The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

Cantú dreams he is in a dark cave surrounded by cold, dismembered, bloodied body parts. A wolf approaches him, and Cantú is terrified. He senses that the wolf wishes to tell him something, and it jumps on his chest and licks his face. Cantú awakens.

While traveling into town in New Mexico, Cantú learns that Santiago, one of his peers in the Border Patrol training academy, is going to drop out. Over drinks, Cantú and his trainee friends Hart and Morales talk about Santiago’s decision to return to Michigan and the colder climate there. They discuss the intensity of desert summers, and Hart asks why anyone would walk through the desert in 115 degree Fahrenheit weather. Cantú tells him that people have crossed through the desert illegally since the 1990s, when the United States closed the city border crossings in places like San Diego and El Paso, erecting fences and increasing the number of Border Patrol agents on patrol. Morales talks about his childhood in Douglas, a town along the border, as well as his experiences visiting his cousins along the south side of the border in Mexico.

Cantú and the other Border Patrol recruits follow strict fitness regimens, including a spin class. As they exercise, they are told “Your body is a tool […] the most important one you have” (17-18). An officer tells them that their bodies will be tested in the line of duty, sharing anecdotes of men he has killed and men whose lives he has saved out in the desert. Cantú reflects on his own body, wondering if it is transforming into “a tool for destruction or […] safekeeping” (19).

The firearms instructor shows Cantú and his peers a PowerPoint, telling them 700,000 aliens were arrested at the border just last year. He shows them slides with photos of people who were murdered by the cartels, reminding them all that this is the enemy they will be up against.

For Christmas, Cantú’s mother comes to visit him. She asks why he wants to be a Border Patrol agent when he graduated from college with honors. Though she worked for the government as a park ranger, she isn’t sure what he hopes to achieve. Cantú explains he studied international relations and border policy as an undergraduate but that he’s tired of reading; he wants to better understand the reality of the border today. His mother still doesn’t understand and reminds him that she raised him near the border and kept her maiden name, passing it along to him so that he will retain a part of her Mexican heritage. Cantú tells her, “I don’t know if the border is a place for me to understand myself, but I know there’s something I can’t look away from” (23). His mother expresses fear of the danger he will face, but Cantú assures her that he doesn’t plan on turning into a callous or brutal law enforcement officer. The job won’t fundamentally change who he is.

Cantú graduates from training and, upon arriving at his field station, his supervisor Cole urges him, Hart, and Morales to “read” the dirt as they hike through the desert looking for footprints. They follow these footprints and find 250 pounds of dope, but no bodies. Cantú asks Cole if they should continue to follow the footprints, but Cole says no; if they find the men it will mean more paperwork. Hart and Morales ransack the backpacks they’ve found, taking clothes and cigarettes. They find a truck with a “gimme load,” or a small amount of dope, meant to distract the Border Patrol agents from a larger load hidden elsewhere.

Morales asks Cole why his nickname is “Black Death.” Cole answers that one night he almost ran over two “Indians” who had passed out drunk in the road. He woke them up and drove them back to town. Not long after, Cole drove down the same road at night and ran over the same man, killing him.

Cole sends Morales and Cantú to do thermal reconnaissance one night, and they encounter a group of migrants scattered and huddled in the bushes. The migrants don’t run away; they cooperate with the agents as they’re brought in for questioning. One man tells Cantú that he is from Michoacán, which Cantú says he’s visited. The man says that if Cantú has been there, then Cantú must understand why he is trying to leave. The man begs Cantú to let him stay, offering to do work around the Border Patrol station if need be. He repeatedly tells Cantú that he is hard-working, he doesn’t sell drugs, and he just wants to work. Cantú says he believes him but cannot help.

As Cantú adjusts to life as a Border Patrol agent, he feels himself getting better at the job, but he also questions what this says about him. He realizes that despite his desire to do good as an agent, it’s impossible to explain to others why he and other agents have to do things like chase migrants who are running away from them or pour out their water. He has nightmares about men staggering through the desert, slowly dying, but when he finds them, the men are already dead facedown on the ground.

The narrative breaks briefly as Cantú pivots to discuss the history of the boderline as we know it today, specifically highlighting Italian priest Eusebio Kino’s ascent to a volcanic peak that looked over the desert in 1706. He was the first white man to take in the expanse of the desert, then populated by nomadic indigenous groups. Though Kino and other Europeans thought this was “bad country” (35), the native people knew that life could be cultivated in the desert.

After his initial three-month training unit, Cantú begins working with a journeyman named Mortenson. The men are the same age, but Mortenson says he’s been promoted to journeyman quickly since the Border Patrol needs experienced agents. They find out from a customs agent that migrants have snuck through a hole in a pedestrian fence. Cantú and Mortenson run after them, but the men in the group run back into Mexico. One woman stays, too terrified to move. Mortenson says he booked her last week. This is her fourth attempt at crossing illegally into the United States. She tells Cantú she’s from Guadalajara, that she wants to be a singer; she sings to him and Mortenson for the entire ride back to the station.

One night Cantú is told to pick up two “quitters” seen walking along the road on a Native American reservation. He finds them, a man and a pregnant woman, inside an empty church. They tell him they got lost, that their guide left them behind four days ago because they couldn’t keep up with the rest of the group. Cantú offers them fresh water as well as juice and crackers at the station. As he drives, he learns that the woman speaks perfect English because she grew up in Iowa. She only returned to Mexico to care for her family after her mother died, but she hoped to return so that her child could have a better life. The man pleads with Cantú to have mercy on them, to just return them to the Mexican border safely, but Cantú tells them he cannot. He promises to remember them but realizes almost immediately afterward that he’s forgotten their names.

Pivoting once more into history, Cantú points out that the border we know today was largely determined by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 after two years of warfare between the United States and Mexico. Surveyors from both countries erected small “monuments” to signify the boderline where they could. The border was slightly altered in 1853 with the Treaty of La Mesilla, also known as the Gadsden Purchase. This led to the creation of 47 more “monuments” marking the boderline. The Gadsden Purchase also signified the end of the United States’ southern and southwestern expansion.

Cantú is charged with watching over a desert bombing survivor named Martin Ubalde de la Vega, who is recovering in the hospital. While they wait for him to be discharged, Cantú asks de la Vega to tell him about himself. The man tells Cantú about his family and daughters. When de la Vega is discharged, Cantú realizes the man’s shirt has been nearly destroyed, so he gives him his own undershirt. As he drives the man to the station, he asks de la Vega if he is hungry and takes him to McDonald’s to try “American food.” He tells Cantú about Guerrero, the region he is from in Mexico. Not long after, Cantú is flagged down by a woman on the south side of the border who asks him if he knows anything about her son, who tried to cross the border days beforehand. Despite knowing her son is likely dead, he attempts to help her. When he gets home that night, Cantú calls his mother to say that he arrived home safely.

Cantú returns to the history of the US-Mexico border. In the 1880s settlers in the Southwestern United States began to have conflicts over where the border began and ended. This led to a renewed interest in “monuments” that were meant to delineate where one country began and another ended, making the border visible to those who might cross it.

Morales and Cantú arrest two men in the desert who cooperate with them and offer the agents some of their food. Cantú tries crickets seasoned with lime and salt as well as jerky before the men are processed for deportation. Later, Cantú translates for two nine- and 10-year-old girls who are brought in for processing. The experience is so unsettling for him that he rushes home at the end of his shift.

After being called to the scene where a dead man was discovered in the desert, Cantú is asked to translate for two teenagers who were traveling with the man and flagged down Border Patrol. They say they were all traveling from Veracruz to the United States, but they were separated from their group. They tried putting rocks in the road to get people to stop and help, but no one did. Both boys ask if they can transport the man’s body back to their village in Veracruz, and Cantú says they can contact the Mexican consulate, though he knows the consulate is unlikely to grant their wish. One of his fellow officers is left to sit with the body until tribal police can come and collect it, but Cantú later learns that the officer was told to leave the body behind when a storm rolled through. That night, Cantú dreams that he has ground his teeth until they fall out of his mouth, and he desperately searches for someone to show them to, to ask about why this is happening.

Diving back into history, the men sent to demarcate the US-Mexico border in the years after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo found themselves in the difficult position of figuring out the often arbitrary borderline. Citing the beautiful but uninhabitable nature of the desert, the area remained sparsely populated. In 1892 a crew of surveyors returned to resurvey and remark the border with a military detail to protect against “Indians and other marauders” (60). In addition to the many difficulties of surveying in the desert, finding drinking water was one of the most cited issues. The Rio Grande, which the surveyors followed, was described as a stream that carried so much sediment that the erosion of its own bed changed the landscape.

Back in the present, Cantú speaks with his fellow Border Patrol agents. Mortenson tells a story about his time as a prison guard and an inmate who used to cut himself, including cutting his own penis. Navarro chimes in with his experience in the Iraq War, describing one of his fellow soldiers who had a penis piercing. The soldier expressed wanting other forms of body modification on his penis, but he died before he could get it done. Not long after this conversation, Morales gets into a motorcycle accident and loses vision in his left eye. Cantú goes to visit him in the hospital. Seeing his colleague in such a weak state unsettles Cantú, who refuses to cry or visit Morales in the hospital again.

Out on patrol Cantú is waved down by a Native American man who introduces himself as Adam. He tells Cantú that strange vehicles have been passing through what Border Patrol agents calls a “vampire village.” Adam takes Cantú to his house, where Adam’s wife talks about a group of suspicious, threatening men who knocked on the door earlier that day asking for water. Since she is used to lost migrants passing through, she knew to give them water and to call the Border Patrol, but these men threatened her and told her not to. She noticed that they did not carry backpacks like typical migrants. Not long after this incident, a suspicious minivan passed through the neighborhood, and Adam told his wife to lock up the house. Cantú takes this information and soon stops a slow-moving vehicle, detaining the passengers until tribal police can come and inspect their vehicle. Unable to prove that they have done anything wrong, the police let the passengers go. Cantú calls Adam to call the police if he hears any strange noises or sees any suspicious characters. He asks Adam why his village is called a “vampire village” but never receives an answer.

Cantú encounters a suspicious man on his street while heading home from a shift in the middle of the night. Concerned for his safety, he calls the police, who only respond with urgency when he identifies himself as an agent. He then goes to the firing range in town, where he shoots a bird and feels sick with guilt, fearing that he is going insane. He buries the bird in a small hole on the outskirts of the firing range and covers the grave with stones.

On Christmas Eve, Cantú comes home from a shift to spend time with his mother, who asks how he is liking the job and how he is doing. Exhausted and unwilling to tell his mother about the mental toll the position has taken on him, he responds in a curt and abrupt manner. She reminds him of the years she spent working for the national park service, saying she understands the difficulty that accompanies working for larger government institutions better than most. She says, “You see, the government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose. I don’t want that for you” (76). Cantú changes the subject.

One night on patrol Cantú is trying to find a group of 20 migrants, women and children among them, who are slowly moving through the desert. Though he desperately tries to find them to provide them with food, water, and transport, they allude him. Despite his training, he feels powerless.