The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

Well, I told him, we’ll be out in it, fetching dead bodies from the desert. Hart looked puzzled. Who the fuck walks through the desert when it’s 115?

Your body is a tool, he announced, the most important one you have. A baton is nothing, a Taser is nothing, even your gun is nothing if you give up on your body when it becomes tired, if you can’t hold it together when every muscle cries out for you to quit. In the Border Patrol, Robles continued, you will be tested—I can promise you that.

I lowered my voice. I’m grateful for those things, I told her, but having a name isn’t the same as understanding a place.

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.

These people aren’t joining the Border Patrol to oppress others. They’re joining because it represents an opportunity for service, stability, financial security—

Then you must have seen what it’s like to live in Mexico, he said. And now you see what it’s like for us at the border.

“indeed much of this country, that by those residing at a distance is imagined to be a perfect paradise, is a sterile waste, utterly worthless for any purpose other than to constitute a barrier or natural line of demarcation between two neighboring nations.”

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.

Death is a price that is paid, a toll collected by the desert.

I felt the city’s pull even as I knew, with sinking certainty, that I would not go, that something I had chosen now kept me from crossing over.

It was no longer the city where women died, it was the city where everyone died.