Reading about the Border Patrol’s long history of violence reminded me of a book I finished last summer: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, Francisco Cantú’s 2018 memoir about his years working as a Border Patrol agent.
Cantú joined the Border Patrol fresh out of college in his early twenties because he’d studied international relations and border politics, and wanted to experience the realities of it all firsthand. Although he writes in and about the many metaphors we apply to the borderlands, his driving desire in the book seems to be emphasizing the realness of the border. It is not just an academic or political subject. It is not an abstraction. It is violence. It is many things to him, but mostly it is violence:
He [my uncle] turned to me and smiled. How’s your job? he asked. I chewed an apple, thinking of how to reply. I wanted to tell him that I had reached a point at which I could barely sleep, a point at which my mind had become so filled with violence that I could barely perceive beauty in the landscape around me. I wanted to tell him that I feared there was nothing for him here, that he would find no peace in these borderland deserts. I breathed a deep breath and looked over at the water held back by the sagging dam. The job is good, I finally said. It’s nice to be out of the office, to have some work back in the field.
p 129
Another of Cantú’s major themes is dreams, especially dreams of teeth and wolves—symbols of violence—that go soft, crumble, fall out, pursue him only to press paws to his chest and lick him. The work of patrolling the border is a thing of violence; the desperation to make it right, to defang the situation and tame it, haunts him like a nightmare.
Cantú is American. He lives and works in the U.S. But because he’s descended from Mexican immigrants, he feels a bond with Mexico that brings him to work on a border he no longer feels he can cross. His memoir is about the cruelties intrinsic to American law enforcement and bureaucracy, but even more it’s about the violence south of our border and his aching empathy for those who struggle in and around the borderlands—those who migrate in search of safety and opportunity, and the many many more who don’t migrate and who continue to struggle south of the border to find work and avoid the predations of cartels and gangs. I thought this would be a book about the American systems, politics, and policies. Instead I found it to be a great cry of grief for his heritage and plea for the fate of his long-lost people: can we find healing? Can we break the cycles of violence and trauma? Is that possible with anything less than a miracle, like his namesake San Francisco making peace with the wolf?