The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

Agents arrested more than 700,000 aliens on the border last year, he told us. If you think that’s bad, when I first got to the field eight years ago, back in 2000, that number was over one and a half million. And I’m here to tell you that not everybody coming across that line is a good person looking for honest work. Our instructor beamed images of drug war victims onto a screen, grisly photos of people killed by the cartels in Mexico. In one image, three heads floated in a massive ice chest. In another, a woman’s body lay discarded in the desert, her feet bound, a severed hand stuffed into her mouth. The instructor paused on an image of a cattle truck with twelve dead bodies stacked in the back, all of them blindfolded and shot execution-style. These twelve weren’t gangsters, he told us, they were migrants kidnapped and killed for some meager and meaningless ransom. The next image showed a group of Mexican policemen shot dead in the street, and then an image of a bloodied body slumped in a car seat—a newly elected mayor who had promised to clean up the drug violence in his town, shot dead on his first day in office. This is what you’re up against, our instructor told us, this is what’s coming.

I don’t know if the border is a place for me to understand myself, but I know there’s something here I can’t look away from. Maybe it’s the desert, maybe it’s the closeness of life and death, maybe it’s the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I’ll never understand it unless I’m close to it.

At the station I processed the man for deportation. After I had taken his fingerprints he asked me if there was any work for him at the station. You don’t understand, I said, you’ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. They’ll take you to headquarters and then on to the border. You’ll be back in Mexico very soon. I understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

Puede ser muy fea la frontera, I told him. The man shook his head. Pues sí, he replied, pero es aún más feo donde nosotros vivimos.

Where did you learn English? I asked. Iowa, she told me quietly. I grew up there, she said, I even got my GED.

I dream in the night that I am grinding my teeth out, spitting the crumbled pieces into my palms and holding them in my cupped hands, searching for someone to show them to, someone who can see what is happening.

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 asked me once how it felt looking back on my career. Well, the Park Service is an institution, an admirable one, but an institution nonetheless. If I’m honest, I can see now that I spent my career slowly losing a sense of purpose even though I was close to the outdoors, close to places I loved. You see, the government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose. I don’t want that for you.

The difference is that in normal times, the dead were ‘disappeared’ or dumped in the desert. Now they are executed and displayed for all to see, so that it becomes a war against the people.”

He goes on to explain how, almost as a rule, he and all the cartel men he knew and worked with were always high and drunk when carrying out their work. After killing or torturing a target, the sicario says, “I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself.”

In 1993, after fifteen years of investigation, researchers identified a deficiency in a gene that produces an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, a key regulator of impulse control. Individuals with low levels of MAOA, it seemed, were predisposed to violence, and researchers came to refer to them as carriers of a “warrior gene.” Since the occurrence of this deficiency is tied to a defect in the X chromosome, men—possessing only one X chromosome, while women possess two—are more prone to the defect, although women may carry it and pass it on to their sons. Subsequent studies revealed that about one-third of the world’s male population carry the warrior gene, the expression of which can be triggered by childhood exposure to trauma.

If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.

There was this big deer-hunting contest, he began, with hunters from the U.S., Russia, and Mexico. On the first day, the Americans came triumphantly before the judges, but the carcass they presented was so destroyed by their high-powered weaponry that it was unrecognizable as a deer, so they were disqualified. On the second day, the Russians brought in the body of a large buck, but when the judges discovered the animal had been poisoned instead of properly hunted, they too were disqualified. A third and a fourth day passed and still there was no sign of the Mexicans. On the fifth day, the judges finally decided to go looking for them. After several hours of searching, they found them in a clearing in the woods, huddled around a rabbit. One of them was torturing the animal without mercy, while another stood over it, shouting: Confess you’re a deer, motherfucker!

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.

My mother soon confided in the man, and he became the first person she ever told about her lifelong shame of being Mexican. The man smiled at her. That’s how it works, he told her. 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. The man looked knowingly at my mother as he explained. This second generation, he continued, might find themselves at great distance from the culture of their parents. Perhaps somewhere along the way they are told to put the old culture behind them, and so they find it within themselves to reject it. 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. They have it easy—the culture of their grandparents’ adopted country defines them wholly. However, he added, when they arrive at adulthood, they often begin to look around for something that makes them unique. And it’s then t...

Immigration decisions don’t happen in a courtroom, so we won’t be arguing our case before a judge. We submit the documents and the decision is made behind closed doors.

For the next two hours, Lupe and I stood at the conference table sorting through piles of papers, some of them faded and yellowing: documents providing evidence of José’s entry into the United States at age eleven and the work he had been engaged in every year thereafter, earning minimum wage as a dishwasher, a busboy, a custodian, an auto repairman, a maintenance man, a farmworker, a fruit picker, an agricultural equipment operator, a carpet mill factory worker, a truck driver, a construction hand; documents providing certification of his marriage, certification of the birth of each of his three sons, certification of his mother’s death; documents providing evidence of the growing lives of his children, children who visited the school nurse and the local health clinic, children who received brain scans, behavioral health reports, cognitive speech and language therapy, children who received report cards and teacher’s notes, children who were being shaped by the twin identities of immigrant and citizen.

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.

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 and again, until I make it, until I am together again with my family. No, no me quedo aquí. Voy a seguir intentando pasar.