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Summary
Summary
A New York Times BestsellerA #1 Indie Next PickFrancisco Cantú's mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Cantú joins the Border Patrol, tracking people in remote regions, hauling in the dead and delivering the living to detention. He tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he leaves the Patrol. But when an immigrant friend visits his dying mother in Mexico and does not return, Cantú must know the whole story. In The Line Becomes a River, he makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
FORCE OF NATURE, by Jane Harper. (Flatiron, $16.99.) In this thriller from the hugely popular Australian crime novelist, five colleagues set out for a hike in the bush, but only four return. Aaron Falk, a federal agent, investigates the missing hiker - a woman who was widely disliked and secretly looking into her firm's dodgy finances. He turns up a web of betrayals and secrets, and acts as the book's moral compass. FEEL FREE: Essays, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $18.) Ajoyful current guides these selections, which touch on everything from a philosophical consideration of Justin Bieber's appeal to the thrill of public parks in Italy. As our reviewer, Amanda Fortini, put it, "It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she's headed." ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE, by Jonathan Miles. (Hogarth, $16.) When an Army veteran who has been paralyzed from the waist down suddenly can walk again, his recovery raises a number of questions: Was it divine intervention? A medical breakthrough? And above all, why him? Miles's novel mimics a New Journalism narrative style, and our reviewer, Christopher R. Beha, called the book "a highly entertaining literary performance." DAUGHTERS OF THE WINTER QUEEN: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Nancy Goldstone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Goldstone is known for her histories of royals, and this one charts the stormy life of Elizabeth Stuart. The daughter of Charles I and known as "the most charming princess of Europe," she schemed for her children in 17th-century England. The book doubles as a useful introduction to a time when Britain's relations with Europe were strained. THE ESSEX SERPENT, by Sarah Perry. (Custom House/William Morrow, $16.99.) In this romance-meets-ghost-story, it's 1893 and Cora, recently widowed, heads to the coast of England with her son. There, she finds a town racked with worry that a fearsome monster has returned. As Cora investigates the phenomenon, she is drawn to a local pastor, and their dialogues about faith and science help create a richly satisfying relationship. THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER, by Francisco Cantú. (Riverhead, $17.) To better understand immigration in the United States, Cantu joined the Border Patrol. He writes of his time with the agency, where he witnessed casual cruelty toward migrants. A later section, which tells the story of a friend who was deported, makes a meaningful contribution to literature of the border.
Guardian Review
A lyrical and moving account from a third-generation Mexican-American who spends four years seeing for himself the horrors endured by crossers In January an Arizona humanitarian organisation issued a report citing numerous instances of border patrol agents slashing water containers left for undocumented migrants crossing the desert on foot. The agents actions have been officially disowned, but the USs arid borderlands have been deployed as a natural barrier against unwanted incomers since long before the current president began fantasising about his big, beautiful wall. In 1994 the Clinton administration instituted a strategy called Operation Gatekeeper, the purpose of which was to harden security in towns close to the Mexico border, thereby funnelling those determined to cross unofficially into more arid and isolated parts of the desert, where they were more likely to die. The wanton waste of lifesaving water, in other words, is consistent with preserving the deserts lethality. Told in three progressively more soul-searching parts, Francisco Cantús memoir of his nearly four years as a border patrol agent describes the borderlands and his work there with a raw-nerved tenderness that seems to have been won from both the landscape and, disconcertingly, the violence he was implicated in. A third-generation Mexican-American, Cantú joined the US border patrol in 2008, aged 23. Having grown up in Arizona and studied international relations in Washington, he wanted to see the application of theory at ground level: Im tired of reading about the border in books, he tells his mother. The daughter of a Mexican immigrant herself, she is his intermittent confidante and the books moral lodestar, troubled by the perils of her sons job and by his involvement in what she sees as a racist institution. But he assures her that stepping into a system doesnt mean that the system becomes you. The years that follow test that assertion. The borderlands are a zone of exception, set apart from their contiguous nations, and not only by climate what the writer Tom Miller has called a thin Third Country. The literary voices of the region have often sublimated something of the landscapes austerity. Its hard to imagine Charles Bowden or Cormac McCarthy, with their disdain for embellishment and indulgence, writing out of, say, Maine or West Virginia or any other more forgiving environment. There are echoes, too, of McCarthys spareness in Cantús eschewal of speech marks and his rendering of Spanish dialogue untranslated. The unflinching quality of the authors gaze, both inward and outward, recalls the same lineage. But there is an emotional generosity in the writing that sets Cantú apart. Perhaps his most concrete influence is the vast and smouldering terrain of southern Arizona malpaís, or bad country, where volcanic processes seem to have calmed only momentarily. Part one describes Cantús training and induction into the work of the field agent for instance, cutting sign to reveal the recent passage of crossers: toe digs, heel prints, kicked-over rocks, the shine of pressed-in dirt, fibres snagged on spines and branches. What does it mean to be good at this, he at last begins to wonder, when being good at it involves not only saving the lives of migrants but destroying their water bottles and pissing on their abandoned belongings? The second part describes his transfer to an office-based intelligence division and his growing realisation that the compromises of the work are unpicking some foundational part of his spirit. This middle section has the most memorable writing prismatic, allusive, self-interrogative, starkly lyrical. Its a mark of the seriousness of Cantús moral reckoning that he resists easy judgment of either his often boorish colleagues, for whom those crossing the desert are merely POWs plain old wets or his quarry. Cantú does not spare himself, but most of the books ire is reserved for a border control and immigration system that promotes such iniquities, and for those pitiless gangs on the Mexican side for whom the systems victims are an exploitable commodity. He is told about another agent who became distrusted for what his colleagues perceived as undue softness. His crime had been to help an injured female migrant out of the desert. They framed him for brutality. They made it look like he had beaten someone up in the field. There is a sense of Cantú as a spectator and an outsider; in his moral vigilance is a kind of loneliness. His vocation is to something other than apprehending illegals, and however many acts of individual kindness he and his colleagues might carry out, they are dwarfed by the larger injustices. My mind had become so filled with violence, he writes tellingly, that I could barely perceive beauty in the landscape around me. For all the scorched corpses, purple with dependent lividity, and the cavalcade of punishment killings meted out by the cartels, the violence that preoccupies Cantú is of the systemic kind, that which rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants. Totemic of that violence, and antithesis of the unnatural border, is the wolf that invades his dreams, a creature identified by Jung, we are told, as representing the animal impulses of the unconscious. Jung is one of several thinkers recruited by the author to elucidate his themes of violence and trauma. Another is the war correspondent David Wood, who describes the moral injury suffered by returning soldiers, whose symptoms are sorrow, remorse, guilt, shame, bitterness and moral confusion. The scales dont fall softly from Cantús eyes. 'Its like Ive been circling beneath a giant,' he tells his mother Cantús attempts to resolve his own moral injury to make peace with the wolf of his nightmares culminate in the books third part, when he befriends an undocumented Mexican man while working as a barista in Tucson, having finally quit the agency. The reality of his previous work is brought home forcefully when José is deported and separated from his family, and Cantú becomes involved in the tortuous legal efforts to bring him home. Pre-empting us, Cantú wonders if he is merely seeking to dole out some paltry reparation. But he has become an outsider, and his familiarity with the system ranged against his friend counts for nothing. The 10-page penultimate section is handed over to the voice of the deported José, separated from his wife and children a voice whose Dictaphone immediacy sounds a note that echoes back sombrely into the previous pages. I have to break the law, he explains to Cantú, to all of us as he plans his next attempt to cross the desert that might kill him. It is a situation of emotion, of love. The scales dont fall softly from Cantús eyes. Its like Ive been circling beneath a giant, he tells his mother, who we sense has been quietly waiting for this moment, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now its like Im starting to crane my head upward, like Im finally seeing the thing that crushes. Cantú has said that in writing the book he was trying to grapple honestly with my own culpability and with all the ways that I can and cannot extract myself from the work that I did. He asks himself towards the end, What would redemption look like? In the epilogue, full of light and space, an answer is suggested in his reawakening to the beauty beneath the deserts taint of violence. I was reminded of Mark Twains line: Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Redemption, as this remarkable book recognises, is not the same as absolution. - William Atkins.
Kirkus Review
A Mexican-American student of international relations becomes a United States Border Patrol agent to learn what he can't in the classroom.Cant 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." Cant 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 Cant, 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
At the station I was given the keys to a transport van and told to drive out to the reservation where two quitters had been seen wandering through the streets of a small village. When I arrived it was just after dark and I noticed few signs of life as I drove past the scattered homes, scanning for disheartened crossers. In the center of the village a small adobe church stood in an empty dirt lot, and I saw that the front door had been left ajar. I parked the van and left the headlights shining on the entrance. I walked to the heavy wooden door and leaned with all my weight to push it open, causing a loud and violent scraping to rise up and echo into the dim interior. Inside the church, the light from my flashlight glinted off tiny strings of tinsel hanging from the ceiling. A large piece of fabric depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe was strung across the front wall, and beneath it I saw two figures lying on a blanket that had been spread out between the pews and the altar. As I approached, a man looked up at me and squinted, holding out his hand to block the light. We were resting a little, he said. It's just that we are lost, muy desanimados. A woman huddled close to him, hiding her face. The man propped himself up on one elbow and told me that they had crossed four days ago, that their guide had left them behind on the first night when they'd failed to keep pace with the group. They were lost for days, he said, with nothing to drink but the filthy water from cattle tanks. Puede ser muy fea la frontera, I told him. The man shook his head. Pues sí, he replied, pero es aún más feo donde nosotros vivimos. The man told me that they came from Morelos. My wife and I, we're just coming to find work, he said. He rubbed his eyes in silence. I have fresh water for you, I told them. At the station there's juice and crackers. The man looked at me and smiled weakly, then asked for a minute to gather their belongings. He stuffed some things into a backpack, then helped his wife to her feet. Her face was streaked with dried tears, and when she turned toward me I saw that she was pregnant. How many months are you? I asked. The woman looked away and the man answered for her. Seis meses. He smiled. My wife speaks perfect English, he said, shouldering the backpack. He stopped in front of the altar, bowing his head and making the sign of the cross. I waited at the door as he mumbled a prayer. Gracias, he whispered. Gracias. Outside I looked at their faces in the glare of my headlights. The woman seemed young. Where did you learn English? I asked. Iowa, she told me quietly. I grew up there, she said, I even got my GED. She kept her head down and avoided my gaze as she talked, glancing up only briefly at my uniformed body. Why did you leave? I asked her. She told me that she had returned to Morelos to care for her younger siblings after their mother died. In Morelos I made some money teaching English at the kindergarten, she said, I even tutored the adults in my village, people preparing for the journey north. For a few seconds she seemed proud, and then she shook her head. But the money there, it isn't enough. She glanced up at her husband. It was my idea to cross, she said. I wanted our child to have a life here, like I did. The man took a moment to look at me in the light. Listen, he said, do you think you could bring us back to Mexico, como hermano? You could drive us down to the border, he pleaded, you could just leave us there, allí en la línea. Like a brother. I sighed and turned my head, squinting at the darkness beyond the church. I have to bring you in, I told him. It's my job. The man took a deep breath and nodded and then climbed into the back of the transport van, holding out his arms to help his pregnant wife. I gestured at a case of water bottles on the floor. You should drink, I told them. I grabbed the metal door of the cage and paused. What are your names? I asked. The man looked at me strangely and glanced at his wife. Then, as if it were nothing, they took turns introducing themselves. I repeated their names and I told them mine. Mucho gusto, I said. They replied with polite smiles. Igualmente. I turned my head and then bolted the cage and shut the door. In the driver's seat I turned to look at the couple through the plexiglass. The man held his wife and gently whispered to her, cradling her head. Just before I started the engine I could hear the soft sound of her sobbing. As I drove through the unmarked streets of the village, trying to find my way to the highway, I felt for a moment that I had become lost. Beyond the last house, I saw a white dog in the darkness at the edge of my headlights, staring into the night. At the station, I sorted through their things with them, discarding perishables and sharp objects. I had them remove their belts and their shoelaces and I tagged their backpacks and handed them a claim ticket. I counted and took note of their money, in pesos and in dollars, and then handed it back to them, telling them to keep it close. Inside the processing center I filled out their voluntary return papers and entered their names into the computer. Before leaving them in their cell I wished them luck on their journey and asked them to be safe, to always think of their child. Later that night, as I sat in the transport van listening to the calls come out over the radio, I realized I had forgotten their names. Excerpted from The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
