The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

Cantú is named “Francisco” for San Francisco de Asís, known in English as Saint Francis, the patron saint of animals. Growing up, Cantú’s mother read him stories about his namesake, including a story about a wolf who lays siege to the town where San Francisco lives. With several townspeople in tow, Francisco approaches Brother Wolf, who tries to attack. Francisco makes a sign of the cross, which stops the wolf, and he brokers peace between the wolf and the people: If the wolf stops attacking and eating humans, the humans will feed the wolf each day so he never goes hungry, as that is what caused him to harm others.

Cantú’s personal narrative picks up with the news that he is transferring out of the field and into a low-level intelligence position in Tucson, Arizona. Around this time, Cantú has a dentist appointment and learns that he has been grinding his teeth in his sleep. The dentist asks about his work and mentions that it must be stressful, which Cantú denies since he now works a desk job, which he sees as a “nice break” (84) from fieldwork.

Cantú flashes back to his first day working at his intelligence position and the orientation led by his new supervisor, a man named Hayward. Cantú is tasked with working in a windowless room where he receives feeds of everything happening along the border in real time, taking calls from field agents and writing narratives of incidents that are reported to him. Hayward makes clear that he sees his position as a supervisor in this office as a way to ascend the ranks so he and his family can eventually move to DC.

Every day at this new job, Cantú receives an email from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) about incidents along the US-Mexico border, including bare-bones narratives of what took place and photos of dismembered bodies left by Mexican cartels with threatening messages. Cantú has even more nightmares about his teeth, including ones where he cannot unclench his jaw and his teeth fall apart.

The narrative of Cantú’s time working in intelligence is interrupted with short passages about Mexican cartel-related border violence. A Tijuana medical examiner discusses the mutilation of bodies murdered by the cartel, noting how each kind of mutilation is meant to signal what the victim did to deserve their fate: a tongue cut out indicates a snitch; severed arms that the victim stole from the cartel; severed legs that the victim tried to leave the organization; a castration that the victim slept with a kingpin’s woman. Displaying the mutilated bodies in this way advertises what happened and what will happen if members of the cartel are disrespected.

Cantú’s mother comes to town for a cardiologist appointment. Over dinner she shares stories she learned from a rancher who was also in the doctor’s office. The rancher told her that men tried to buy his property to hunt other men, and that when he called Border Patrol upon encountering migrants, they were too far away to help and so the migrants wandered for miles and miles past the border and died, which wreaked havoc on his land. Cantú’s mother asks if he has seen this happen, and Cantú tells her that this is an unintended consequence. His job as an agent was not to write policy but to enforce it. Shocked by his apathetic attitude, his mother expresses relief that he has moved from fieldwork to office work. Cantú says he’s not sure he likes the new position, that it feels like a retreat from work in the field.

His mother is in part responding to a rise in human trafficking. The cartel has become increasingly involved due to border-patrol crackdowns on undocumented migrants. This shift has created an inadvertent increase in smuggling migrants across the border under dangerous conditions. Many who cross the border and make it through the desert are then stored in crowded “drop houses” by smugglers. This latest development along the border ensures that undocumented migrants become commodities and transactions rather than human beings.

Cantú’s new position in the intelligence office gives him unprecedented access to public records, photographs, and tracking in the name of intelligence research. He must use this information to track drug cartel activity within the state of Arizona.

The drug war that fuels the cartels has namely been reported by the number of known murders that have happened along the border. Many Mexican morgues in cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana modernized their morgues in the 1990s and early 2000s to keep up with the number of murdered bodies brought in to be identified, 20% of which were left unclaimed by families due to fear of retribution or denial of their relative’s death. The high numbers of bodies and the brutal way they were treated traumatized morgue workers. But even morgues were not safe from cartel violence. As Cantú writes:

In cities like Tijuana and Juárez, the cycle of violence was so tightly looped, so unending, that cartel members often raided morgues, reclaiming the bodies of victims, comrades, and leaders. The bodies were ferried from one death-ridden place to another, hovering indefinitely aboveground, endlessly lying in wait for a place to rest in the earth (96).

While working a night shift, Cantú takes a call from his old field station and speaks to Cole over the phone. Cole tells Cantú that earlier in the evening they encountered a half-naked man in the desert who was cowering in the fetal position, barely able to speak after having drank his own urine for four days. Doctors were amazed that the man was still alive, given the grave state of his kidneys. The man had been traveling with his brothers, but agents found their bodies rotting in the desert along with 1,800 pounds of dope. Cole and the agents don’t chase the smugglers because they’d rather not do the paperwork. Cantú feels helpless as he stares at live camera footage of the desert, knowing that there are so many bodies out there that they may never find. Hayward reminds Cantú that if he wants to help in the field, working in the intelligence office was a good career move that will allow him to understand both sides of the agency.

Cantú dreams he is back in the field seizing dope from smugglers, but when he busts open the boxes, they are all empty. The smugglers in his dream tell him he’s already seized their drugs. He is woken up by his mother’s panicked phone call. She lets him know that another Border Patrol agent with the last name Cantú was killed and that it is all over the news. When Cantú arrives at work that day, top officials are tense, and Hayward asks Cantú to dig up whatever he can on the smugglers who killed the other agent named Cantú. Hayward specifically asks him to identify “who’s a scumbag and who’s just a POW” (101), clarifying that “POW” refers to “plain old wet.”

Cantú attends his great-aunt’s memorial service in San Diego in his mother’s stead. As he reunites with his cousin and family, they fondly remember their great-aunt’s insistence that the family was not “Mexican” but “Spanish,” noting: “400 years in Mexico […] and she still clung to Europe” (102). Another family member tells the harrowing story of how their great-aunt came to the United States as an undocumented migrant when she was a child. At the memorial service, Cantú realizes that his great-aunt wished to be buried under her maiden name “Cantú” instead of her married name “Abrams.” He adds that his mother almost named him “Joshua Tyler Cantú-Simmons” but later changed her mind; he says this would have made him a different person. The family looks at their other family members’ nameplates and notes that they could see the hills of Tijuana from where their family was buried.

Looking back at Mexican history, Cantú notes that Mexico is “cursed” to endure century-long cycles of violence and unrest, with the current drug war echoing the destruction and chaos of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. The current drug war was initiated in 2006 by Mexican President Felipe Calderón. By the time he left office six years later, 100,000 had been murdered, most of whom he claimed were criminals. But those who study Mexican politics note that this is incorrect, that the majority of those murdered were ordinary citizens. In 2014 the Mexican government released updated numbers at 164,000 murders since the beginning of the drug war, but this number is likely conservative and does not include those who have been reported missing, abducted, kidnapped, or extorted. This number also does not include undocumented migrants who died while attempting to cross the border to escape cartel violence. The United States has reported 6,000 dead between 2010 and 2016, though many acknowledge this number may be up to five times higher in reality, though there is no way to quantify this. There is also no way to quantify how this conflict has affected the Mexican and American people who have lost loved ones or witnessed the violence firsthand.

When work is quiet, Cantú goes down a rabbit hole of research about cartel violence, finding stories like that of an 18-year-old boy who survived a shooting and somehow managed to escape after faking his death and laying hidden beneath the dead bodies of his loved ones. This causes Cantú to slump at his desk and pull his own hair.

Citing the work of cultural sociologist Jane Zavisca, Cantú delves into the linguistics of metaphor, specifically in journalism, concerning undocumented migrants. Migrants were often referred to with economic (“cost,” “calculation,” gamble”), violent, and dehumanizing metaphors (“cat-and-mouse”), as well as in flood-related metaphors (“surge,” “wave”). Zavisca posits that these metaphors are dangerous: They turn migrants into “others,” making it easier for Border Patrol agents to blame migrants for their own deaths.

Hayward is offered a position at the El Paso office, which he sees as his ticket to DC one day. He asks Cantú if he’d like to be transferred there as well because they are looking for agents with field and office experience who can speak Spanish. Cantú watches security footage of a prairie falcon out in the desert and feels a pull to return to the border while simultaneously fearing that this time the border’s violence may consume him.

He accepts the position in El Paso, and Hayward shows him around the office. There he meets his new team members, Beto and Manuel. As Cantú gets to know them, Beto tells him he has a one-bedroom casita in his backyard that he could potentially rent. Cantú accepts and learns they will go out on their first mission to Lordsburg, New Mexico, in two weeks.

When they arrive in Lordsburg, they receive a warm welcome from locals at a Mexican restaurant. Cantú feels relieved to be back in the field, but he quickly finds himself having nightmares about caves full of dismembered bodies. In the hotel bathroom that night, he does not recognize himself in the mirror. Hayward, Beto, and Manuel tease him at breakfast, asking if he spent the entire night masturbating in the hotel bathroom. He shakes them off but can’t get the images out of his head as they go out into the field.

That day Beto receives a phone call that his cousin died in Juárez. He tells Cantú that, while urinating in the desert the day before, he saw a black butterfly move past him. The only other time he’d ever seen a butterfly like it was around the time his grandmother died. That night they go out for drinks, and Hayward tells them stories about his youth in Virginia. The next day they head into the desert and can hear scouts reporting on their every move over the radio scanner. They listen as they hear a large caravan make its way to a high-level cartel meeting.

Cantú learns more about the former sicarios, another term for cartel hitmen, who carry out hundreds of thousands of murders along the border. According to an anonymous sicario interviewed in the documentary film El Sicario, Room 164, sicarios are often drunk or high while murdering their victims. He also claims that most of the mass murder burial sites have not been found and that no one will ever be able to tally the number of dead. The cartel went to great lengths to mutilate many of the bodies in such a way that they could never be identified, using chemicals like lime so that there would be no trace of their identity left. Later, the sicario talks about the nightmares he experienced after working with the cartel and how he would wake up to find himself choking his wife. He says, “I realized that something very bad was happening to me. I was no longer any good. There was a line that I had respected between the work I did […] but this work no longer stayed on one side of the line” (155).

After his trip to Lordsburg, Cantú visits his uncle in Santa Fe. His uncle, a retired contractor, drives him to a desert property where he plans to build a new house, telling Cantú he wants to have a house in a place that still feels wild. They hike in Horseshoe Canyon, and his uncle talks about the many natural formations he has had to destroy or ruin due to his work as a contractor. Though Cantú can relate, he does not tell his uncle the extent of the devastation he has seen during his job as a Border Patrol agent. He debates telling his uncle about his dreams and visions but decides against it.

Cantú returns to El Paso and, while jogging, finds himself at a high elevation looking down on both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. He reflects on the tension of living in El Paso at this time, particularly living in the desert while knowing there is horror happening nearby along the border. Like a nightmare, Cantú finds it necessary to shake off the reductive stereotypes of Juárez as a city full of drug cartels, violence, sicarios, and other terrifying images. Something inside of him tugs at him to go to Juárez and walk the streets, but he does not give in to the urge.

These two adjacent cities played a pivotal role in the reporting of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. In 1911 residents of the cities could watch the battles break out by paying 25 cents to gain access to a roof or train, risking their lives to watch the destruction of Ciudad Juárez in particular. Just one year before the revolution began, residents of both cities united in climbing to their rooftops to witness a very different kind of spectacle: the passing of Halley’s Comet.

Back in the present day, Cantú goes to an El Paso nightclub with Beto and his friends. Beto catches Cantú checking out a woman in the VIP section and tells him to be careful because she is associated with a narco, or a drug dealer. Deciding to dance with another girl, Cantú strikes up a conversation, and she tells him about suspicious men who spoke to her in formal Spanish from Spain, asking her to go somewhere, but she refused.

This sparks Cantú’s interest in the Mexican drug war’s femicide, a term describing the systematic abduction, assault, torture, and massacre of women. Femicide became an issue in Ciudad Juárez in the mid-1990s, when women were often kidnapped, raped, and murdered, their bodies dumped into the street half-naked. The murdered women in Juárez were initially thought to be the work of a serial killer until the early 2000s, when the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women visited the city and began to investigate. While this drew international attention, it failed to humanize the women who were victimized by the drug cartels. Femicide in particular is meant to be seen as the sacrifice of purity or nationalism, but this act often turns the victim into an “other,” a statistic without a name or life story. The failure of forensics teams to properly find and identify women’s bodies found in mass graves only underscores how violence and corruption lead public institutions to fail these women and their families, including when a victim’s loved ones seek justice. These deaths only mounted after Mexico declared war on the cartels in 2006, and femicide has continued into the 2010s, though outrage has waned as the killings began to seem perversely normal or “natural” (138).

Cantú and Beto help Manuel move one weekend, and Manuel introduces them to his parents. While discussing visiting Mexico as children, Cantú learns that Manuel’s family used to visit Juárez often, but they no longer go there, presumably due to the perceived danger. On their way home that evening, Beto tells Cantú he’d long dreamed of being a cop, but he can’t leave the Border Patrol because of his financial obligations. Beto asks if Cantú is looking for a way out of the Border Patrol himself, and Cantú admits he’s considering going into the foreign service or returning to school. Cantú says he had hoped that being an agent would help answer his questions about the border and put the place as an abstraction into context, but that has not happened. They both discuss how they visited Juárez throughout their lives but have not returned since becoming agents. Cantú then dreams that he is visiting Juárez with Beto and Manuel, dancing in the street with women, but a sense of unease creeps in, and he sees a band of men kidnapping and murdering people in broad daylight. He tries to escape with Manuel and Beto, wondering how people can survive in this city.

Looking to history once again, Cantú invokes historian Timothy Snyder’s work on Eastern European history, specifically that on genocide and mass murder. He urges readers to think of intangible numbers like 14 million dead as “14 million times one” (144). This humanist approach to history is an attempt to emphasize the loss of the individual rather than one massive number.

Hayward approaches Cantú and asks if he heard about a shooting that occurred at his old field station. The shooting, a self-defense measure, killed a Guatemalan man near the border. Hayward shares the story of a time he killed a man in his youth. Cantú secretly hopes he never has to understand the feeling of killing someone.

Scientists have attempted to understand the genetic origin of human violence by studying histories of violent acts in families over generations. In 1993 researchers identified that individuals with low MAOA, a key enzyme in determining impulse control, were predisposed to violence. This was deemed a “warrior gene” within the X chromosome, meaning men, possessing only one X chromosome, were more susceptible to it. Whether a carrier of this gene actually acts violent or aggressive depends at least in part on environment and traumatic experiences.

While dog sitting for Beto one weekend during a dust storm, Cantú returns to the house to see that Beto’s dog has escaped from the backyard. He goes to El Paso Animal Services, where he finds the dog covered in blood and bite marks, then takes him home with the information for the family down the street whose dog was involved in the scuffle. Wondering why he ought to take responsibility for the dog’s actions, Cantú knocks on the neighbor’s door. The agitated neighbor lets him know that Beto’s dog ripped her dog’s jugular open and that the dog may not survive. Cantú is shaken by this news. After offering to pay for the vet bills, he drives Beto’s dog home and washes him.

Pivoting to the idea of “moral injury,” Cantú introduces this psychological change common in veterans returning from war, which often manifests in dreams and doubt about what is right or wrong. This stems from exposure to inflicting violent acts over a long period of time. Often confused for PTSD, this form of psychological distress is subtler and can often seep into a sufferer’s home life or relationships.

Cantú deploys on a mission near his old field station with Manuel and Beto. One night during this trip Cantú is called out to the desert to escort a migrant woman back to the base. While driving with her in the backseat, he is reassured by the freedom he feels being back in the desert before realizing that this woman likely does not feel the same way. At the base, Cantú offers to disinfect and wrap the woman’s severely blistered feet, which she allows. She tells him in Spanish that he is very kind, but he replies in English, “No…I’m not” (154).

Once the mission is over, Hayward takes Beto, Manuel, and Cantú to a firing range. Cantú informs Hayward that he has received a research scholarship to study abroad and that he feels he needs to leave the force and perhaps go to graduate school. Hayward says he could take classes while still working as an agent, but Cantú rejects the offer, saying he can no longer do the work.

Cantú engages with poet and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza’s work about the pervasive pain inherent in modern Mexican culture and about power that is often demonstrated through actions against other people’s bodies. She considers the relationships between war and imagination, noting that pain and war, though constant, are not natural or inevitable if we can imagine something better.

Cantú dreams that he is back working in the field and approaches a man and son in a pick-up truck along the side of the road. Seeing that the man and boy are walking toward him, Cantú shoots the man before seeing the boy take a gun and aim at him. Cantú shoots him as well but realizes the boy is still breathing, pleading for him to end it already. Desperate for help from Hayward or his mother, Cantú stands over their bodies until he is sure they are dead. When he awakens, Cantú weeps and tells Brother Wolf, the vision he saw in the beginning of Part 1, that he wishes to make peace.