The Line Becomes a River Quotes

“You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, 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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“As I swam toward a bend in the canyon, the river became increasingly shallow. In a patch of sunlight, two longnose gars, relics of the Paleozoic era, hovered in the silted waters. I stood to walk along the adjacent shorelines, crossing the river time and again as each bank came to an end, until finally, for one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape trembled and breathed as one.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“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. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“Jung went so far as to assert that it had become “a political and social duty” to perceive “the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. I sat back in my seat and stared up at the ceiling, listening to my mother’s voice. You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, 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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“José is unique. Sure there might be thousands or millions of people in his position, but it’s because of him that their situation is no longer abstract to you. You are no longer severed from what it means to send someone back across the border. You know what’s keeping him away, what keeps him from his family. It’s something close to you, something that’s become a part of you.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“I realized, too, that despite my small role within the system, despite hours of training and studying at the academy, I had little inkling of what happened to those I arrested after I turned over their paperwork and went home from my shift.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“In Jung’s view, “the mass State”—his term for government and its structures—has “no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.” 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. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“Pain, of course, is intimately linked with fear. “Fear isolates,” writes Rivera Garza. “Fear teaches us to distrust. Fear makes us crazy.” If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“I came with the others for the bodies of our people. Antígona González asks: “What thing is the body when someone strips it of a name, a history, a family name? . . . When there is no face or trail or traces or signs . . . What thing is the body when it’s lost?”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“In Antígona González, Sara Uribe writes: Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“A name is everything.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“The number of border deaths, just like the number of drug war homicides....does little to account for all the ways that violence rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“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.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I'm in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I'm the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home.

Fine, my mother said, fine. But you must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.

I looked away from her and a silence hung between us. I glanced down at my hands and weighed my mother’s words. Maybe you’re right, I replied, but stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you. As I spoke, doubts flickered through my mind.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“My mother shook her head. You make it sound like you'll be communing with nature and having heartfelt conversations all day. The Border Patrol isn't the Park Service. It’s a paramilitary police force.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“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—”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept?” He went on to ask, “Who is responsible for this blood?”—observing that “today no one in our world feels responsible. . . . We have become used to the suffering of others.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“In her critique of America’s quest for retribution in the Middle East following the attacks of 9/11, the philosopher Judith Butler describes the process of derealization and its discursive power to create “humans not recognized as humans.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“The wétiko disease is, above all, an affliction of the psyche and spirit that causes us to become “passive foot-soldiers trained to surrender [our] minds and hearts.” On a societal level, it manifests both in the relentless move toward militarization and in our blind acceptance of this path as inevitable and necessary.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“Forbes posits that Columbus, the conquistadors, and the waves of colonizers who followed them were all wétikos, carriers of a cannibalistic psychosis he defines as “the disease of aggression against other living things . . . the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border