The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

Despite growing up near the border and crossing over it with his mother to visit Mexico several times in his life, Cantú expresses a desire to better understand the border both as a place and as an idea from the very beginning of the book. He spells this out to his mother when explaining his decision to sign up for the Border Patrol, saying,

I don’t know if the border is a place for me to understand myself, but I know there’s something here I can’t look away from. Maybe it’s the closeness of life and death, maybe it’s the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I’ll never understand it until I’m close to it (22-23).

For Cantú, the border is not merely a physical line in the sand but a place from which our understanding of who can be considered “American” stems. His decision to join the Border Patrol allows him physical access to the border as well as the consequences of border enforcement.

This is set up for the reader in Cantú’s inclusion of historical research about the border treaties and surveying trips of the 1800s. His emphasis on the impossibility of forging a true physical border—after all, many of the monuments erected along the borderline were destroyed by punishing desert conditions—suggests that borders are not permanent or fixed ideas but something as variable and untamable as the desert itself. This challenges the certainty inherent in Cantú’s position as a Border Patrol agent; it also causes him to question what his job as an agent is and how one could ever be “good” at it.

His focus on historical struggles to erect a physical border wall echoes President Donald Trump’s 2016 election promise to “build a wall” that would keep undocumented migrants from crossing. This became a rallying cry for many conservative Republican voters who believed a reduction in undocumented migrants would reduce crime and make more jobs available to American citizens. Yet, as the title of the book suggests, the boderline is subject to the whims of the desert, including rivers like the Rio Grande, as well as our shifting societal whims about who can make a life in the United States. The decision to end the book with Cantú swimming in the Rio Grande, feeling the riverbed sediment move while he crosses between both countries, is meant to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a border and emphasize how political ideals rarely line up with lived reality.

The book’s first two parts document Cantú’s increasing traumatization while serving in the Border Patrol, due to the violence, injustice, and death he witnesses during his tenure. Part 2 in particular examines the effects of witnessing, hearing, learning, and consuming the extensive violence that unfolds along the US-Mexico border. Through this intellectualization of what he is experiencing, Cantú informs the reader of just how damaging this is both to his psyche and to the collective psyche of undocumented migrants; American and Mexican citizens living along both sides of the border; and the Border Patrol agents tasked with finding, seizing, recovering, or helping those who are subjected to this violence.

Violent acts committed by the Mexican drug cartels and their sicarios are meant to dehumanize the victims (especially women) and send messages to their enemies. Cantú is repeatedly exposed to these acts during his time in the field and in the intelligence office This trauma manifests physically for him, as Cantú grinds his teeth, experiences nightmares, and struggles to sleep or relax.

It should be noted, however, that the trauma experienced by undocumented migrants extends beyond physical trauma and death. The “alien” migrant is commodified, turned into an object for the purposes of human trafficking, another form of violence. There is also harm done in the language used to describe migrants, which ranges from slurs to seemingly innocuous words like “flood” or “surge” that characterize border crossings as a natural disaster. Cantú highlights the inhumanity of human smuggling across the border to illustrate that not all violence done to migrants is physical.

Cycles of violence have been monetized by smugglers and cartels, which take advantage of vulnerable people, but also by the Border Patrol, which repeatedly deports migrants back across the border, where they often face danger. As a Border Patrol agent, Cantú repeatedly questions who exactly he and his fellow officers are protecting from violence, especially since many Border Patrol agents are the children of Mexican immigrants or are Mexican American themselves.

This acknowledgement of acting against part of one’s self or one’s heritage allows Cantú room to discuss “moral injury” as an invisible wound. He observes:

one does not have to be in combat to suffer from moral injury […] war is something that reaches beyond the battlefield, something that leaches out into proximate geographies and relationships, seeping deep into the individual and societal unconsciousness (131).

By examining invisible as well as visible trauma, Cantú implores his reader to consider the vast damage this border “battle” causes to citizens consciously and unconsciously in Mexico and the United States. In this way, the border, as a place and as a concept, becomes a collective wound, one that is not easily healed given the complicated history surrounding its inception.

Violence against other human beings is only possible when a person or a group of people are considered “other,” or something less than human. Cantú curates a diverse list of characters from his life, each of whom he describes with honesty and affection. He takes care to describe and humanize everyone in the text, especially the undocumented migrants he meets in the field. This makes it more difficult to dismiss any one person’s humanity, and therefore more difficult to justify violence.

While not explicitly stated, the reader is clued in to Cantú’s desire to render the people he arrests as fully human by always asking for their names, where they are originally from, and a little bit about themselves. His fellow officers don’t always do so, yet Cantú feels guilt when he can’t remember a migrant’s name. Part 3 humanizes José in great detail, as well as his wife Lupe, their sons, his attorneys, his coworkers, and the other people in his life who are affected by his deportation. By naming a person and recording his encounter with them, sharing their story and personal details, Cantú personalizes the numbers ascribed to undocumented migrants crossing the border, which are typically big, unwieldy, and difficult to conceptualize.

Naming especially helps to bring someone’s humanity to the forefront of narrative. This is true even for Cantú, as is noted in the beginning of Part 2, when he discusses how his mother named him. A name is unique to a person, and that particularity is something Cantú attempts to emphasize for every person he writes about in the book. This is evidenced by Cantú’s recognition of the hyphenated surname his mother almost gave him, a “white” name that would have changed his conception of himself (and others’ conceptions of him as well). Naming migrants while describing their traumatic experiences endured crossing the border creates a more three-dimensional portrait of the border.

Humanizing the “other” is also done for the Border Patrol agents, who might easily be dismissed as aggressive or as bullies. But Cantú makes sure to depict their humanity as well. This is done through naming (using mostly surnames) but also through backstory, as many of the agents are children of immigrants, war veterans, and more. While the agents Cantú serves alongside are not perfect, and often dehumanize the migrants they encounter, they are given the same grace and understanding as migrants, which gives the reader a stronger understanding of both sides of the controversy surrounding the US-Mexico border.