The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

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 enforcement agents as humane shepherds tending to a flock.” This allusion “reinforces the humanity of the Border Patrol while it dehumanizes migrants by portraying the Border Patrol as ‘saviors.’” An associated livestock metaphor, widespread in Mexico, casts migrants as chickens and smugglers as chicken ranchers—pollos at the mercy of their polleros.

Another subcategory of metaphors describes migrants as “dangerous waters threatening the nation . . . a metaphorical home.” Enforcement is represented as an effort to stanch the unwieldy flow of migration, the border as a barrier to be plugged and sealed against a rising tide. The corresponding death toll is “a ‘surge,’ and the bodies are part of a ‘flood’ of migrants that overwhelm Border Patrol agents and medical examiners.” It is here that Zavisca cites the work of Otto Santa Ana, a sociolinguist at the University of Califo...

In his book What Have We Done, veteran war reporter David Wood examines the pervasiveness of “moral injury” among soldiers who have returned from the battlefronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by “sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion” that manifest not in physical reactions but in emotional responses as subtle as dreams and doubts. “In its most simple and profound sense,” writes Wood, “moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do.” As a soldier tells him, “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”

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.

Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000, told The Arizona Republic that during the adoption of this strategy, which came to be known as “Prevention Through Deterrence,” enforcement officials and policy makers believed “that geography would be an ally to us” and that border crossings “would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.” But migrants continued to cross despite the new dangers of the journey, endangering their lives in the desert in ways they had never done before. Even as it became obvious that large numbers of people were risking the crossing, resulting in an unprecedented number of deaths in increasingly remote corners of the desert, the government did not change course. “I will be absolutely frank with you,” Meissner told an interviewer when asked to look back on the policy of deterrence in light of migrant deaths—“The idea of abandoning any kind of strengthened border enforcement because of that consequence was not a point of serious discussion.” Meissner’s damning admission—that the sustained loss of hundreds of migrant lives on America’s doorstep each year was not enough to cause the government to re-evaluate 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. Deterrence-based enforcement has steered the immigration politics of every administr...

In 1992, Jorge Durand, a social anthropologist and geographer at Mexico’s University of Guadalajara, coordinated a series of in-depth interviews with Mexican migrants who had experienced the hard journey to the United States. One of these migrants, a man named Aurelio, crossed the US border dozens of times, only to be captured and sent home by U.S. authorities on every single occasion. “El Norte es como el mar,” he told his interviewer. “The north is like the sea.” He went on to explain, “When I hear people speak of the United States, I am quickly made to think of the ocean. . . . When one travels as an illegal, he is dragged like the tail of an animal, like trash. I imagined how the sea washes trash onto the shore, and I told myself, maybe here it’s just like I’m in the ocean, being tossed out again and again.” What we must understand about Aurelio is that his sense of being regarded as trash is in direct relation to our indifference, to the privileges that have been constructed for us at the expense and exclusion of him and others like him. 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...

GET INVOLVED The organizations listed below have robust advocacy programs in the borderlands and are set up to receive tax-deductible donations. Many of them also offer volunteer opportunities. For more information about advocacy organizations, visit https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555764/the-line-becomes-a-river-by-francisco-cantu/9780735217713/readers-guide/. The Colibri Center for Human Rights (http://www.colibricenter.org) is dedicated to the idea that no human being should lose their life crossing a border and no family should experience the pain of searching for them. By partnering with families and forensic scientists, they help to identify people who have lost their lives in the desert. Border Angels (https://www.borderangels.org) is an all-volunteer non-profit that seeks to promote human rights, social justice, and humane immigration reform. Volunteer opportunities include outreach to day laborers and monitoring water stations along the California border. No More Deaths (http://forms.nomoredeaths.org/about-no-more-deaths/) is a humanitarian organization located in southern Arizona that works to end migrant death and suffering in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. They offer a variety of field-based volunteer programs in the desert of Arizona.

The Texas Civil Rights Project (https://texascivilrightsproject.org) assists families at the border to get translation services and legal advice; more broadly, the organization works to reform the criminal justice system, advance racial and economic justice, and protect voting rights. Mariposas Sin Fronteras (https://mariposassinfronteras.org) seeks to end violence and abuse against LGBTQ people held in prison and immigration detention by supporting detainees through visits, letters, bond support, advocacy, and housing upon freedom from detention. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.nnirr.org) works to defend and expand the rights of all refugees and immigrants, regardless of immigration status. The Kino Border Initiative (https://www.kinoborderinitiative.org/) works to promote immigration and border policies that affirm human dignity. The organization offers educational opportunities, immersion experiences, and volunteer programs at their aid center and soup kitchen for deported migrants.

The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (https://firrp.org) works to provide free legal and social services to detained immigrant men, women, and unaccompanied minors under threat of deportation in Arizona. The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (https://www.raicestexas.org) the largest immigration legal services provider in Texas, offering free and low-cost legal services to families, refugees, and immigrant children in Central and South Texas. The Cristo Rey Border Immersion Program (http://iglesiacristorey.wixsite.com/borderimmersion) invites participants to learn more about issues that affect those living in the borderlands. This program allows participants to participate in fellowship at the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez fence, tour rural settlements in El Paso, assist with after school programs, and more. BorderLinks (https://www.borderlinks.org/) facilitates educat...