Border Patrol Agent’s Memoir Is Criticized
enforcement,” he said, reflecting on the experiences of finding lost, dehydrated men and women staggering through mesquite thickets.
Mr. Cantú transitioned from patrolling in the field to intelligence gathering, agonizing over what it meant to be good at such work.
He describes in the book the dehumanizing language colleagues used to describe immigrants. He said he had felt that there was no way to effectively speak out against the racist language pervasive in the institution.
He was far from alone: More than half of Border Patrol agents now are Latinos, as the agency has emerged as a source of opportunity in impoverished stretches of the Southwest. Mr. Cantú said that when he joined at age 23, he expected to do the job for a few years before going into diplomacy or law school, hoping to specialize in immigration issues.
Javier Zamora, 28, a poet who emigrated without authorization from El Salvador to the United States at the age of 9, said he understood why some people criticize Mr. Cantú, especially those who say that the perspective of Mr. Cantú, a United States citizen, stands in contrast to those at risk of deportation.
Still, Mr. Zamora, who now lives in California and is at risk of being forced to leave the United States, said he appreciated much of Mr. Cantú’s book, especially passages where he writes about the mental toll of his work, describing nightmares. “It shows how the border is anything but black and white, but just very, very gray.”
Still, other writers, including some who spent much of their lives in fear of immigration agents, are less charitable in their assessments of Mr. Cantú and his book.
“Cantú is a white-passing man who has never been undocumented,” said Sonia Guiñansaca, 29, a poet brought to New York at age 5 from Ecuador. She spent more than two decades living illegally in the United States before obtaining documents allowing her to remain in the country. “It saddens me that he’s benefiting from our stories when I have a phone book full of phenomenal migrant writers and artists who never get the same chance,” she said, nevertheless adding that excerpts from the book she had read were “beautifully written.”
An overriding influence for Mr. Cantú was his mother, a former park ranger in the Guadalupe Mountains
The immigration issue ‘is anything but black and white.’
near El Paso, Texas. She tried to dissuade him from joining the Border Patrol, and questioned him about the cruelty of agents who allow migrants to die in the desert. “She was concerned for the health of my soul,” he said.
Mr. Valles said it would be easy to forgive the writer for youthful naïveté or not listening to his mother. “People are going to read his book; maybe they’re going to cry in the process,” he continued. “And by reading it, they’ll feel like they’ve helped someone, but they get to close the book and move on. We can’t close the book on the nightmare that the border has become.”
With that point, Mr. Cantú would not disagree. He said that his belief that he could be a force for good within the agency was naïve. Writing, he decided, allowed him to convey “the simultaneous beauty and joy and horror of living here and loving this place.”