The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

The migrants who survive the journey through Mexico’s interior and evade capture across the U.S. border are often shepherded by their smugglers to “drop houses” in the suburbs of southwestern cities and towns.

A couple of decades ago, workers commonly traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border . . . Now, organized gangs own the people-smuggling trade.”

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.

“Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”

moral injury is a wound that sets in slowly, something that occurs, as one Iraq veteran wrote, “when a person has time to reflect on a traumatic experience.”

“What Mexicans in the early twenty-first century have been forced to see,” writes poet and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, “is without a doubt one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horrorism.” In her book Dolerse—the title is the Spanish verb meaning “to be in pain”—she attempts to construct and deconstruct the pervasiveness of pain in modern Mexican society.

Jung asserts that when we come to perceive “the other” as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust.

How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?

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.

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.

José’s situation is not unique. There are thousands of people just like him, thousands of cases, thousands of families. Millions, actually—the whole idea of it is suffocating.

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.

it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.

If I must stay in Mexico and my wife raises my boys alone, they will be getting less care, less love, and so the family will slowly deteriorate.

In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.

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.

The judges in the United States, if they know the reality, they know they are sending people to their death.

One of my principal goals in The Line Becomes a River was to create space for readers to inhabit an emergent sense of horror at the suffering that takes place every day at the border.

the U.S.-Mexico border can be understood as a vast zone of exception, a place where laws and rights are applied differently than in any other part of the nation.

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

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.

the government views undocumented migrants as people “whose lives have no political or social value” and “whose deaths are of little consequence.”

To paint the Border Patrol as a rescue operation is also to gloss over a pervasive culture of callousness and destruction: while I indeed worked alongside some deeply compassionate and honorable agents, I also witnessed coworkers scatter migrant groups in remote areas and destroy their water supplies without ever being held to account. (These practices have been extensively documented by humanitarian groups and recorded in “The Disappeared Report” compiled by No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos.)

“A war on immigration,” Saunders argues, can also be understood as “a war on the global wanderings of the unverified self.”

“today no one in our world feels responsible. . . . We have become used to the suffering of others. . . . The globalization of indifference makes us all ‘unnamed,’ responsible, yet nameless and faceless.”

To push back against the abstraction of migrants’ stories, to reject the dismissal and erasure of their lives, we must begin by grieving their deaths, by speaking their names, by seeing them, hearing them, and amplifying their voices.

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

all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not; we must learn to be accountable to ourselves, our consciences, our neighbors, and the nonhuman members of our community . . . rather than be loyal to political, economic, religious, penal, educational, and other institutions that do not serve us well.”

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.

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.