Book Review: Francisco Cantú's "The Line Becomes A River"

With the heartbreaking situation of separated family detentions continuing at the U.S.-Mexico border (with a gradual re-unification of families taking place), it can be easy for all sides to dig in their trenches. In doing so, we are in danger of dehumanizing everyone around us, and we need reminders of that essential humanity and because of this humanity, issues are not black and white but complex rainbows of gray. No matter if you're an immigrant, U.S. citizen, conservative, liberal, etc. For me, that reminder of our common humanity came when I read former Border Patrol Agent Francisco Cantú's 2018 work The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border, a three-part treatise not afraid to blur the line between the personal and the systemic affairs of politics and governments in the crafting and enforcement of immigration policy.

Cantú served as an agent of the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, patrolling the remote, arid borderlands from Arizona to New Mexico and Texas. In his brief stint with the Patrol, Cantú learned and honed tracking skills more commonly utilized in hunting to track migrants, who were abandoned by their smugglers and lost amongst the violence engendered by the cartel system amid a harsh desert landscape. He helps to deliver those who have survived the crossing (albeit with many scars, visible and invisible) to the authorities for processing and often deportation under a fraught legal regime, but just as often attends to the grim work of recovering the bodies of those who did not. The physical, emotional and spiritual stress of the Border Patrol experience manifests in constant nightmares of wolves and teeth falling out for Cantú, who eventually can't take the strain and leaves the law enforcement agency in 2012.

While The Line Becomes a River is not a purely journalistic affair in its heavy use of emotional appeals, Cantú intersperses tales of his upbringing, time in the Border Patrol and his later civilian life befriending an immigrant (José) at his coffee shop job with historical anecdotes and studies from various experts to give the reader an introduction into the complex history of the U.S.-Mexico border. The latter border was settled on paper by 1853 after negotiations over the terms of the 1848 Mexican-American War peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding "nearly thirty thousand square miles of territory" to the United States by following a "rigid and pivoting line" that would "dip south from Yuma and run east to the Rio Grande" (Cantú, 2018, p. 43). Throughout the book, Cantú decries the cold and arbitrary nature of the border, a tense mediator between two violent systems: that of crime syndicates who pillage, destroy and corrupt the Mexican republic and its people, and that of the rigid, sometimes cruel nature of the U.S. immigration system that separates families and makes it nearly impossible for migrants to attain legal status.

Moreover, the physical border serves as a spiritual dividing line for Cantú in The Line Becomes a River as he struggles to reckon with his complicity in a broken immigration system in light of his simultaneous Mexican heritage and status as a U.S. citizen and his search for redemption in the final part of the book when he comes to the aid of his immigrant friend who's separated from his U.S.-habiting family. While exploring the various perspectives of the immigration tragedy, giving humanity to fellow Border Patrol agents (he argues to his mother that the agency isn't "full of white racists out to kill and deport Mexicans" but rather is a diverse organization filled with those seeking job security) and migrants alike (lamenting the dangers of the border crossing and their desperate quests for better lives and reunion with families across the border), Cantú gives vivid life to the violent history (and present) of the border catalogued in the statistical reports and academic studies of experts and historians he interjects throughout the narrative.

In doing so, Cantú reveals the beauty of the borderlands underneath the ugly, violent realities playing out everyday, with the diverse human communities dotting the harsh landscape giving a defiant vitality to a landscape his former Park Service mother treasures so. Perhaps a kind of perverse beauty, given the death and destruction playing a constant counter-melody to life in the desert.

The Line Becomes a River concludes with a letter from José that speaks to Cantú, but that might as well be addressed to all of us, chronicling the man-made and natural obstacles alike to a desperate border crossing (the monetary and legal extortions of the cartels and smugglers imposed upon their charges, the deadly heat of the summer sun and the dearth of clean water or food, the simultaneous fears of being caught by Border Patrol and the smugglers whom one was often dependent upon for border crossings). With avenues for asylum and other methods of legal entry severely restricted, each desperate crossing adds to one's criminal record, making legal status near-impossible and making migrants ever more desperate, leading to a vicious cycle of exploitation and violence by both sides.

José writes in his conclusion that despite the many dangers "the judges in the United States, if they know the reality, they are sending people to their deaths" because many wanting to leave behind desperate situations "will do anything to be on the other side" in the United States (Cantú, 2018, p. 241-242). This sobering fact is more recently illustrated by the forced family separations and detentions of around 2,900 migrant children underneath the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy towards immigration.

Ultimately, The Line Becomes a River is a desperate cry for immigration reform to remedy the heartbreaking headlines and even more so a call for readers to conduct introspections into our roles in this problem and what can be done to help.


Works Cited:

BBC News. (2018, July 10). US Cannot Reunite Dozens of Child Migrants With Their Parents. Retrieved July 11, 2018, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44785867.

Cantú, Francisco. (2018). The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border. New York: Riverhead Books.

Book Review: Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America"

There is a principle of physics that states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In his latest book, The Soul of America (2018), historian and biographer Jon Meacham invokes the latter maxim of Newton's Third Law to describe the almost perpetual tug-of-war between progressive and reactive forces in America's 242 years of being a nation. In the latest episode of national turmoil inspired by the rise of right-leaning populist Donald Trump to the American presidency, Meacham entreats readers to remember past moments of discord, and that ultimately, the progressive impulses at the heart of America or the "better angels of our nature," always manage to come through for us (Meacham, 2018, p. 19).

Meacham's historical narrative is divided into seven parts, featuring seven scenarios in which the fate of the Union seemed in doubt: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the backlash to the Progressive Era, the emergence of a Second Ku Klux Klan and the parallel fight for women's suffrage, the New Deal era, the age of McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights movement. Carrying the nation forward were primarily its presidents, who used the muscle of the federal government in repeated attempts to right historical and continuing injustices, as well as ordinary citizens become heroes, from Rosa Parks to Eleanor Roosevelt. (While the former is definitely important, setting the national tone, I believe it's equally, if not more important for a parallel grassroots response to emerge in response to top-down policy proposals and appeals to American values. Otherwise, sustained change is made more difficult by the transitions between each presidential administration.) 

One of the greatest strengths in Meacham's prose is showing that the heroes of each chapter (Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.) were not the perfect, larger-than-life demigods or goddesses that history paints them as, illustrating beautifully Meacham's point that the "American soul" is constantly torn between contradictions of justice, but also prejudice and injustice, progress and regression. While the latter theme is sometimes frustrating in many works of nonfiction today, at times seeming to gloss over or minimize the suffering caused to whole groups of people in favor of amping up a patriotic narrative, in The Soul of America, I think a balance has been more or less achieved. Yes, it's great to be proud of your nation, but you must acknowledge its imperfections, exceptional nation or no. Meacham walks this fine line between acknowledgement of past injustice and optimistic, effluent patriotism very well in his chronicles of how climates of fear and hate are overcome by those who chose to espouse a contrarian politics of progress and optimism.

Whether it is the Emancipation Proclamation, the first in a series of fitful steps to grant equal citizenship rights to African-Americans, or lawyer John Welch's admonition to McCarthy at the height of hysteria over Communism in the '60s, "Have you no decency, sir?," these national corrections of injustice have not come without cost (Meacham, 2018, p. 201). The constant struggle between forces of progress and stagnancy or regression represented starkly in the various fights to expand the promise and protections granted by American citizenship from white, propertied males to African-Americans to women to minorities and to the LGBTQ community shows us all that, despite how free and open our 21st century America may be, that this progress is always vulnerable. That the American promise and the institutions of our democratic republic are still fragile and injustice still exists, with ancient prejudices taking on new disguises. Kinda like America First, the not-so-original 2016 campaign slogan taken from the annals of history in which demagogues the world over incited similar fears of the Other in order to give a toxic buttress to national identity in the face of social, political, economic and cultural change. Sound familiar? History has that ability to eerily rhyme, if one chooses to listen.

Meacham writes that when we, in the present, condemn our forebears for "slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?" (Meacham, 2018, p. 259). This mindfulness of history is one of several points of advice that Meacham concludes with for American citizens who wish to prove the essential goodness of the American soul rather than exacerbate its darkness. Armed with the knowledge of history and its inevitable cycles of peace and turmoil (or simultaneous periods of both), facts and reason, and a willingness to resist tribalism and engage with all corners of the political world, Meacham is optimistic that this era of Donald Trump can be overcome as well. And it starts with each of us doing our part to help the better angels in their exhausting, Sisyphean fight. 

Works Cited:

Meacham, Jon. (2018). The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels. New York: Random House.