The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

you felt you could understand yourself in wild places?

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things, the sense in what we do

The modern-day boundary between the United States and Mexico was defined largely by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, signed after nearly two years of warfare between neighboring republics. The newly agreed-upon borderline was to begin “on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego,” and run east “following the division line between Upper and Lower California” until it reached the Colorado River at the town of Yuma. The treaty dictated that the line would then follow the course of the Gila River from its intersection with the Colorado until it reached the border of New Mexico, at which point the boundary would leave the waters of the Gila in a straight line until it intersected the Rio Grande north of El Paso, where the line would again become fluid “following the deepest channel” of the river until it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, to be forgotten in the waters of the ocean at a point “three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande.” Article V of the treaty mandated that “in order to designate the boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both Republics . . . the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and a surveyor, who . . . shall meet at the port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte.” It a...

Grande, asserting, for the very first time, the entirety of a boundary that had hitherto existed only on paper and in the furious minds of politicians.

The commission’s final report revealed that the terrestrial portion of the line, “although having a total length of about 700 miles, crosses but five permanent running streams between the Rio Grande and the Pacific.” The report took special care in describing the point where the boundary line gave itself over to the Rio Grande, “a variable stream with turbid waters.” The river carried “an immense amount of sediment,” it noted, “and as a consequence it is bordered by alluvial bottoms, through which by erosion, it is continually changing its bed.” It was as if the surveyors wished to acknowledge how the border, no matter how painstakingly fixed upon the land, could go on to endlessly change its course with the whims of a river.

In Mexico, there is an axiom that the country is bound to suffer through hundred-year cycles of uprising. The war for independence from Spain ignited in 1810, exactly one hundred years before the inception of the bloody revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Death-toll estimates for the War of Independence range from 400,000 to 600,000. The revolution claimed anywhere from 500,000 to two million. Today, one hundred years later, historians, journalists, and policy makers struggle to approximate a tally for the country’s ongoing drug war, a conflict that began ahead of schedule, when president Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, just two weeks after taking office in the most closely contested election in Mexican history.

a research librarian and professor at New Mexico State University who studies violence in the borderlands, argue that “when President Calderón or other government spokesmen say that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, it is also the case that fewer than 5 percent of the crimes have been investigated. And by reading the daily accounts of murders . . . one sees that the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people and that most of them are poor: children, teenagers, old people, small-business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling newspapers . . . and dozens of people who have been slaughtered inside drug rehabilitation clinics.”

These numbers also fail to take into account all those who have died or gone missing crossing the border into the United States, people often fleeing the violence-ridden towns and cities of their birth. In 2017, Manny Fernandez reported in The New York Times that the Border Patrol had recorded over six thousand deaths in the sixteen years between 2000 and 2016. In Arizona’s Pima County alone, the remains of more than two thousand migrants were found. The sheriff of another rural county in Texas told Fernandez that “for every one we find, we’re probably missing five.”

It is difficult, of course, to conceive of such numbers in any tangible and appropriate way. The number of border deaths, just like the number of drug war homicides, or the numbers that measure the death toll of the Mexican Revolution or the War of Independence, does little to account for all the ways that violence rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants.

In an exhaustive study of news coverage in multiple borderland newspapers, Jane Zavisca, a cultural sociologist at the University of Arizona, surveyed ten years’ worth of reporting to determine the most common metaphors used by journalists writing about migrant deaths. Economic metaphors were predominant, characterizing migrant deaths as a “cost,” “calculation,” or “gamble.” Death is a price that is paid, a toll collected by the desert. Death is the foreseeable outcome of “cost-benefit analysis, with measurable, calculable risks and consequences.” Death is the ultimate risk in a game of chance, the unlucky result of a roll of the dice. Metaphors like these, Zavisca writes, “naturalize death” and “suggest that migrants bear some responsibility for their own deaths.” Violent metaphors were the second-largest category, depicting death as the vengeful punishment of an angry desert or the casualty of a war waged along the border. In such discourse, deaths were blamed on unforgiving weather, on lethal immigration policy, on a lack of enforcement against an invading army of migrants. Dehumanizing metaphors constituted Zavisca’s third category. Here, migrants were depicted as animals, something hunted, the persecuted prey of smugglers, law enforcement agents, and militant vigilantes. “Lured” to the border by the prospect of well-paying jobs, migrants engage Border Patrol “trackers” in a “cat-and-mouse game” with deadly consequences. “A related metaphor,” writes Zavisca, “depicts e...

In Antígona González, Sara Uribe writes: Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.

life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.” Snyder explains that “to join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history.” Snyder ends his book with a plea to academics and fellow historians, to all those who grapple with death on a grand scale. “It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”

an old and quiet pain spreading across his face the likes of which I hoped I would never be made to carry.

After all, “the person who imagines always might imagine that this, whatever this might be, can be different . . . The person who imagines knows, and knows from within, that nothing is natural. Nothing inevitable.”

Today,” Carl Jung wrote near the end of his life, “we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction.” Jung was addressing what had become, after the conclusion of World War II, the defining conflict of the times. As he saw it, the cold war reflected the state of modern humanity’s psyche, with the Iron Curtain as its prevailing symbol. “This boundary line bristling with barbed wire,” he wrote, “runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives.” Even “the normal individual . . . sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide.” Jung went so far as to assert that it had become “a political and social duty” to perceive “the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.”

Jung asserts that when we come to perceive “the other” as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.”

The effort to push away our individual and societal shadows is undertaken in the hope that we might “quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness” and reclaim a sense of normalcy, however vague and distorted. But in reality, Jung warns, “nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the obscure misgivings are there before our eyes, if only we would see.” Jung urges us, instead, to recognize the selfsame nature of the other, to declare, “I am guilty with the rest,” to understand that “none of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow,” and ultimately to accept evil as something “lodged in human nature itself . . . as the equal and opposite partner of good.”

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In his work as a psychologist, Jung argued against the division of the psyche, the dissociation between good and evil, the bifurcation between the conscious and unconscious selves. The goal of psychoanalytic therapy, as he saw it, was not to bring life into some sort of harmony, but to engage in a process he called “individuation,” the opening up of a dialogue between our waking consciousness and the often repressed preoccupations of our unconscious mind. He saw individuation as a path toward discerning wholeness in seemingly irreconcilable opposites, a way of holding darkness within the psyche, a way of learning to live with the chaos and disorder of our lives.

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preoccupations. “The dream describes the inner situation of the dreamer,” he wrote, “but the conscious mind denies its truth and reality, or admits it only grudgingly.”

Watching the defendants shuffle to the front of the room to stand before the bench, I realized that I had never before seen so many men and women in shackles, that I had never laid eyes on a group of people so diminished. I had apprehended and processed countless men and women for deportation, many of whom I sent without thinking to pass through this very room—but there was something dreadfully altered in their presence here between towering and cavernous walls, lorded over by foreign men in colored suits and black robes, men with little notion of the dark desert nights or the hard glare of the sun, with little sense for the sweeping expanses of stone and shale, the foot-packed earthen trails, the bodies laid bare before the elements, the bones trembling from heat, from cold, from want of water. It dawned on me that in my countless encounters with migrants at the hard end of their road through the desert, there was always the closeness of the failed journey, the fading but still-hot spark from the last flame of the crossing. But here, in the stale and swirling air of the courthouse, it was clear that something vital had gone missing in the days since apprehension, some final essence of the spirit had been stamped out or lost in the slow crush of confinement.

You know, he said, it’s difficult to see a man’s life torn apart. A lot of people in the immigration system lose sight of people’s humanity. I see it every day here. He gestured at the air all around him. The Border Patrol agents, the marshals I see here day in and day out, they objectify these people all the time. I clenched my jaw, not wanting to reveal myself.

Under existing law, José doesn’t really have a path to legal status until his oldest son turns eighteen and can sponsor his mother and father for citizenship.

Some politicians in the United States think that if a mother or father is deported, this will cause the entire family to move back to Mexico. But in fact, the mothers and fathers with the best family values will want their family to stay in the U.S., they will cross the border again and again to be with them. So you see, these same people, the ones with the most dedication to their family, they begin to build up a record of deportation, they have more and more problems with the government, and it becomes harder and harder for them to ever become legal. In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.

To be honest, I am still grateful to the United States. If I am arrested crossing the border, I understand it’s part of the system. I realize that I am crossing illegally. But it’s complicated, you see. I know I’m breaking the rules, but it is necessary because my family is there. I don’t want to cause harm to the country, but I have to break the law. I have to. Es una necesidad. It is a situation of emotion, of love. Those who accept staying apart from their family are without love. Their children grow up without love. So I must fight against this. I know there are laws, I know that they need to be enforced, but at the same moment these laws are wounding me, wounding something inside me. My children want me there, my wife wants me there, all of them are pleading for me to stay, but the government is separating us. If I search my feelings, I don’t feel hate but sadness. The day you saw me in court, the day I saw my family there, it was as if the government was destroying my family, tearing it apart right in front of me. I could feel the power they held over us.

Now I sit in this room and I look out the window at those hills. Those hills that you see right there, that’s the United States. I used to be able to just run up and over those hills. But now there is a barrier. I hate it, I hate it. It’s something barbaric.

So you see, each time I cross I risk my life. When you step into the Mexican consulate, you see pictures of the missing. All of us who cross are exposed to this possibility. We know there are dangers in the desert and in the mountains. La mafia, la migra. There’s mountain lions, snakes. There’s cliffs and deep canyons. There’s no water. There are many dangers, but for me it doesn’t matter. I have to cross, I have to arrive to the other side. I even dream that I am there. I dream that I’m there with my family, that it’s morning and I have to go to work. Then I wake up and I’m here. The judges in the United States, if they know the reality, they know they are sending people to their death. They are sending people to commit suicide. I will do anything to be on the other side. To be honest, I would rather be in prison in the U.S. and see my boys once a week through the glass than to stay here and be separated from my family. At least I would be closer to them. So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing. My boys are not dogs to be abandoned in the street. I will walk through the desert for five days, eight days, ten days, whatever it takes to be with them. I’ll eat grass, I’ll eat bushes, I’ll eat cactus, I’ll drink filthy cattle water, I’ll drink nothing at all. I’ll run and hide from la migra, I’ll pay the mafias whatever I have to. They can take my money, they can rob my family, they can lock me away, but I will keep coming back. I will keep crossing, again ...

During the years I was at work on The Line Becomes a River, I always imagined it would come to exist as a document of an uglier time, a past recognizably worse than the present. This thought was rooted in the seductive idea that ours is a society moving always in the direction of justice, one that gradually lurches forward toward greater civil and human rights. This I now recognize as wishful thinking, rooted in the same naivety that underlay my decision to join the Border Patrol more than a decade ago. This is the naivety that so often grips people who are young and idealistic, causing us to overestimate ourselves and underestimate institutions of power, allowing us to believe that we might work to change them from within, that by witnessing the violence they perpetrate, we might learn to subvert it without participating in it ourselves.

Today, instead of looking back on an uglier time, we see a border that has become ever more militarized, ever more deadly for migrants, ever more dismissive of their lives and indifferent to their suffering. The U.S.-Mexico border, I have learned, is a place that perpetually shatters naivety, a place where idealism withers in the face of a violent status quo that is constantly being normalized, minimized, or ignored.

This current state of crisis did not descend from nowhere. For as long as many of us can remember, the border has been depicted as a place out of control, overrun by criminality. In the narrative that has dominated the national consciousness, violence and disorder are endemic to the region and those who are drawn to it. When words like border or migrant are uttered, they carry this narrative with them, along with a sense of obscure menace to people and places far from the country’s frontier: loss of jobs, encroaching violence, the erosion of a familiar dominant culture. What we have long been made to look away from, however, are the places most affected by a militarized border, and the migrants who are most impacted by the narrative that has so long excluded their experience.

Because we are rightly habituated to believe in the innocence of children, because the “othering” of a child requires a special degree of callousness, these images and stories proved difficult to shake off—they caused us to feel, for one reverberating moment, a sense of horror at beholding our nation, our institutions, and perhaps even ourselves. But the separation of families does not represent one isolated, horrifying event in our history; it is merely a chilling extension of the dehumanizing policies that came before it.

to inhabit an emergent sense of horror at the suffering that takes place every day at the border.

To inhabit such a place is to inhabit a state of in-between-ness, a space where the ground is aggressively claimed, but the people who belong to it, and those seeking to cross it, are rejected. This is a place that Chicana scholar and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa describes as “an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries,” a place she refers to using the Nahuatl word for middle space, nepantla. “Living in this liminal zone,” she writes, “means being in a constant state of displacement.”

It is important to remember, however, that the borderlands were not always liminal, that this state of displacement was imposed by a political boundary that resulted from war. The modern-day torments that grip this place must be understood as part of this history, rooted in conquest and the thirst for empire.

“The significance of de- sanctifying the earth, the animals, the plants, the trees, and even human beings is that the world is made a potentially ugly and very exploitable place.” This describes, in part, the mentality that has allowed the two-thousand-mile-long border region to be transformed into a vast “buffer zone,” a geography that has itself been converted into a tool of enforcement that is considered so disposable as to merit being riven by an immense wall—seven hundred miles of which already exists.

In Agamben’s framework, the U.S.-Mexico border can be understood as a vast zone of exception, a place where laws and rights are applied differently than in any other part of the nation. Since 9/11, presidents of both parties have deployed National Guard troops there in response to ill-defined crises. When troops were deployed to the border by President Trump, for example, in April 2018, crossings were at historic lows, and the U.S. border was, by almost any measure, more secure than at any point in recent decades—though we might ask, secure for whom?

The borderlands have slowly become a place where citizens are subject to distinct standards for search and detention, and where due process for noncitizens is often unrecognizable as anything that might exist within the American legal system. It is a place where migrants are regularly sentenced through mass hearings in which the fates of as many as seventy-five individuals can be adjudicated one after another in a matter of minutes, after which they are funneled into a burgeoning immigration incarceration complex. It is a landscape often written off as a “wasteland” that is inherently “hostile”—without recognition that it has, in fact, been made to be hostile. Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.

reveals the extent to which the desert has been weaponized against migrants, and lays bare the fact that the hundreds who continue to die there every year are losing their lives by design.

Jason De León, in his book The Land of Open Graves, argues that the government views undocumented migrants as people “whose lives have no political or social value” and “whose deaths are of little consequence.”

In this sense, the true crisis at the border is not one of surging crossings or growing criminality, but of our own increasing disregard for human life. To describe what we are seeing as a “crisis,” however, is to imply that our current moment is somehow more horrifying than those that set the stage for it—moments that, had we allowed ourselves to see them and be horrified by them, might have prevented our arrival here in the first place.

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“in order to change the order of things, it’s crucial to cease behaviors that ally us with the cult of violence.” She continues, “It is crucial to speak of the body, of the violence enacted upon it and suffered within it. . . . We have to be able to construct meaning around the death of any person. To make sure that the death and the pain of an Other cause a shudder in all of our bodies.”

At the same time, we must recognize that to feel empathy for him and others like him is not enough. “Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” The same can be said of empathy—we can imagine Aurelio’s pain, we can feel something that perhaps approaches it, and we can even, as Pope Francis suggests, grieve for him, weep for him—but in the end our feelings and our tears are useless unless they compel us to act in a way that might someday improve his situation. The hard truth is that the policies and structures that have taken Aurelio’s body and rejected it, time and again, will remain in place until we push firmly against them, demanding they be abandoned or remade.

that “the responsibility for holding destructive institutions—more broadly systems, and more broadly yet cultures—accountable falls on each of us . . . This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not; we must learn to be accountable to ourselves, our consciences, our neighbors, and the nonhuman members of our community . . . rather than be loyal to political, economic, religious, penal, educational, and other institutions that do not serve us well.” With regard to our borders and the crises of migrant death and disappearance across the globe, we must thus declare loyalty to human life over shifting and mutable laws and policies, and we must remain attuned to these loyalties so as not to return to indifference.

what I have learned from giving myself over to a structure of power, from living within its grim vision and helping to cannibalize the people and places from which I came, is that small impulses and interactions have the power to lead us back toward humanity, and heeding them can be a means of extricating ourselves from systems of thought and policy that perpetuate detachment. We can do this in spite of all the mechanisms that have been devised to keep us wedded to individual and nationalistic self-interest. As obvious as it might seem, to truly and completely reject a culture of violence, to banish it from our hearts and souls, we must first fully refuse to participate in it, and refuse to partake in its normalization. When we consider the border, we might think of our home; when we consider those who cross it, we might think of those we hold dear.