Border Patrol memoir gritty but bleak
In his new memoir, “The Line Becomes a River,” Francisco Cantu introduces an uncommon leading man: the U.S. Border Patrol agent with a heart of gold.
That agent is the author himself, who joined the federal agency after studying the border in college and finding that he yearned for an unvarnished look — “not sitting at a computer, not staring at papers.”
But Cantu is soon beset by troubling dreams, misgivings about some patrol tactics and empathy for border crossers he sends back south. 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.
Early in the book, Cantu relays a conversation in which his mother, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, questions his plan to join the Border Patrol, or
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.”
And they do. Cantu listens to the stories of crossers before he processes them for deportation. Once, he gives one his shirt; he washes the ■ blistered feet of another.
For some who have wandered the desert for days without water, the agents aren’t just the guys who arrest and send them back; they are lifesavers.
Cantu and his colleagues try their best to disrupt the business of violent, ruthless men. But he increasingly struggles with some of the agency’s practices, from slashing water bottles when agents come across migrant stashes in the desert to letting the men ferrying seized drug shipments get away to spare themselves the paperwork. He secondguesses his motivation. He has nightmares.
Cantu’s portrait of Mexico as the backdrop for border crossings ulimately feels overly bleak — all mutilated bodies, crushing poverty and crumbling towns.
Some readers might lose patience with the author’s conflicted feelings about a job he stuck with for years. But if they are interested in life on a border that has recently occupied an outsize role in policy debates, they will learn a lot.