Cantú and his colleagues try their best to disrupt the business of violent, ruthless men.
For some who have wandered the desert for days without water, the agents are not just the guys who arrest and send them back - they are life savers. Once, he gives one his shirt he washes the blistered feet of another. Cantú listens to the stories of crossers before he processes them for deportation. She warns him about “stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.” He counters that the people he encounters will find in him an officer who speaks their language and has traveled in the places from which they hail - “a small comfort.”Īnd they do. In an often raw and timely confessional, the former Fulbright fellow and Pushcart Prize winner paints a striking picture of the unsparing borderlands, even as he often finds coarse beauty in the desert terrain where he and his colleagues plied their trade.Įarly in the book, Cantú relays a conversation in which his mother, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, questions his plan to join the Border Patrol, or la migra. That agent would be the author himself, who joined the federal agency after studying the border in college and finding he yearned for an unvarnished look, “not sitting at a computer, not staring at papers.” But Cantú is soon beset by troubling dreams, misgivings about some patrol tactics and empathy for border crossers he sends back south. Border Patrol agent with a heart of gold. Cantú’s story has deep roots too in American and Mexican history: death, detention, and deportation on the border.In his new memoir, “The Line Becomes a River,” Francisco Cantú introduces an uncommon leading man: the U.S. His disillusion with the agency he joined is total, his dismay at the system of border control is sincerely felt, and his book is a valuable contribution to the literature on what has become an increasingly scalding issue in the Trump presidency. Cantú’s account is a refreshing counterpoint to the glut of narco-thrillers and action-movie fantasies about US agents taking out drug dealers in Mexico.
He is from the 'broken earth,' not Texas or South Carolina he is educated there is a heavy-hearted softness in his dealings with those he arrests and whose language he speaks. Cantú is part of this, but apart from it. 'They act the tough guy, but if you put any of ’em out on the land under the sun without their toys, they’d be dead in two days'. Reading Cantú’s account reminded me of the scathing words I heard from the tribal activist Mike Flores, with whom, one suspects, Cantú’s mother might sympathize.
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