In The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, Francisco Cantú writes about his experiences working as a US Border Patrol agent, and also about his life before and after that job. He writes about his mom’s Mexican-American family, and her former job as a park ranger, and how he studied international relations in college and wanted on-the-ground experience of the border, after learning so much about the history and theory and policy of it. He writes about walking from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez with his mom, before becoming an agent, and about not wanting to take that same walk afterwards: he writes about the ways the job changed him. He writes about stress-dreams, and about grinding his teeth; he writes about a classmate quitting before even becoming an agent; he writes about the migrants he encounters, on and off the job. He writes about his own ambivalence about what working as a US Border Patrol agent means: when he’s in school, one of his instructors talks about having killed one migrant and having saved the life of another, and Cantú’s thought is this: “I wondered if he thought of his body as a tool for destruction or as one of safekeeping. I wondered, too, about my body, about what sort of tool it was becoming” (19).
Cantú’s mother worries about that, too, about the effects of taking a job within an inhumane system, about what it does to a person, and it was interesting to me to read this book fairly soon after having read Ali Smith’s Spring, a novel in which one of the characters is a detainee custody officer at an immigrant removal centre in England, struggling (albeit fictionally), with similar issues. “You are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people,” Cantú’s mother says, when he’s starting the job “(25). “Stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you,” he replies (ibid). But by the end of the book, when he’s acting as helper and translator for the family of someone who’s been detained after re-entering the country without papers, I’m not sure if he would agree. (Cantú helps that person’s family partly because that person is his friend, but it might not be as simple as just that.)
This is a book about place, too, not just a book about a job and about migration/border policy in general and about specific people’s stories, and I liked Cantú’s descriptions of the kinds of desert landscapes I’ve never seen, like this:
At night, finally allowed to patrol on my own, I sat watching storms roll across the moonlit desert. There were three of them: the first due south in Mexico, the second creeping down from the mountains in the east, and the third hovering just behind me—close enough for me to feel smatterings of rain and gusts of warm wind. In the distance lightning appeared like a line of hot neon, illuminating the desert in a shuddering white light. (38)
Or like this, at the book’s end, when Cantú is in Big Bend National Park, swimming in the Rio Grande:
I stood to walk along the adjacent shorelines, crossing the river time and again as each bank came to an end, until finally, for one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape tumbled and breathed as one. (247)
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