The Line Becomes a River: Author’s Note Summary & Analysis

In an author’s note written in December 2018 and published in the paperback edition of The Line Becomes a River, Cantú writes that while working on the book, he always imagined it would be a document of a particularly bad time, and that the situation on the border would improve. He writes that this has proven untrue, and it’s just as naïve as his hope that he could subvert the institution of Border Patrol from within without being changed by its violence. And since Cantú wrote the book, the border has become ever more militarized, until it entered a state of crisis.

Cantú notes that violence on the border has long been normalized and thus accepted by the people of the United States. Then, in the summer of 2018, the Trump administration implemented a “zero tolerance” immigration policy in which, among other things, children were caged and separated from their parents. The photographs of these children that appeared in the press forced an overdue public reckoning with border policy.

Americans responded to these photos because children are seen as innocent, Cantú writes, so “othering” them seems particularly callous. But he notes that the dehumanizing policy is not isolated: it’s just an escalation of long-running cruelty.

Cantú notes that in writing the book, he hoped to give his account of his experiences and allow readers to draw their own moral conclusions. He set out to explore three kinds of border violence: in part one, violence resulting from border enforcement; in part two, the violence of the drug war and migrants’ lives being commodified by traffickers; and in part three, the violence wrought by the threat migrants always feel, even after establishing themselves in the United States. Writing the book was an opportunity to process the ways he himself normalized violence while working as an agent.

After leaving Border Patrol, Cantú spent time in the border regions as a civilian. Only then did he truly see the military infrastructure and patrol presence that makes the area so ominous, particularly for those with darker skin. This normalization of military presence has led to the border region being claimed as a “transitional terrain.”

But the border landscape was not always transitional or liminal. In fact, this status was imposed by colonizing powers. Cantú quotes the Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes, who attributes the violence of colonial and post-colonial American to “the wétiko disease”—colonizers being possessed by a “cannibalistic psychosis” for consumption, aggression, and exploitation.

Forbes goes on to say that the wétiko disease has simply become more subtle in modern times, most often manifesting as a dull sense of fear in the dominant nation that leads people to normalize acts of terror and oppression, such as the militarization of the border.

Forbes’s definition of the wétiko disease also accounts for the urge to “de-sanctify” holy or sacred places. Cantú points out that this is exactly what has happened in the border region, where revered desert land has been claimed as a liminal, militarized zone.

Cantú presents the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the concept of the “state of exception,” which governments have used for centuries to diminish people’s rights amid perceived crises. Cantú notes that the whole U.S.–Mexico border can now be seen as a vast “zone of exception,” where many human rights are suspended and laws applied differently.

Cantú notes that the deadly militarization of the border began in the 1990s, when the “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy came into effect. Under the policy, border towns were strictly policed, but the border was mostly unenforced in the desert, since officials believed the inhospitable conditions would deter crossing there. Even when it became clear that many people were dying while trying to cross in the desert, the institutions of border enforcement did not consider changing the policy.

This policy, Cantú writes, equates to the deliberate killing and disappearance of many thousands of migrants. He cites evidence that Border Patrol officers left many deaths off the official records, erasing those people’s lives.

Although Border Patrol now carries out rescue missions in the desert, and its agents (including Cantú) are trained in emergency medical care, Cantú writes that these measures cannot atone for the fact that the agency itself causes the death and injury it then sometimes seeks to address. He adds that many individuals in the agency also personally endanger migrants’ lives through unethical behavior such as destroying water supplies.

The rhetoric within Border Patrol and increasingly in the U.S. population at large frames migrants as criminals or illegal, Cantú writes, positioning border enforcement agents as soldiers and equipping them as such, while migrants become their enemies.

Writing from the midst of the 2018 controversy around child separation, Cantú notes that describing that moment as a “crisis” is questionable, since it implies that it’s isolated—that it wasn’t preceded by many horrific events, all of which could have been an opportunity to change course.

Cantú adds that migrants are denied even the right to an identity and a self by the way in which the U.S. and other dominant powers prioritize passports, visas, and other documents as the tickets to identity. These documents, he notes, give their bearers a "verified self,” to use the words of British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders. Most migrants are thus denied a verified self—the right to be recorded in history and to move freely.

Cantú describes a speech given by Pope Francis on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where many migrants arrive from North Africa. Pope Francis commemorated migrant deaths and referred to the migrants as “brothers and sisters of ours” rather than as “others.” Pope Francis decried the global indifference to the migrants’ suffering and the failure to grieve for these migrant deaths—a failure made possible by the migrants’ anonymity.

Rejecting the cultural blindness to migrants’ suffering and death will begin with grieving them, speaking their names, and listening to them, Cantú writes. He quotes the Mexican intellectual Sayak Valencia, who writes that it is essential to stop seeing border regions as distant and inherently violent. Cantú references the case of a migrant named Aurelio, who told social anthropologist Jorge Durand that, after being captured and deported while crossing the border dozens of times, he simply saw himself as trash on the ocean, constantly being tossed around. Aurelio’s view of himself as trash, Cantú writes, is a direct result of the way he has been treated by the U.S.

And yet it’s not enough to simply have empathy, Cantú writes. In order to stop the suffering, empathy must be translated into action. People around the world must vow to protect life above laws, and convince others to do the same.

Finally, Cantú writes that during his time in a violent institution, he learned that small impulses and interactions can begin to rehumanize people and systems. That despite the power of the institutions that rule us, we also have power—the power to refuse to participate in the institutions and their attempts to normalize violence.