the line becomes a river francisco cantu

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. In his new memoir, “The Line Becomes a River,” Francisco Cantú introduces an uncommon leading man: the U.S.

The line becomes a river francisco cantu