The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

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...