The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

but stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you.

What do Americans eat? he asked. I laughed. Here we eat mostly Mexican food.

You know, my mother said, it’s not just your safety I worry about. I know how a person can become lost in a job, how the soul can buckle when placed within a structure.

You see, the government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose.

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.”

In such places, where the threat of death is incessant, there is little space for grieving.

“Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”

The “social languages” of pain are, in fact, “political languages” as well, “languages in which bodies decipher their power relationships with other bodies.” Thus, at a political and social level, she argues, “the language of pain becomes a producer of meanings and legitimacy.”

The first generation struggles to leave, to come into a new country, to gain acceptance in a new culture. Often they arrive and find themselves ostracized, they settle in pockets, they do everything they can just to get a toehold. Whether or not they learn English themselves, they know that their children must speak it. Sometimes they go so far as to discourage their children from speaking their own language—they want them to get into good schools, to identify with their new culture, to be accepted by it in all the ways they were not.

This second generation, he continued, might find themselves at great distance from the culture of their parents.

As the second generation forms their own identity, he went on, it is more often built within the new culture rather than the old. By the time they have their own children, it usually turns out that this third generation is almost totally accepted.

However, he added, when they arrive at adulthood, they often begin to look around for something that makes them unique. And it’s then that they begin to search for an inheritance, to look back for the traditions that make them special, and often they realize it isn’t there. They realize something has been lost along the way.

Almost no one wins asylum from Mexico, only about one percent of Mexican cases are actually granted asylum.

What I’m saying is that we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without choosing it, it becomes normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are.

You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison.

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.

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.

Writing was also a way of charting my own involvement with an institution largely indifferent to human life, an opportunity to finally grapple with all the ways I had normalized the layered violence that is inseparable from border enforcement.

Living near the border means becoming conditioned to a degree of militarization and surveillance that would cause great alarm in any other part of the country.

In his book Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes suggests that the violent historical trajectory of colonial and post-colonial America should be understood as stemming from a kind of sickness—what he calls “the wétiko disease.” In the language of the Cree people, wétikos are individuals or spirits who terrorize others through evil acts.

Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.

To paint the Border Patrol as a rescue operation is also to gloss over a pervasive culture of callousness and destruction: while I indeed worked alongside some deeply compassionate and honorable agents, I also witnessed coworkers scatter migrant groups in remote areas and destroy their water supplies without ever being held to account.