The Barnes & Noble Review
Francisco Cantú, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol for nearly four years, was not your typical agent. In The Line Becomes a River, his beautiful and devastating memoir of his time patrolling the border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, he gives one migrant the actual shirt off his back before buying him a meal. Another migrant, abandoned by her group when she can't keep up, can hardly walk when she's apprehended by agents in the desert. Cantú, in an act rich with symbolism, tenderly washes her blistered feet.
Cantú is of Mexican heritage on his mother's side; his maternal grandfather was brought across the border by his parents as a young boy. His mother never makes peace with her son's job, and their searching conversations appear throughout the book. (The author eschews quotation marks when writing dialogue, giving these exchanges a dreamy, poetic feel.) He tells his mother that he's taking the job because, after studying immigration and international relations in college, he yearns "to see the realities of the border" for himself. She wants him to find work that lets him "help people instead of pitting [him] against them." His argument: "Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I'm in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I'm the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home."
He does exactly that, bringing a determined humanity to a brutal system. When he and his partner are searching the backpacks of two men they've found in the desert, they discover bags of grasshoppers and dried fish, which the men proudly tell the agents are typical Oaxacan cuisine. They urge the agents to sample the food, and while his partner is hesitant, Cantú immediately accepts, asking them about their village. "For a short time we stood together with the men, laughing and eating, listening to their stories from home." At the station where the men will be processed for deportation, they notice Cantú throwing out their water bottle. One of the men whispers to Cantú that it's not water, but homemade aged mezcal: "It's at its best right now, he said, take it with you."
Still, Cantú cannot escape being implicated in the border's cruel realities. Migrants being pursued by Border Patrol often stash their heavy provisions, intending to come back for them, so that they can more easily evade the agents. "I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things," Cantú writes, "but it's true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze." The idea is to hasten the migrants' realization that there's no point in continuing, that they will not survive the journey. Indeed, as Cantú also sees firsthand, many do perish during the difficult desert crossing.
The final section of The Line Becomes a River takes place after Cantú leaves the Border Patrol because he's plagued by anxiety and nightmares. He's in Arizona, working at a coffee shop while pursuing a graduate degree in writing to help him "make sense of what [he'd] seen." He befriends a maintenance man named Jose, and every morning for almost two years Jose shares his breakfast with Cantú and Cantú offers him coffee in return. Jose, in the U.S. illegally and married with three American-born sons, returns to Mexico to see his dying mother and is arrested trying to get back into the country. Cantú, seeking to help his friend, perhaps seeking some form of redemption too, attends Jose's court hearings, takes his sons to visit him in jail (a trip too risky for their mother, who also lacks legal status) and, along with Jose's boss and his pastor, retains an attorney to represent him. Despite their efforts, Jose is deported to Mexico. "I shouldn't have left the U.S.," Jose -- whose story is not at all unusual -- tells Cantú. "I shouldn't have left my family, but I couldn't live without going to see my mother."
There are complex political and economic dimensions to our current immigration debate, but Cantú's deeply humane book forces us to ponder questions of conscience. How can we sanction a system in which the decision to see a dying mother one last time is the wrong choice, one that can cost a man his family? When Jose asks Cantú whether he'd arrested many drug smugglers while working for Border Patrol, Cantú replies that he had but confesses that he mostly arrested "people looking for a better life." One man being processed for deportation after his arrest asks Cantú if he can clean the jail cells or take out the trash while he waits: "I want to show you that I'm here to work," he pleads. Is there any enhanced border enforcement that will stop the irrepressible human drive for a better life?
Cantú visits Jose in a border town in Mexico, where he's preparing to attempt another crossing. Jose tells the author matter-of-factly that "there are many dangers, but for me it doesn't matter. I have to cross, I have to arrive to the other side . . . So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing." He, and many others like him, will continue to risk their lives to enter the United States. It's difficult to imagine a wall high enough to stop them from trying.
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.
Reviewer: Barbara Spindel
Publishers Weekly - Audio
★ 03/26/2018
Cantú narrates the stellar audio edition of his memoir about his time as a border-patrol agent in Arizona. He uses a manner that respectfully conveys the life-and-death struggles of the people he witnessed desperately trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. Cantú, raised in the Southwest by a single mother of Mexican heritage, resists the temptation to go for obvious ethnic vocal characterizations or demonstrative displays, instead opting for an understated delivery to relate the details of spouses separated from one another, parents separated from children, and border crossers facing the elements. When advocating on behalf of a friend who is a detained undocumented immigrant, Cantú speaks in tones that elicit understanding and empathy rather than pity. The passages recounting parent-child visitation at a detention center provide an especially memorable display of Cantú’s narration style working in sync with his writing style. Cantú first shared parts of this narrative on the radio show This American Life; his excellent audiobook will appeal to fans of that show and of first-person nonfiction storytelling in general. A Riverhead hardcover. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
[The Line Becomes a River] lays bare, in damning light, the casual brutality of the system, how unjust laws and private prisons and a militarized border have shattered families and mocked America’s myths about itself.” —New York Times Book Review
“[Cantú] proves to be an astounding writer with this memoir for the moment.” —Entertainment Weekly
“When the political rhetoric around the complex, ruggedly beautiful and scarred U.S.-Mexico borderlands is reduced to talk of a 30-foot concrete wall, it’s time to take a more nuanced look at our southern border...The Line Becomes a River veers away from propaganda and stereotypes and into the wild deserts and mountains, and, especially, the hearts and minds of the people who traverse the increasingly militarized borderlands.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything.” —Esquire
“[Cantú's] beautifully written account of a life between nations cuts through the politics surrounding “the wall” to probe what’s really at stake.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“A book that whips across your face like a sandstorm, embedding bits of the desert into your skin that, like it or not, you’ll carry forward.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Exquisitely nuanced...explains the conflicted journey of a border crosser with an impressive level of compassion, self-reflection, and conviction.” —NBC News
“If you read one book on immigration this year, choose The Line Becomes a River.” —Denver Post
“The wall that separates us is high and wide, but as Cantú’s memoir shows us, there is still a way around it.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The best book on immigration you will read this year…honest, gripping and wonderfully written.” —Mother Jones
“By coming to better understand Cantú's fixation with the border, readers of his book are brought into that suspension, prompted — if not outright required — to experience what it's like to exist in-between, knowing no amount of politics or prayer can give a hard question easy answers.” —CNN
“An intense and captivating memoir of dreams, divisions, and death at the border.” –Christian Science Monitor
“Read enough op-eds and takes and tweets about the border, and you can start to forget that it’s a real place….Francisco Cantú has written an insistently humane book, or maybe just a human one….It’s an exploration of how the border feels, and what happens to the people who get caught in its gears.” —Bookforum
“A poetic and empathetic work whose message — the border is built on an imaginary line, but its impact on the people who cross it, or can't, is real — feels more urgent this year than ever.” —Salon
“Raw and timely confessional… A striking picture of the unsparing borderlands.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Beautiful, eloquent and timely...[Cantú's] your correspondent if you want the real story.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Woven throughout his personal story is a deep body of research and critical analysis that seeks to explain how the status quo came to be. And while reasonable minds can disagree on whether he’s succeeded, Cantú, in both his book and public comments, has clearly attempted to address the underlining conditions that made his experience what it was, along the way demonstrating a willingness to publicly challenge the mission of his former employer.” —The Intercept
“A powerful, harrowing view of the border — a no man’s land where no one returns the same. Run, don’t walk, to your bookstore.” —KQED
“A beautifully-crafted question; the answer has yet to be written.” —NPR
“Sharply political and deeply personal.” —New York Magazine
“[Cantú's] compelling, tragic account may help to break down the wall for others, too.” —The Economist
“Spare, graceful, and full of the details that propel a good story… [Cantú's]life on the line has made him the kind of expert we need to hear from.” —Boston Globe
“Cantú’s confessions mimic the desert landscape he patrols: haunting but elegant, with glimmers of humor for reprieve … The achievement of this book is how deftly Cantú reels us in, cold and wet behind him.” —Texas Observer
“This work may determine for future generations what building a wall does to magnify the heartache of plight and flight, of people moving between nation and nationality…without the agency to define it themselves.” —LitHub
“Every single person in this country — near borderlands or not — should read this book, and realize that immigration cannot be solved with a single policy.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Full of insights into the migrant experience.” —Financial Times
“This beautiful and horrifying memoir should be required reading.” —NY Journal of Books
“Cantú interrogates one of the thorniest subjects in contemporary America and finds his mother's warning to be true: ‘We learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions.’”
—The Week
"[Adds] new depths to one of the most controversial issues of our modern times: the Mexican border.” —PopSugar
“Beautiful and brutal.”—High Country News
"Fresh, urgent...A devastating narrative of the very real human effects of depersonalized policy." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Cantú’s rich prose and deep empathy make this an indispensable look at one of America’s most divisive issues.” —Publisher's Weekly (starred)
“A personal, unguarded look at border life from the perspective of a migrant and agent, recommended for those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of current events.” —Library Journal
“There is a line dividing what we know and do not know. Some see the world from one shore and some from the other. Cantú brings the two together to a spiritual whole. My gratitude for this work of the soul.” —Sandra Cisneros
“A beautiful, fiercely honest, and nevertheless deeply empathetic look at those who police the border and the migrants who risk – and lose — their lives crossing it. In a time of often ill-informed or downright deceitful political rhetoric, this book is an invaluable corrective.” —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
"Francisco Cantu’s story is a lyrical journey that helps bridge the jagged line that divides us from them. His empathy reminds us of our humanity — our immigrant history — at a critical time.” —Alfredo Corchado, journalist, author of Midnight in Mexico
"Cantú’s story, and intelligent and humane perspective, should mortify anyone who ever thought building a wall might improve our lot. He advocates for clarity and compassion in place of xenophobia and uninformed rhetoric. His words are emotionally true and his literary sensibility uplifting.” —Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men
"This book tells the hard poetry of the desert heart. If you think you know about immigration and the border, you will see there is much to learn. And you will be moved by its unexpected music."—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway
Library Journal
02/01/2018
Cantú (contributor, Guernica) uses a series of vignettes to recount his experiences as a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Stories of catching migrants and retrieving dead bodies are interspersed with interludes that provide historical context to the border conflict. Throughout his time as an agent, Cantú is plagued by unsettling dreams and struggles to justify his work to his mother, who is proud of her Mexican heritage and skeptical of the Border Patrol. After Cantú leaves the Border Patrol he befriends José, an undocumented immigrant who has been living and working in the United States for more than 30 years. José visits his dying mother in Mexico and finds that he cannot return to his family and life in the United States. Cantú assists José's family with the legal proceedings, while musing on the juxtaposition between border agents and those affected by the policies that the they enforce. José also tells his side of the story, emphasizing his reasons for wanting to remain in America. VERDICT A personal, unguarded look at border life from the perspective of a migrant and agent, recommended for those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of current events.—Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
APRIL 2018 - AudioFile
Francisco Cantu joins the Border Patrol, seeking to understand the stories of those who traverse the long stretches of desert in their attempts to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. Though Cantu’s narration suffers from a lack of vocal variation at times, his pacing heightens the feeling of urgency regarding this hotly contested issue. Cantu is deeply affected by his time in the Border Patrol and by the case of a friend who is unable to return to his family in the United States after visiting his dying mother in Mexico. Moved by the personal stories of those he intercepts but still a dispassionate enforcer of the policies of the Border Patrol, Cantu seeks to provide a personal look at the individuals affected by U.S. policy. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
