this reader feel a little off-balance. He begins with a visit to Mexico with his mother, covers his training at the Academy, his time in the field and in the office, and ends after he’s left the Border Patrol and is working at a coffee shop where he befriends the maintenance man, an undocumented worker who has been in the USA for about 30 years.

Cantú explains the policies and procedures of the Border Patrol and Immigration. He writes with brutal honesty about the realities of hunting humans, the horrors of finding bodies in the desert, the heart-breaking stories of women and children left to fend for themselves by coyotes who have taken their money (and what little water they had), the callous destruction of “caches” found by the agents (they put holes in water jugs, urinate on extra clothing, break tools). And he explores the dreams that plague him.

It’s raw and emotional and thought provoking.

The audiobook is read by the author. He sets a good pace and has a smooth delivery. And his Spanish pronunciation is perfect.

NOTE: There is occasional Spanish in the book, and Cantú rarely translates it.

Luba. Francisco Cantú grew up the the grandson of a Mexican immigrant in the southwestern part of the United States. When he became an adult, Cantú joined the Border Patrol and saw firsthand the never-ending challenge of policing people on both sides of that line. Years after leaving his position with the patrol, his examination of his time in the job—and after—is an urgent, necessary view of an increasingly complex part of the country.

Enlilghtening, I'm glad that I read this book and got a perspective on the plight of illegal aliens.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be one of the agents who patrols our southern border? Cantú paints a bleak picture of his four years near Tucson, AZ, and El Paso, TX. He grew up in West Texas and got a college degree in international relations, specializing in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. With his Mexican heritage and fluency in Spanish, he thought he could make a real difference in the lives of people he intercepted at the border. There are some tender scenes mixed in with the too common discouraging events involving drug smuggling and human trafficking. He couldn't bend the rules and allow illegal migrants to stay in the U.S., but he could treat them with compassion. After four years, though, the upsetting dreams came more frequently and he decided he needed to take a break from the high-stress job and go back to school to further his writing career.

After almost 2/3 of the book spent in relating the experiences of a Border Agent, the book changed directions and the author became friends with an illegal alien who had been in the states for almost 30 years raising a family and being a good "citizen". When he was called back to Mexico to attend to his dying mother, the book turned from a documentary into a compelling personal story about trying to reunite with his family and coming up against the system over and over. The author tried to help his friend and the family but there was little he could do. The heartrending story of a man who just wanted to live with and support his wife and children personalized the dilemma of what is going on at our southern border and made me better understand the complicated nature of our current laws and wish that cases could be considered in a more individual and compassionate way.

A very thought provoking book. I wished for him to be more conclusive about his ideas on the border issue, but if he was, then it wouldn't be as powerful as it is. This book really shows how there really isn't an easy solution to illegal immigration. But his reporting of the research into moral injury and how it relates to the drug, violence, and corruption problems in Mexico was incredibly sobering. "Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong." This upending of beliefs is gradual, one that is difficult to perceive" but it has happened in Mexico.

I don't even know why I read this book. Peeing on clothing, pouring out water that is left for humans to drink so that they do not die of thirst, humans hunting humans. This is not humane. And now, the lost children, the children being taken from the families, all this in the news today. Disgusting.

I'm glad I did not purchase this book, I would not want my money going to a man that is capitalizing on the heartbreaking stories of human beings.

The Line Becomes a River is by Francisco Cantu who after graduating with an international studies degree worked as a Border Patrol officer for 4 years in TX and AZ. There are some very heartbreaking chapters and ones that will make you angry. At times he jumps from real life to his nightmares so I had to backtrack a few times to realize he was detailing a dream.½

I wish every member of Congress would read this book before they vote on funding Trump's "Wall" !

Very moving, very relevant. The only improvement would have been to include a bit more on the history of US-border control issues and laws.½

I was unaware of how controversial the author was when I started this book & I'm glad of it because I likely would not have finished the book. The first half covers the author's time as a border guard, a portion of the book I found difficult (especially when the author recounts discovering migrants' supplies in the desert and destroying them) but it did give me a better understanding of what happens at the border and the challenges faced by those crossing the border. The second half of the book covers a time after the author left the border patrol and had a coworker who ran afoul of immigration. The book definitely added nuance and complexity to my understanding of the US-Mexico border.

Slim and beautifully written, The Line Becomes a River is a powerful, deeply humane piece of nonfiction about the lives of Border Patrol agents and desperate migrants on the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico. This is a hybrid work: part memoir, part meditation, part expository piece. Richly allusive, it refers to the works of many writers on immigration, history, politics, and psychology. Aspects of Mexico’s geography—its flora and fauna, its culture and history, its wars of independence and revolution, as well as its ongoing catastrophic drug wars—in which thousands of innocents have been murdered and innumerable crimes against humanity have been committed—are all touched upon. Other topics are addressed, including the cartels (whose stranglehold on human smuggling only grew as the U.S. government cracked down on the border and hardened the policy related to it), mass graves (well over a hundred throughout Mexico, a number of them along the border), and femicide. No, this is not cheerful stuff.

The first half of the book focuses on Cantú‘s 2008-2012 training, field, and intelligence work for the U.S. Border Patrol—mostly in Arizona. His decision to join this agency greatly concerns his mother, the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant, a former National Park ranger, someone who proclaims herself to be “not an enforcement-minded person.” As she sees it, the Border Patrol is “a paramilitary police force.” “You must understand,” she tells her son, “you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.” However, Cantú has determined that he will gain real-world experience with the border he’s spent the last few years studying in his international relations program in Washington, D.C.. A number of the men he meets during his training grew up on the border, are bilingual, and have even attended college; they’ve joined because the agency represents an opportunity for service, stability, and financial security.

The lessons, the rules, come swift and hard. “Your body is a tool,” says a trainer; batons, tasers, and guns mean nothing compared to the body, and a person must not give in when it tires. You must learn to read the dirt: when you “cut the sign”—i.e., follow a migrant trail—you must keep the sun in front of you, never at your back, so that the sign catches the light. Don’t track drug smugglers: you’re only asking for “a hell of a lot of paperwork” and a double shift to write it all up. When you discover “lay-up spots”—where rations and water are stashed—piss on, crush, or burn the stuff to encourage migrants to quit and return. Be sure to carry Vicks VapoRub; you’ll need it when you come upon the dead bodies.

It isn’t long before Cantú feels the effects of his work. “I have nightmares, visions of them [migrants] staggering through the desert . . . men lost and wandering without food or water, dying slowly as they look for some road, some village, some way out.” The nightmares intensify: a wolf is a recurrent character, and sometimes Cantú’s teeth break in these dreams. A dentist he visits during this period supplies the reason: Cantú is wearing down his tooth enamel with nighttime grinding. When his uncle asks about his job, Cantú wants to tell the older man that he can hardly sleep: his mind is “so filled with violence” that he can no longer perceive the beauty of a landscape he was once so sensitive to. There is a term for what has happened to him: moral injury—“a more subtle wound [than PTSD], characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex, but by ‘sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion.’” It is learned behaviour: “learning to accept things you know are wrong.” Cantú tells his supervisor, Hayward—who greatly values him, that he needs to leave. What he cannot tell Hayward is that “it’s not the work for me.”

The second part of The Line Becomes a River concerns itself with Cantu’s life after the Border Patrol, when he is working as a barista and becomes friends with Jose Martinez, a hardworking undocumented Mexican employed as the mercado’s custodian. Every morning at 10 am, Jose sits down to share a burrito with Cantu, who prepares him coffee with vanilla in return. A father of three sons, all born in America (one mentally disabled; one slightly lame after being hit by a car), Jose has a wife who is is also an illegal. When the dedicated Jose doesn’t show up for work one morning, Diane—the owner of the mercado—informs Cantú that her best worker has returned to Mexico to see his dying mother. Two weeks later, in late 2015, he is caught trying to illegally cross back into the U.S. (where he has lived for 30 years, since the age of 11) and is scheduled for deportation. Cantú attempts to aid the Martinez family as a sort of interpreter and shepherd through a justice system that he himself knows little about. Because Lupe Martinez is also illegal, it is Cantu who accompanies the Martinez sons to the prison facility where their father is being held. Through these experiences, the author sees what happens to illegals on the other side of arrests of the kind he carried out as a Border Patrol agent.

I have watched my fair share of TV news stories on the plight of Mexican and Central American migrants, and I have read some children’s literature that portrays their experience. However, it is Cantú’s understated book that has brought the issues home for me. The Line Becomes a River is a powerful, exceptional work about an ongoing tragedy. I hope we will be hearing more from Cantú.

MEMOIR/IMMIGRATION
Francisco Cantú
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
Riverhead Books
Hardcover, 978-0-7352-1771-3, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 256 pgs., $26.00
February 6, 2018

They come from Michoacán and Guadalajara, from Oaxaca and El Salvador. Men, women, children, entire families. Some are heroin mules, “coyotes,” and cartel scouts; some are pregnant women, children escaping gangs, and fathers who want to feed their kids. One man offers to clean up around the station while he waits for the bus that will return him to Mexico. Sometimes the migrants’ backpacks are dumped on the desert floor, the water drained, the clothes and food burned. Other times, the migrants’ blistered feet are washed and bandaged. There are abandoned drug loads and abandoned people, extraordinary cruelty and ordinary kindness, paranoia and compromising situations, kidney failure and the comatose and the dead. The Southwestern desert is a vast graveyard. A Texas sheriff notes, “For every one we find, we’re probably missing five.”

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border is the first book from Francisco Cantú, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent. His writing has appeared in Harper’s and Guernica, among other publications, and Cantú won a Pushcart Prize and the 2017 Whiting Award. The Line Becomes a River is a profoundly disturbing memoir of Cantú’s years in the Border Patrol during years of breathtaking violence, when Felipe Calderón was president of Mexico and challenged the cartels.

Cantú, whose family came from Mexico, spent time growing up in West Texas, his mother a park ranger. He left the desert for Washington, D.C., and earned a degree in international relations, studying the southern border. Seeking to add practical experience to his academic studies, Cantú entered the Border Patrol academy. “The government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose,” his mother warns him. “Stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you,” he parries.

Divided into three parts, The Line Becomes a River is composed of a series of vignettes, sometimes approximating stream-of-consciousness. Cantú is conflicted and dreams of wolves and disintegrating teeth; Jungian psychology provides context. He alternates between the anecdotal and the empirical, fitting human faces to the facts and figures—all those numbers—and providing a history of the line—all those broken treaties. Cantú has read his Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy and Sara Uribe.

After Cantú left the agency to attend graduate school, he learns that a friend with whom he shared breakfast almost every morning, José, has been arrested re-entering the country after visiting his dying mother. It’s the first time Cantú visits anyone in detention, attends the court hearings, witnesses the slow-motion ripping apart of a family. The last part of The Line Becomes a River is related in José’s voice, a very effective technique, visceral and instructive: “The U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.”

The Line Becomes a River seems an honest examination of conscious, a reckoning on Cantú’s part. Though he occasionally strays into melodrama, I admire Cantú’s writing and was moved by the stories he relates. Still, The Line Becomes a River leaves me unsettled, troubled by something I can’t quite put my finger on. Cantú wonders whether his shame can be redeemed, spiritual sickness healed. I wonder at the costs to human beings of what sometimes seems a personal experiment on the part of Cantú.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.½

Cantú worked as a border patrol agent for 4 years. In this book he discusses the job--what he did, why he did it, his co-workers, the migrants, the boredom that the job often was, the stress and worry and dehumanizing nature of the job. The nightmares and worry that he was losing himself, and the questioning looks from family over why he, a man with Mexican grandparents, would even want the job. And while he felt like he was a kind agent, he was still deporting people and sending them to try to get across the dangerous desert again.

A few years later, a friend he knew from work went home to his mother's funeral in Mexico. And could not get back. Cantú did not realize he was an illegal immigrant. He was a regular guy--solid worker, husband, father, involved in his church and his sons' lives.

Cantú does not pretend to offer solutions. This book is thoughtful, and examines who is trying to get across, why, and looks at those who prey upon them.