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
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