The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú (review)

By now it's unlikely that WAL readers haven't already come across a copy or review of The Line Becomes a River, or of an interview with Francisco Cantú, the book's young author. Since its release the book—part memoir, part investigation—has been featured by NPR, Salon, The Guardian, The Economist, the New York Times, and dozens of other major newspapers and magazines across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Although Cantú has published previously in Ploughshares, Harper's, Guernica, Zócalo, and Orion, clearly his debut book is directed toward a wider general readership. While primarily a chronicle of and reflection on Cantú's three years working as a US Border Patrol officer on the Arizona–Sonora border, The Line Becomes a River weaves in additional autobiography, family and regional history, and other wide-ranging multidisciplinary research on the ways in which the US's increasingly hardening southern border cuts across and through the lives of individuals and families, communities and landscapes. Beginning with Cantú's academic training, the book proceeds to recount his work as a field agent, then as an analyst in a Tucson intel center, mining databases to study traffickers' "smuggling techniques and crossing patterns" (93), concluding with his return to civilian life.

From the start Cantú asserts that his intention in signing on with the Border Patrol is to gain a more direct, firsthand understanding of the borderlands. Indeed, his move to embed occupationally is not unlike earlier writers such as Richard Henry Dana Jr. enlisting as a sailor to experience and better represent life and work at sea, or John Muir herding sheep in order to appreciate the Sierra more intimately, with the various messy and often serious contradictions and ambiguities that attend such approaches. But the book's central driving tension is broached early on and revisited throughout, primarily in conversations between Cantú and his mother, herself a retired national park ranger, worried about more than just her son's physical safety. Appealing to their common concerns, he asks about her own decision to join the Parks Service, "because you felt you could understand yourself in wild places?" He continues, "I know there's something there I can't look away from. Maybe it's the desert, maybe it's the closeness of life and death, maybe it's the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I'll never understand it unless I'm close to it" (23). She responds unequivocally, reminding him that in joining a "paramilitary police force" he is "stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people" (24–25).

Early on Cantú briefly historicizes the border's current militarization, drawing from nineteenth-century survey reports to illustrate how "the line" was first produced. Beginning with political calculations, paper treaties, and territory purchases, the border becomes a line surveyed across the surface of the land and along the course of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, where it "would again become fluid 'following the deepest channel' of the river" (42). He goes on to show how this reified boundary first took shape as seven stone monuments, then forty-seven (many of which were already being displaced or removed by the elements and local interests by the mid-1850s), and was eventually replaced by 215 iron obelisks, placed every two or three miles (49). Such passages, along with Cantú's own stories, demonstrate how arbitrary and untenable the project of maintaining and reinforcing such a boundary becomes, even from its inception.

Beyond the narrative and the historical, Cantú's concerns here are also consciously representational. He frequently pauses his own account to consider how dominant narratives about the border have long tended toward fetishizing and commodifying violence (131–36), objectifying and dehumanizing migrants, and naturalizing their risks and their deaths (109–10, 187–88). Several episodes also depict some of the ways US border policy has effectively...