The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

Living in the shadow of the border for many years, I was anxious to see what Mr. Cantú had to say. His book exceeded my greatest expectations. He cut through contemporary stereotypes to craft a beautiful and compelling story of the human condition. His story is factual. It is a multifaceted presentation about the real conditions faced by Border Patrol agents on the front lines and by the illegal immigrants themselves. After reading the book, I came away a bit more understanding of the agents who are often driven into hardened shells by the realities of their jobs and the cold dictates of a political system where there’s little room for humanity. Cantú’s writing style is refreshing. An air of spirituality permeated the book; to an extent, it was reminiscent of the writing of Carlos Castaneda. Cantú crafted a fabulous book that was easy to read, but hard to put down. The story didn’t end as I would have liked, but reality rarely accommodates my personal wishes. Such is the nature of the real world. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I picked up this book because the subject is topical and my local news suggested it contained some politically controversial material. The only thing that makes this book controversial is the presently vocal anti-immigrant hysteria of the American political Right. If the book had come out two years ago, no one would be declaring it controversial. An autobiographical story told in first person and covering a roughly 10 year period from the author's college graduation with a political science degree through and beyond his four year stint in the U.S. border patrol serving the south western United States. The author, being of Mexican heritage and raised in the South West, was drawn to the international border between the U.S. and Mexico, joining the border patrol to, as he put it, bring the theory he studied down to earth. There are a few flash backs to his earlier life, and some history of the border region, the 1860s war with Mexico that added the South West territories, Texas, and the southern half of California to the U.S. map, and also the impact of the Mexican Revolution of 1911. Much of the emotional conflict is revealed through dreams he had while serving on the border and later as his life never let him forget what he experienced. This is the story of a compassionate man in an in-compassionate job. He relates incidences of drug seizures, but notes that most of what he had to do was capture and return to Mexico people who wanted nothing more than to do some honest work and in many cases reunite with wives and in particular children born in the U.S. and so citizens. Many of these people die trying. Unlike a generation back, when crossing the border was relatively easy whether for work or criminal activity, it is now much more difficult and only the criminals have the resources to assure themselves of making the trip alive. The rest take their chances and thousands do not make it. The cruelty of criminal groups escorting migrants is on full display. People who cannot keep up in the many miles long trek across stony and water-less desert are simply left behind to die. The border patrol itself is complicit in some of these deaths destroying water and food, meant to sustain these people, where ever they find it. After four years the author cannot take more and quits the border patrol. The remainder of the book relates a friendship he develops with an undocumented Mexican immigrant who becomes trapped in the system, torn from his wife and children simply because he returns to Mexico to be with his dying mother and bury her. From there, he cannot get back and every attempt to do so traps him deeper and deeper in a system that cares nothing for compassionate people. This book is not political. Cantu avoids even mentioning much of politics, but merely reports what he experiences of an indifferent system and those trapped by it. He is most surely not opposed to interdicting drugs and deporting real criminals, but the vast majority of the migrant people involved are neither drug runners or criminals, but only criminalized by their desire to work and share a life with their spouses and children. If you are a compassionate person the book might bring you to tears. It is an honest report of the impact of an impersonal system on the lives of thousands of individuals who want nothing more than a life for themselves and their families. The political is mostly notable for its absence as the author tries, likely in vain for these times, to personalize these stories. There is nothing more controversial about it than that.

As a strongly conservative person, I was ready to delve into this book anticipating a strong liberal bias that would label me a bigot. I was ready to feel outraged as yet another person would, in print no less, tell me how I just don’t understand what is going on with regards to the immigration issue. While I know that I can’t fully understand Jose’s plight, I can surely empathize and sympathize with him and for him. It was a relief to me to be surprised by Francisco Cantu’s book. I lived in the Rio Grande Valley for 47 years and have seen firsthand the complexities involved in this issue. My brother was killed when a group of Mexican teenagers and their polleros were evading the police. The car they were in T-boned my brothers car at an intersection and cut him in two. A very good friend of mine, Hispanic as well, is a Border patrol agent. He qualified himself to work on the Rio Grande River in boats, on ATV out in the field and has also worked at the US Border Patrol sector headquarters. We spoke often, way before this book, about the things he has seen and done throughout his years as a CBP agent. How they are always being watched by lookouts from the south side of the river as they patrol the US side. He described the smell of decomposing bodies left behind in the brush land, or finding people under the full effect of heat stroke. He has told me about the taunts they receive as the polleros just escape back across the river. Cantu’s book reminded me a lot of my friend’s recollections. It also help me understand a little more of why he won’t speak too much about his feelings. I sense he is empathetic towards those he has stopped and believe he has genuine sympathy for them, but he also insists that what he is doing needs to be continued. He feels that even if stopping 1000 crossers only yields a few really dangerous people, he has improved life for His family on the US side. Living in Dallas for 3 1/2 years now, I have seen how much of it is being built by undocumented people. I know people, who like Jose stay under the radar by working and going home, day after day, and strive to live in peace. Some of them submitting themselves to unjust treatment because it is a better alternative than going back to their home country. I have been surprised at this treatment because it comes, many times, at the hands of Latinos who are fortunate enough to have legal status. This issue is very complex, and it angers me when people and politicians distill it down to platitudes. This has been done for far too long by people on every side of the argument. Usually, it has been done for personal gain and without any real knowledge of what it is like to live in an area affected by this, or any real knowledge of the people living through this. Thank you Mr. Cantu for writing this book, I wept through many sections and it has given me some resolve to help where I can. If anyone has strong feelings on either side of the immigration and citizenship problems of the US, I urge you to add this book to your references on the subject.

Cantu gives a first hand account of the experiences of both border agents and migrants that shows us the moral and human costs of US border policy. The book is a series of mostly short vignettes that grab and keep your attention. His writing is engaging and at times moving as we see the human tragedies that regularly unfold along our border. He also weaves in history and an appreciation for the stark beauty of the desert and mountains along the border. The stories are populated by both innocents and predators, so no one with a blind ideological agenda will come away from this work feeling totally vindicated.

The first 160 pages of this book are well worth reading, because the author describes his experiences as a US Border Patrol Agent working in Arizona and Texas. He takes the reader into the front lines of the immigration crisis, and writes with great clarity and sensitivity. He also gives the reader some history about how the US-Mexican Border was created. Other reviewers have rightly praised this part of the book . After he leaves the Border Patrol, however, the book becomes a advocacy tract for better treatment of undocumented US residents. While I sympathize with this view, this does not make for interesting reading, made worse by strange interludes of psychology, including the author's dreams.

The author is a solid writer and I appreciate how he weaves together his own thoughts, conversations, feelings, and dreams; narratives from those he meets and befriends; history; and ideas and writings from worldly scholars. I also appreciate how the book, implicitly, forces you to think about how horrible things must be in someone's home country for them to embark on the life-threatening journey to the U.S. This is something that is usually missing from any discourse on immigration – a thorough examination of the historical "push" factors forcing Mexicans and Central Americans to leave their homelands. One contributing push factor includes the many corporations that abandoned production plants and factories in Mexico in the 1990s and fled to Asia, where manufacturing was cheaper. Although many of these plants were sweatshops, they still offered employment. Drug cartels have filled that void, and as a result, people have absolutely nowhere to turn, nowhere to work. Their one and only choice is to risk their lives trying to get into the U.S. As a result, the most vulnerable people – migrants – are in the crossfires; they are scapegoats for everything that is going wrong along the southern border; as if they had any power. Finally, the author has skillfully reminded us of the humanity in each and every soul. His ability to withhold judgment and criticism is at the core of this. He simply writes about his experiences and concedes to his own naiveté and his emotional struggles.

A Line Becomes a River, by Francisco Cantú, details the experiences of one border patrol agent’s life from the beginning of his career on the border to years after the end of his career as a border patrol agent. It is the tale of Francisco Cantú’s life from his perspective looking back on it many years after the events in question. I was fairly happy with this book as I was pretty confident I would like it after reading a short excerpt in a class. The book did turn out to be a bit slower than what I believed it too be. I felt that the book did a great job at showing multiple sides of the problems that it brought up. It never felt like it was pushing for one mind set or demonizing anyone, outside of the cartels of course. The book did a rather poor job with using time though as some parts would cover large stretches of time while others would take up the same number of pages yet cover insignificant amounts of time. It made it rather hard to keep track of where and for how long Francisco had been in a certain situation. This made certain ideas, such as that of the border slowly corrupting people such as Francisco, a rather large theme of the book, have less of an impact and seem less noticeable. The book was rather informative on the topic of immigration and border security. The information surrounding these topics was mainly introduced through statistics, logos, or stories of people that lived on the border, pathos. I never questioned the credibility of the author throughout this book as he never appears to mess with any of the information within the book to support his biases. He leaves most of the thinking up to the reader, mainly sticking to giving evidence and context for events. Francisco asks the reader to think about immigration, especially illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border. The many facets to this issue are what the book focuses on with its many pathos and logos based evidence. Francisco mainly serves to inform people on this issue, leaving much of the deciding of what is good and what is bad to the reader. He very intelligently works his evidence all throughout the story and does a great job at getting the reader to sympathize, if not agree, with most of the people Francisco meets throughout the book. This approach to informing people of the border allows for the conversation around the border to be opened to many more people as this book expects you to know little more than the fact that illegal immigration does occur along this border. This book is great for anyone interested in the US-Mexico border and those looking for an introduction into border policy within the United States of America.

I found my reading experience here to be both moving and valuable. The overall sense is that of one's good friend dealing with the difficulties and sorrows of adversity. You are there moment to moment and feel like you want to help. This book puts individual lives front and center in the controversial current discussion of issues on the border between Mexico and the United States. And you can feel the representative nature of these specific stories, they are not related to give extreme instances that might shock someone. Nothing extreme here. As others have detailed, the book is a story of one individual, but in 3 parts. The first part is his story as a border control employee of the US government. In the second part he has been promoted from on the ground work to more of a desk job that coordinates the work of others on the ground. The third part is when he's no longer doing this sort of work but finds himself witnessing and trying to help a family that is in the throes of being torn apart by the system of immigration control I found the first and third parts to be the most deeply engaging. I have highly recommended this book to my good friends.