The Line Becomes a River

September 15, 2017

An agent for the U.S. Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, third-generation Mexican American Cantu wearied of tracking humans and delivering them to detention and sometimes the morgue. An immigrant friend's disappearance after returning to Mexico to visit family prompted him to look at immigration on both sides of the border. Since he claims Fulbright, Whiting, and Pushcart honors, Cantu can tell us well.

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November 15, 2017
A Mexican-American student of international relations becomes a United States Border Patrol agent to learn what he can't in the classroom.Cantu is a talented writer who knows where to find great material, even as he risks losing his soul in the process. His Mexican mother had worked as a ranger in West Texas, and he had an affinity for the region that spurred his departure from academic life to learn firsthand about patrolling the border and determining the fates of the Mexicans who dared to cross it. Some were selling drugs, and others just wanted a better life; some had to work with a drug cartel in order to finance their escape. The author was by all accounts a good agent for some five years, upholding the law without brutalizing those he captured for deportation, as some agents did. But he feared what the experience was doing to him. He had trouble sleeping and suffered disturbing dreams, and he felt he was becoming desensitized. His mother warned him, "we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without our choosing it, it begins to seem normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are." Cantu left the field for a desk job and became more reflective and more disturbed; eventually, he returned to scholarship with a research grant. But then a man he knew and liked through a daily coffee shop connection ran afoul of the border authorities after returning to Mexico to visit his dying mother and trying to return to his home and family. His plight and the author's involvement in it, perhaps an attempt to find personal redemption, puts a human face on the issue and gives it a fresh, urgent perspective. "There are thousands of people just like him, thousands of cases, thousands of families," writes Cantu, who knows the part he played in keeping out so many in similar situations.A devastating narrative of the very real human effects of depersonalized policy.

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Starred review from December 11, 2017
An ex–Border Patrol agent finds himself on both sides of the battle over illegal immigration in this fraught memoir of his time patrolling the Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas borders from 2008 to 2012, an experience that roiled his emotions and shook his sense of his own part-Mexican identity. He discovers at the border a zone of heartbreaking absurdity: agents arrest a parade of undocumented migrants who want nothing but a job; to do so, they employ tactics such as emptying water bottles and urinating on food caches hidden along commonly used routes to deny border crossers sustenance, then rescue them when they are dying of thirst in the desert. After Cantú quits because of teeth-grinding stress and guilt, he’s forced to further reexamine the border when an undocumented friend, José, goes to see his dying mother in Oaxaca and is arrested trying to return. Through José’s story, Cantú comes to see the border crossers’ fierce resolve in the face of border police and brutal smuggling gangs as a defense of family and civilized values. Cantú’s rich prose (“For one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape trembled and breathed as one”) and deep empathy make this an indispensable look at one of America’s most divisive issues. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger, Fletcher & Co.