The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

“It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”

a bulging dossier on a life lived at the workaday margins of a country now set in motion against him.

children who were being shaped by the twin identities of immigrant and citizen.

They all began with some variation of “To Whom It May Concern.” They referred to José as a brother in Christ, a family man, a good father, a responsible husband, a reliable person, always working hard, always giving his best, always offering to help with a smile on his face, always laughing.

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.

Mexico could be a great country, a rich country, a country of opportunity. There are leaders in this country, but they are not given an education, they are not valued, they are ending up in the mafia. So you see, this sets up a cycle: How can a government care for its people if it is run by the mafia?

A government has to care for its citizens. People in government must strive to protect their fellow man.

I try to teach my boys that they must not be consumed by battle, they must not give in to vice, they must work hard to become someone in life.

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.

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.

And that’s why I’m here, because I had too much love for my mother.

I don’t want to carry drugs across the desert, I don’t want to get myself into more problems, but sometimes it’s not a choice. The same people who control the drug smuggling control the human trafficking, so in some places if you want to get across, you have to carry a load. I’ve even heard that sometimes they will kill you if you refuse. A man in jail told me that there are mass graves in the desert where many people are buried for this very reason.

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’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.

When troops were deployed to the border by President Trump, for example, in April 2018, crossings were at historic lows, and the U.S. border was, by almost any measure, more secure than at any point in recent decades—though we might ask, secure for whom?

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

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.

For the majority of Americans, most of what happens on the border continues to remain out of sight and out of mind. But politicized immigration rhetoric now reaches into every corner of the nation, casting migrants as “animals,” “gang members,” and “rapists” while linking border security to vague notions of warfare and defense against invasion.

This logic, rooted in the dehumanizing rhetoric of war, has transformed the border into a permanent zone of exception where some of the most vulnerable people on earth face death and disappearance on a daily basis, where children have been torn from their parents to send the message You are not safe here, you are not welcome. In this sense, the true crisis at the border is not one of surging crossings or growing criminality, but of our own increasing disregard for human life.

We have to be able to construct meaning around the death of any person.

To make sure that the death and the pain of an Other cause a shudder in all of our bodies.”

“Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

With regard to our borders and the crises of migrant death and disappearance across the globe, we must thus declare loyalty to human life over shifting and mutable laws and policies, and we must remain attuned to these loyalties so as not to return to indifference.

As obvious as it might seem, to truly and completely reject a culture of violence, to banish it from our hearts and souls, we must first fully refuse to participate in it, and refuse to partake in its normalization. When we consider the border, we might think of our home; when we consider those who cross it, we might think of those we hold dear.