The Line Becomes a River

by

Francisco Cantú

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The Line Becomes a River: Part 2 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Cantú considers his namesake, St. Francis, his mother’s favorite saint. He recounts a story she told him, in which a village is terrorized by a wolf that’s eating its people and livestock. When St. Francis goes to the wolf, it tries to kill him, but he calms it and makes an offer: if the wolf stops eating people and animals, the village people will make sure it’s always well fed. The wolf agrees.
The story symbolizes Cantú’s dawning awareness that detaching from or trying to repress the violence on the border will always fail. Instead, he must learn to get to know the dark forces both within himself and in society at large.
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Quotes
At the dentist, Cantú learns that he’s been grinding his teeth. He tells the dentist that he’s a Border Patrol agent who’s recently moved to the city to take on a job in intelligence after working as a field agent. The dentist asks if it’s stressful, and Cantú says it isn’t, but he gets agitated when the dentist presses him about whether it will be boring to be in an office.
Cantú’s tooth-grinding is a clear symptom of the suppressed stress from his job finding an outlet. His refusal to admit his own stress signals how thoroughly he has learned to deny and detach from his emotions, and thus how thoroughly his work is severing him from his human experience.
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Cantú’s new boss, Hayward, shows him and five other newly promoted officers around the intelligence building. He details the job: gathering information from various sources to keep the agency abreast of the major occurrences in the region. The work might be boring, he says, but it offers good opportunities for advancement, as well as stability and an urban setting.
Entering an office marks a new phase in Cantú’s institutionalization, in which he is cushioned from observing the deaths and tragedies on the border in person. However, in the contrast between his physical comfort in an office and the violence of Border Patrol’s work, there is the potential for a more insidious form of emotional trauma, in which tragedy comes to seem not overwhelming (as it did in the field) but boring and commonplace.
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Almost every day, Cantú receives emails from the Drug Enforcement Agency, detailing developments in the drug war. The emails contain graphic photographs of mutilated bodies and brief descriptions of scenes of extreme violence.
The scenes Cantú now sees in daily emails are far more gory than the real-life tragedies he saw in the field. They are also more difficult to process, because there’s a sharp disconnect between the photographs and his surroundings in the office.
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Cantú’s dreams about his teeth get more varied and extreme. Eventually, they get to the point where he dreams that he’s not dreaming, but rather he truly is clenching his teeth until they shatter in his mouth.
Again, Cantú’s suppressed stress expresses itself in dreams about his teeth. Here, the dreams—and, by extension, his stress—seem to be escalating in intensity, suggesting that the move to office work has not alleviated his emotional distress at all. 
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Cantú quotes from a book called Amexica: War Along the Borderline, which details the symbolism behind the various kinds of mutilation that cartels carry out: for instance, if a body’s tongue is cut out, it means they talked too much.
This moment speaks to the extent of death and violence along the border. The complex symbolism of cartel murders indicates a total loss of respect for the value of a human life, in which a body is simply a canvas on which to convey a message to one’s enemies.
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Cantú’s mother visits, and after dinner one evening, she tells him stories that she heard from a local rancher: for instance, that men used to call and ask to buy land to ranch when really they wanted to hunt people along the border.
Cantú’s mother offers a perspective from outside of Border Patrol—a perspective that is still connected to nature and humanity. By contrast, Cantú’s perspective has been warped by institutionalization, as demonstrated by his earlier shooting of the bird.
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The rancher believes the government is inhumane, Cantú’s mother says, because instead of stopping people at the border, it allows them to cross and then lets them Border Patrol chase them in the United States until they die in the desert.
Again, Cantú’s mother offers a valuable external perspective on the institution of Border Patrol. When communicated in her voice—which throughout the book is associated with nature, humanity, and empathy—the true inhumanity of the policy of allowing people to die in the desert has even more moral weight.
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When Cantú’s mother asks him whether this is true,  Cantú replies that it’s complicated. His mother is shocked by his complicity in this policy, and Cantú gets defensive.
By trying to justify a policy that his mother framed as inhumane and out of step with their values, Cantú reveals just how far he’s been institutionalized by Border Patrol and how far it’s shifted his moral compass.
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Cantú’s mother tells him she’s just glad he’s safely out of fieldwork now—that the rancher told her stories of how dangerous things could be in the border region. But Cantú expresses discontent with his move to intelligence work, saying that it feels like “a retreat.”
Here, Cantú explicitly expresses the sense suggested earlier, that being in an office is more emotionally taxing than being in the field, rather than less, precisely because it lacks field work’s immediacy. This, in turn, increases the work’s capacity to make Cantú detach emotionally.
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In a factual interlude, Cantú charts the commodification of people trying to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. Decades ago, people used to cross back and forth easily, but when border enforcement increased, traffickers stepped in, increasing their smuggling fees until almost the whole black market passed into the control of drug cartels. These days, Cantú writes, people are often held hostage at crowded “drop houses” in the U.S. after crossing until their relatives pay a ransom.
Cantú illustrates the way in which manmade borders, particularly militarized ones, can increase crime and suffering, while still failing to stop the natural phenomenon of migration. In addition, he suggests that the sheer scale of the institution of modern U.S. border enforcement has given rise to equally huge illegal institutions, such as cartels, which operate in the shadows of border enforcement’s regulations. As such, one element of the border’s institutional violence is in the violence of the institutions that spring up to counter it.
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Hayward asks Cantú to write a report on a drug-trafficking cell. Cantú lists all his powers to investigate suspects, which include, he writes, the power to look up their photos online and stare into their eyes.
By considering the powers his job affords him, Cantú highlights how powerless he actually feels—since, for example, staring into the eyes of a photograph doesn’t achieve anything. The underlying argument is that, for all its complexity and self-importance, the institution of Border Patrol has no power to improve life for anyone involved with it.
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In another factual interlude, Cantú recounts details from a 2009 Associated Press article about the overcrowded morgues in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez during the drug war. Morgue doctors describe the psychological difficulty of working on hundreds of mutilated bodies at a time. Many bodies were never claimed because the families feared the cartels—and the cartels themselves sometimes raided the morgues to reclaim bodies.
These scenes from inside a morgue indicate that at the height of Mexico’s drug war, the value of a human life has been completely eroded. The bodies become endless mountains of flesh, which the doctors have to depersonalize in order to do their work. Like Cantú, their own interactions with violence along the border lead to trauma and emotional detachment.
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One night, Cantú is working the overnight shift when his former coworker Cole calls to report two dead men and a third in hospital, whom his agents recovered that evening. After hanging up, Cantú imagines all the many bodies out in the desert.
Cantu’s perspective shifts between small-scale tragedy (the death of two men) and large-scale tragedy (the uncountable dead bodies in the desert). The shifting scale hints at the impossibility of fathoming the value of one human life, when so many are being lost.
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Quotes
Cantú tells Hayward that he feels the real work is out there, and Hayward tells him it’s helpful to understand the intelligence side too, and that he should get on with the report. Later, Cole calls again to report a large shipment of drugs his agents intercepted. They didn’t apprehend any people, which Cantú knows Cole avoids doing in order to minimize paperwork.
Cantú struggles with his institutionalization: both with the knowledge that the institution he works for is perverted by rule-bending agents like Cole, and with the knowledge that he is advancing farther away from interacting with migrants and into Border Patrol’s more abstract structural mechanisms. His discomfort indicates that he knows the work is changing him for the worse.
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Cantú dreams of finding a group of smugglers in the desert, all faceless men. He handcuffs them and tries to make them lead him to their drug stash. He radios for backup but nobody responds.
Cantú’s dreams about work reveal the stress and anxiety he is attempting to suppress in order to keep doing his job. This dream suggests that he feels threatened and unsupported, since nobody responds to his call for help.
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In the dream, they walk through the desert until they reach a canyon piled with black chests, which Cantú starts searching, but they’re all empty. He feels increasingly intimidated and asks the men where the bundles of drugs are, but they say he’s already taken them.
Again, Cantú’s dream reveals the stress he’s under, which he suppresses until it explodes out of his subconscious in dreams. The dream suggests a general fear and an anxiety that he’s not doing his job well enough.
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Quotes
One night Cantú is woken by his phone ringing. It’s his mother, who is terrified because she heard a Border Patrol agent named Cantú had been killed. Cantú tells her that there’s another Cantú, before it dawns on him that this death, too, is momentous.
This exchange reveals how cheapened human life has become in Cantú’s eyes, as it takes him quite some time to register the tragedy of a death.
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At work the next day, there are many high-level staff members at the intelligence office. Hayward fills Cantú in on the background to the shooting and the great many staff from Border Patrol and other agencies that are looking for one of the culprits who escaped.
The heightened response to the loss of a Border Patrol agent contrasts with the unceremonious responses to migrants’ deaths in the desert. This contrast forms an implied argument about the injustice of treating human lives with such wildly varying degrees of respect.
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Hayward tells Cantú to put together a rigorous report about the suspects who have already been arrested so that they can figure out “who’s a scumbag and who’s just a POW,” meaning “plain old wet.”
Hayward’s casual use of a racist slur suggests that within the institution of Border Patrol, contempt for migrants is common and accepted—a condition that lays the groundwork for the mistreatment of migrants.
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Soon after, Cantú’s great-aunt Frances dies. At the memorial in San Diego, Cantú catches up with his cousins. They swap stories of Frances, including her insistence that their family was Spanish, not Mexican, despite being in Mexico for 400 years.
Cantú’s family’s history of migration highlights just how old and natural a phenomenon migration is, long predating the militarization of border enforcement. Additionally, Frances’s insistence on the family’s Spanish origins highlight the colonial power dynamics that led to the establishment of manmade national boundaries.
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Frances’s daughter tells the story of their family arriving in the United States: during the Mexican Revolution, Frances and her brother (Cantú’s grandfather) were only children. Their family hopped on a freight train going north late at night, and in the morning they saw dead bodies hanging from the trees they passed.
The dead, hanging bodies recall the mutilated bodies of the present-day drug war, which Cantú witnesses every day at work. The echo suggests the sheer, unfathomable scale of lives lost in Mexico in recent centuries.
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The next day, Cantú goes with his family to the family mausoleum. He tells them that though he is the only family member still called Cantú, he was originally supposed to be called “Joshua Tyler Cantú-Simmons.” His cousins laugh at the “gringo name.” Cantú agrees that if his mother hadn’t changed it, he’d have been a different person.
Cantú’s mixed cultural heritage highlights how natural and commonplace migration is, and how blunt an instrument manmade borders are in a world where so many people’s identities are split across national boundaries.
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Cantú goes to visit his grandfather in the mausoleum. He calls his mom, who asks him to speak to her father for her. His grandfather’s nameplate is in a sunny hallway with a view of Tijuana. Cantú tells his grandfather he can see Mexico from here.
Again, Cantú highlights that his own family’s heritage is split across the U.S.–Mexico border: his grandfather was born in Mexico and now lies at rest in the U.S., with a view of his native country.
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In a historical interlude, Cantú quotes from a historian about the carnage and death toll of the Mexican Revolution and adds that in Mexico, some people believe that the country suffers 100-year cycles of disturbance: the War of Independence (which started in 1810) claimed 400,000 to 600,000 lives; the revolution, which started in 1910, claimed up to two million.
The belief that Mexico suffers 100-year cycles of disturbance contains an implicit acceptance of the inevitability of mass dying, suggesting that recurring tragedy can erode a people’s belief in their right to life. They may not value their own lives less, but they feel powerless to defend them.
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Cantú notes that the next wave of violence started early, in 2006, when president Calderón declared war on the drug cartels. By the end of his six years in power, the official murder toll was 100,000. Calderón claimed the deaths were mostly cartel members, but Cantú cites academic Molly Molloy’s research showing only five percent of murders were investigated, and most victims were likely ordinary, poor people.
The failure to investigate murders during Mexico’s drug war suggests both a lack of respect for the lives of the everyday poor people who died and a sense that large-scale dying is somehow inevitable or even unremarkable. Both explanations point to a society that has lost sight of the value of a human life.
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By 2014, the official homicide toll had risen to 164,000—still an underestimate, according to researchers, and one that doesn’t include the many people who had disappeared without trace.
In being left out of the official death tolls, the disappeared and uncounted are written out of history; the value of their lives is entirely negated. 
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Neither does it include those who have lost their lives crossing into the U.S. to escape violence in Mexico. Cantú notes this is a huge number of people, but again, an unknown number, since so many simply went missing. Neither can a death toll account for the many ways cultural violence changes life for those who don’t die.
Again, Cantú notes that the situation on the border is one of complete disrespect for human life and its sanctity: partly because so many lives are left uncounted, and partly because even counting is a profoundly impoverished way to measure the uncountable value and needs of human life.
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Quotes
During a quiet shift at work, Cantú traces the story of an 18-year-old Ecuadorian boy, the sole survivor of a massacre of 72 people, who fled the scene and ran to a military checkpoint 10 miles away to report it. Reading the story at the office, Cantú starts to dissociate until Hayward notices and tells him to snap out of it.
Cantú dissociates because the information he’s absorbing is too traumatic to process, and because there’s such a disconnect between the violence of the story and the comfort of his surroundings. The episode marks one stage further in his traumatized emotional detachment.
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In another interlude, Cantú lists the metaphors that journalists typically use to describe migrant deaths, as determined by an academic study: economic metaphors (such as the “cost” or “gamble” of crossing), violent metaphors (such as “armies of migrants” or “lethal policies”), and dehumanizing metaphors (for instance, describing migrants as hunted prey). 
The language used to describe migrants obscures the tragedy of the deaths and disappearances on the border by diminishing migrants’ individuality and humanity. This also normalizes the tragedy and all but ensures it will continue.
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Hayward tells his team that he’s accepted a job in El Paso and encourages Cantú to apply, saying it would allow him to start working in the field again.
Hayward’s suggestion implies that the cure for Cantú’s emotional struggles with his work is to progress further into the organization—a typically institutionalized response that will in fact entrap Cantú farther in the institution’s damaging grip.
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Sitting at his desk, Cantú sees a prairie falcon on a surveillance camera he’s monitoring. It seems to look straight into the camera and dare him to take a job back in the field. Cantú wants to reply that he’s afraid the violence won’t affect him any longer.
Throughout the book, birds symbolize freedom. Here, Cantú’s resistance to the bird’s urging suggests how much freedom of spirit and mind he has lost as a result of his work in Border Patrol. In addition, his fear that the violence won’t affect him is in fact a fear of the ways the work and its necessary emotional compartmentalization are changing him, trapping him in the border’s cycle of pain.
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Hayward greets Cantú at his new workplace in El Paso and introduces him to his new coworkers, Manuel and Beto. Hayward tells Cantú to be ready, because they’ll be going on their first mission in two weeks.
Cantú has overridden his emotional misgivings about the new job, plunging himself into a demanding new work scenario. There’s an implication that he’s so detached from his own needs and instincts that he no longer knows how to listen to them—which, in turn, would be a sign of diminished connection to his particular humanity.
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In another interlude, Cantú describes a retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, set in modern Mexico. Sara Uribe’s Antígona González centers on the tragedy of so many people disappearing while crossing the border and remaining “unidentified and nameless” ever after.
Again, Cantú highlights the anonymity of people who disappear while crossing the border, drawing on poetry to illustrate how much life and value that anonymity obscures.
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Hayward, Manuel, Beto, and Cantú arrive in Lordsburg, New Mexico, for a mission. They go to a Mexican restaurant for dinner, where an older couple thanks them for their service and a young boy stares at their guns and badges while his mother tries to draw him away, explaining that he wants to be a police officer when he’s older.
The little boy’s attraction to the officers’ guns and badges reveals that in border regions, militarized, violent border enforcement are normalized and even lionized—thus perpetuating the institutional violence of border enforcement. The boy’s reverence seems even more jarring in the context of a Mexican restaurant—a site that nods to the importance of Mexican culture and Mexican migrants in the United States.
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The next day, the team works in the field, driving around and surveying the area. Cantú feels “giddy” to be back in the field. That night, he dreams again of a cave littered with body parts and a wolf circling the dark. Cantú gets up to write the dreams in a notebook in the bathroom while Beto, his roommate, sleeps.
In Cantú’s dreams, wolves symbolize the violent side of human nature that must be acknowledged and neutralized rather than repressed. Following a day back in the field, this dream suggests that Cantú is subconsciously glad to once more be confronting the violence of his work head-on rather than from behind a computer screen, where he can so easily compartmentalize it.
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At breakfast the next morning, Cantú’s coworkers make fun of him, accusing him of masturbating in the bathroom in the night. He makes fun of them in return.
The camaraderie between agents relies on light-hearted mutual mocking. Part of the institution’s violence is the way its culture deters members from processing their trauma by talking openly and honestly about their experiences.
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Later that day, Manuel, Beto, and Cantú drive toward the border for the day’s work. Images from his dream still circle in Cantú’s mind. He wonders what the wolf symbolizes: he knows wolves used to roam this area but were deemed too dangerous and were exterminated, and that conservation projects are now returning them to this land in small numbers.
In this book, wolves are associated with the violent shadow side of human nature. The story of their extermination suggests a cultural unwillingness to acknowledge this universal shadow side, while the careful conservation projects Cantú mentions suggest some hope that repressed elements of human nature might be reintegrated, either in Cantú or in society at large.
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Beto takes a clearly upsetting call from his mom, but he doesn’t tell Manuel or Cantú what it’s about. They pass a lot of wildlife—antelopes and coatimundi (raccoon-like animals)—before stopping for lunch. Finally, Beto tells Cantú that his cousin died the day before in Juárez. Beto tells Cantú a few stories about his cousin and then comments on the wildlife they’ve been seeing, including a butterfly he saw the day before and can’t stop thinking about.
Beto becomes more conscious of the wildlife around him after hearing of his cousin’s death because nature humanizes people and reminds them of the full richness and complexity of the human experience. In the context of a book in which human life is so often devalued, nature becomes a crucial reminder of the true worth of life.
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One night of this mission, when all four agents are off duty, they drive up into the mountains and go to two bars. Beto makes out with a woman he meets named Suzy, Manuel tells Cantú that he’s about to become the first person in his family to own a house, and Hayward reminisces about meeting his wife in high school in Virginia. The night seems full of “happiness and promise.”
Only in connecting with his coworkers as humans, rather than in their professional capacities, does Cantú feel a sense of happiness and promise. The evening points to how institutions usually dehumanize people by requiring them to leave their personal lives out of their interactions in the name of professionalism. 
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Back at work, Manuel, Beto, and Cantú listen to their own progress along a dirt road being narrated via radio by cartel scouts in the neighborhood. The next night, they hear more drama: an armed convoy in Mexico is raising panic among scouts until another man comes on the radio to say they have permission to pass. Cantú imagines the cartel ranch they’re heading to and knows he must never go there.
This passage highlights the illicit, unofficial land boundaries (determined by cartels) that flank the official U.S.–Mexico border. Cantú suggests that whether it’s done by cartels or governments, claiming territory is always about control and power, and thus that such arbitrary and unnatural boundaries will also contain the possibility of violence.
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In another interlude, Cantú describes the writer Charles Bowden’s interviews with a former sicario (a cartel’s hit man). The sicario notes that he and his fellow sicarios were always high or drunk while doing their work, so that they couldn’t think about what they were doing.
The sicario’s testimony shows that even those who perpetrate the most extreme violence of Mexico’s drug war are emotionally affected by it. These sicarios have to work while high or drunk in order to shield their psyches from the violence—an extreme form of the emotional detachment readers see in Cantú as he struggles to navigate the trauma of his work. The implication is that trauma and emotional detachment are universal among those touched by the violence on the border.
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Quotes
The sicario also describes the cartels’ methods of destroying bodies to obscure their identities, and he says that there are many more mass graves than have ever been discovered—and that “it is impossible to say” how many people have been buried in this way.
People buried in mass graves are anonymous; they are denied any individuality, and as such, their lives seem less valuable. This passage reinforces the book’s claim that the tragedies on the border are reinforced and perpetuated by the impossibility of valuing every individual life lost—both because of the sheer number of deaths and because so many people remain unaccounted for.
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When the mission in Lordsburg ends, Cantú’s coworkers go back to El Paso while he stays behind to visit his uncle on his father’s side, whom he hasn't seen in years. In the morning, Cantú wakes to find his uncle gone and looks through his things, finding photographs of his own father and his “many past wives,” as well as pictures of his own half-siblings by those wives. He finds a picture of himself and his mother. Cantú looks outside to see his uncle jogging. A degenerative disease is eating his muscle tissue, and he runs strangely. 
Here, Cantú is reckoning with his own identity. From his uncle’s possessions, he gets a new perspective on his own life, in which he is just one of his father’s many children. The effect makes him slightly anonymous and strange to himself, just as the migrants he encounters are strange to him. The passage thus becomes an implicit commentary on the way humans understand others, in which value is contingent on how much of a person’s individual story is known.
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Cantú’s uncle takes him to see the land he has bought to build a house, which he likes because it’s wild and remote. Afterward, on the way to a nearby trailhead, Cantú’s uncle speaks romantically about the local trees, saying he was drawn to the area by the sycamores and describing an apple orchard he found locally on his honeymoon and has never found again since. As they hike, Cantú’s uncle tells him about all the natural things he had to destroy for his work as a contractor, saying he sometimes feels overwhelmed by the destruction.
In this book, reverence for nature is associated with living in full humanity and an appreciation for life in all its forms. By revealing that he complied with the professional requirement to harm nature, despite his reverence for it, Cantú’s uncle underscores Cantú’s own experiences in Border Patrol: that the structures of work and society can cause a person to act against their own values—and harm them psychologically in doing so, as indicated by Cantú’s uncle’s comment about feeling overwhelmed.
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Quotes
Cantú wants to tell his uncle about the far worse acts of destruction of the natural landscape he has seen while working in the desert, but he doesn’t. Cantú thinks about how strange it is that his uncle can destroy the landscape despite loving it so much.
By not telling his uncle about the destruction he has seen while working with Border Patrol, Cantú reveals that he’s still emotionally suppressing that destruction because it’s too painful to confront. In addition, Cantú’s bewilderment about his uncle’s behavior reveals that he can’t yet see the parallel with his own: that he, too, is destroying something he loves (i.e., the cultural and personal exchanges between Mexico and the United States).
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Cantú’s uncle asks him how his work is, and Cantú wants to tell him that the violence is overwhelming him, but instead he answers that work is good. On the way back to the car, he worries that he has the same degenerative disease as his uncle, and that there’s something in his blood that will destroy him.
Cantú’s inability to express his troubles at work signals emotional detachment and repression—his coping strategies for dealing with the pain of border enforcement. His immediate fear about having a degenerative disease indicates both how psychologically damaging this repression is and that he has internalized the suffering on the border, convincing himself that there is something wrong with him rather than the institution of Border Patrol.
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Back at home in El Paso, Cantú jogs through the streets, looking at Juárez on the hillside opposite. He reflects on the fact that in order to live in El Paso during those violent days in Juárez, people had to set aside what they knew about the atrocities that went on just across the river.
Cantú notes that the emotional detachment necessary for his work as a Border Patrol agent is also widespread in the general population. Living in such proximity to the tragedies and violence in Juárez, the whole city of El Paso has to emotionally detach from the suffering in order to live their lives—and in so doing, they perpetuated the suffering.
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Quotes
Looking at Juárez from the top of the hill he has jogged to, Cantú remembers the kindness he has personally experienced in Juárez and feels a longing to go back, but he knows he won’t.
The U.S.–Mexico border seeks to establish a binary: “us and them,” “here and there.” Having crossed the border fluidly throughout his life, Cantú understands that such an arbitrary binary overlooks the humanity of people on either sides of the line—and yet he knows that he won’t go back because he, too, has internalized this cultural lesson.
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In another historical interlude, Cantú draws from historian David Dorado Romo’s account of El Paso during the Mexican Revolution. El Paso residents gathered on the tops of buildings to watch the fighting in Juárez through binoculars, and after the battle, they ran sightseeing tours to the “ruins” of the Mexican city.
Cantú offers a contrast to the present-day emotional detachment from the violence in Juárez: evidence that, in the past, citizens of El Paso have been more callous, seeing the loss of life in Juárez as a source of entertainment. The incident stands as proof that the human capacity to ignore the value of others’ lives is not a new phenomenon.
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Cantú notes that a year before the revolution, Halley’s Comet had passed through the sky, and his own family (including his grandfather as a fetus) might have gathered on a rooftop elsewhere in Mexico to gaze in a different type of awe.
Stars are often interpreted as clues to destiny or aids to help people navigate. By imagining his own family stargazing in Mexico many years ago, Cantú illustrates a more gentle, inspiring side of the age-old phenomenon of migration: people experiencing awe and a sense of destiny before seeking a new life in another country. This is the kind of migration that has been curtailed by the militarization of the border.  
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One night, Beto invites Cantú to a nightclub with his friends. Beto advises him not to look at a particular woman, whom he says is “with a narco.” Cantú dances with another woman all night, who tells him she’s been disturbed by a wealthy older couple at the club who tried to persuade her to leave with them. At the end of the night, Cantú can’t find this woman.
Beto’s comment about the “narco” and Cantú’s concern about the woman highlight the sense of perpetual threat in areas along the border. The episode suggests that nobody and nothing are ever fully safe here, which consequently suggests how devalued human life has become for some people in these areas.
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In another interlude, Cantú considers the femicides, or killing of women, that began to escalate in Juárez in the 1990s. Women began to be abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered, and their bodies were dumped in the desert or the street, negating their humanity. 
The serial murders and disappearances of women in Mexico are evidence of the devaluation of human life. Moreover, the murders fit into a self-perpetuating cycle in which society never confronts or metabolizes the tragedies, so the victims are dehumanized, life loses yet more value, and the likelihood of more murders increases.
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Cantú cites researchers including Molly Molloy, who observed that the narratives that emerged around these murdered women were often sexualized and painted them as powerless, when in fact they were often their families’ sole breadwinners.
The narratives Molloy highlights are designed in part to lessen the tragedy of these women’s deaths by insinuating that they deserved their fates or were worthless in society. Victim blaming and diminishing the value of lost lives are some the ways societies avoid assuming responsibility for their own ills, thus perpetuating cycles of loss and suffering.
Themes
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
One man was arrested for the murders, Cantú writes, but the crimes didn’t stop. The city began to seem like a “battleground” for women, thus minimizing their individual danger and loss of life. The police did not seriously investigate the crimes and were even complicit in deliberately unfair prosecutions, perhaps as a cover-up—a fact borne out by the findings of a visiting UN committee.
Again, Cantú reveals the ways in which failing to value and seek justice for human life and death locks a society in cycles of suffering. In this instance, the danger is specifically aimed at the women of Mexico, who increasingly become targets after their society reveals how little it values their lives. However, also Cantú implies a parallel to the loss of migrant lives on the border, where loss of life is stoked by callous treatment.
Themes
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
In 2004, Cantú writes, an investigation by a team from Argentina found a “willfully inept justice system” and mass graves for women in which body parts of different women were often mixed up.
The mixing of body parts from different women signals that these women have been stripped of all individuality and dignity. Much like the migrants who disappear on the border, these women’s lives are treated as valueless.
Themes
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
This violence, Cantú writes, was a “blueprint” for the violence of the drug war, of which Juárez ended up being the epicenter. By 2010, Juárez was the “murder capital of the world” for men and women alike, while across the river, El Paso, Texas, was announced as the safest city in the United States.
Here, Cantú presents two perspectives on the devaluation of human life. First, he argues, once tragedy and death have been normalized in a society, more are likely to follow, as they did in the form of Mexico’s drug war. Second, he notes that the devaluation of human life is never universal: those in more powerful social categories (such as U.S. citizens in El Paso) rarely have their lives devalued in the way that more vulnerable groups do.
Themes
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
In 2012, Cantú writes, Juárez was hit by another, even bigger wave of femicides. By now, however, violence in the region had become so normalized that journalists and campaigners couldn’t get people to care.
Cantú highlights that the devaluation of human life is widespread. And again, he highlights that tragedy can initiate a self-reinforcing cycle, in which individuals and societies detach emotionally from suffering, thus allowing more suffering to occur.
Themes
Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
One day, Manuel asks Beto and Cantú to help him move. Over pizza afterward, they talk to Manuel’s parents, who are from Mexico. They remember the days when people could cross back and forth “like the border wasn’t even there.” They even used to go to Juárez, she says. But they don’t go there anymore.
Manuel’s mother’s memories of the border highlight that there is nothing essential or inevitable about the current militarized border, and that it hasn’t even been around that long. As such, Cantú questions the validity of militarization.
Themes
Natural Migration vs. Human Boundaries Theme Icon
Driving back from Manuel’s house, Beto and Cantú talk about their lives before they joined Border Patrol. Beto says he felt his choices were to join a cartel or join the patrol, and now he won’t leave the agency because he has a mortgage and opportunities for advancement.
This conversation illustrates how society can trap people in institutions, even when those institutions harm them or their communities, by offering no valid alternatives. In this way, the violence of the institution of Border Patrol is reinforced by broader social injustices.
Themes
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú says he’s considering his options, including going back to school. He says he entered Border Patrol hoping to understand the border better, but instead he only has more questions.
This comment highlights the gulf between the naïve, idealistic Cantú who entered Border Patrol, and the more jaded person he has become. This difference has been wrought by the harshness and violence of the institution of Border Patrol, which, Cantú implicitly argues, is far more powerful than any individual.
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Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Beto says he grew up in Juárez and El Paso and used to cross the border often, but he hasn't gone since joining the patrol because it “never felt smart.” Cantú says he hasn’t either, though neither of them quite knows why they haven’t.
Again, Cantú notes how much border enforcement has changed in recent decades, implicitly suggesting that the current state of militarized enforcement is unnecessary. In addition, he notes the ways in which manmade borders sever families and individual identities, such as Beto’s.
Themes
Natural Migration vs. Human Boundaries Theme Icon
Cantú dreams that he is in Juárez with Manuel and Beto, partying and kissing girls in the street, when they notice men coming down the road, killing and kidnapping everyone. Manuel, Beto, and Cantú go to their car and speed off, and people come out onto the streets again as morning begins. In his dream, Cantú wonders how they live with the fear.
As with Cantú’s other dreams, the disturbed tone here suggests repressed trauma and stress finding an expression through his subconscious—thus signaling the profound emotional and psychological impact of his work. In addition, the specifics of the dream—the violence that occurs in the midst of a party—suggests that Cantú has come to feel there is no element of life that’s safe from violence. Again, this suggests that his work is taking a heavy toll on his life and conception of the world. 
Themes
Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
In another interlude, Cantú discusses the work of historian Timothy Snyder, who studies the genocides perpetrated in Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1945. Snyder notes that death-toll statistics negate the individuality of each victim and pleads with his fellow academics to “turn the numbers back into people.”
Here, Cantú returns to the theme of the value of a human life, arguing that cases where death is widespread enough to be reported in statistics are precisely where individuality and human stories must be respected most, in order to fully weigh the import of the mass tragedy.
Themes
The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
Quotes
Over lunch one day, Hayward tells Cantú that an agent at his old station shot and killed a migrant, and he asks if Cantú knows the agent and how he’s doing. He tells Cantú that he himself killed a migrant in his early days, when he was in his early 20s, and has never gotten over it.
Hayward’s confession reveals the violence that institutions like Border Patrol can perpetrate against those inside as well as outside them. In addition, there’s a secondary, implicit question about whether an institution like Border Patrol can feasibly do its job fairly if it’s staffed by individuals who have been traumatized in the course of their work. Cantú suggests that institutions can traumatize their members, who then perpetuate the suffering of non-members. 
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Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú discusses research from a Dutch university regarding a gene that’s linked to violence, known as the “warrior gene.” About a third of all men carry the gene, Cantú writes, but, crucially, the gene is typically only expressed (i.e., activated) by traumatic childhood experiences. Scientists have not specified whether a whole society experiencing trauma over many decades would trigger the gene.
This research emphasizes that social institutions that perpetuate poverty, inequality, and other injustices are much more culpable for violence than individual psychology. In addition, Cantú implies that the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, racism, and other inequalities might create conditions in which violence in inevitable.
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Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
One weekend, Beto asks Cantú to look after his dog while he goes out of town. Cantú goes out, leaving the dog in the yard, and the dog escapes. Cantú finds the dog at the shelter, bloody and covered in bite marks. He has been in a fight and torn another dog’s throat. Cantú visits the other dog’s owner, apologizes, and promises to pay the vet bills. He is badly shaken by the violence.
By revealing violence’s universality in the animal kingdom, this incident somewhat contradicts the idea that violence is largely attributable to institutional failings. However, Cantú implies that it’s a base, animal instinct—and by extension that, given the right conditions, humans can and should override it.
Themes
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú discusses the concept of “moral injury,” a psychological condition common among soldiers, in which individuals feel disconnected from themselves after being forced to participate in and accept things they know are wrong.
Institutions are inherently violent, Cantú implies, because they create environments in which rules are more important than a person’s moral compass. As a result, they require people to betray their own values, causing damage to their psyches—and thus, possibly, damage to the people whose lives they impact in the course of their work.
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Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú’s team heads to his old station for a mission. One night, the group finds a migrant who’s lost her group. Hayward asks Cantú to take her to the base. She’s limping badly. Manuel respectfully helps her into the car, and on the ride, Cantú tries to make small talk with her, but can’t think of anything to say, except for telling her she can use the informal “tú” form of address with him.
In the context of their work with Border Patrol, whose agents so often dehumanize the migrants they encounter, Manuel and Cantú’s kindness to this woman seems like a remarkable sign of respect for the value of her life. However, Cantú’s inability to make small talk with her illuminates the power imbalance between them, which devalues the woman’s life, no matter how personally affable Cantú and Manuel are.
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The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
Driving to the base with the migrant, Cantú feels a strange sense of freedom in the desert, even though he knows the horror that happens there. He looks in the rearview mirror and wonders what the woman sees and feels. He’s certain it’s not freedom.
Throughout this book, nature is associated with wisdom and the full range of human experience—however, here, Cantú suggests that only those privileged enough to enjoy nature freely can access this sense of wisdom and freedom.
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Nature, Beauty, and Humanity Theme Icon
At the station, Cantú takes the woman’s details and asks if he can help with her feet, which are covered in huge blisters. He cleans, disinfects, and bandages them, and the woman says, “Eres muy humanitario”—“You have a lot of human goodness.” Cantú tells her that’s not true.
Cantú’s discomfort with the woman’s gratitude indicates his awareness of the power imbalance between them: he may value her humanity, but he has chosen to work for an institution that does not, and he must bear the responsibility for that.
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The Value of a Human Life Theme Icon
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú returns to the story of the sicario that Charles Bowden interviewed. Like Cantú, the sicario suffered from nightmares. Sometimes, he says, he would wake up aiming his gun or holding his wife by the throat. At this point, he realized that his work had changed him, and he “was no longer any good.”
Cantú implicitly compares himself to the sicario, suggesting that he believes his work with the institution of Border Patrol to have been damaging and violent, both to others (like the sicario’s) and, as a result, to his own psyche.
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Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
At this point, the sicario says, he decided to leave his work. He fled with his family. Early in his new life, he says, he went to church, and he was so moved he cried for five or six hours. As he cried, the church people cried with him and touched him.
This passage suggests Cantú’s hope that he may one day, like the sicario, find relief from the psychic wounds of his work. By extension, it reveals his hope that the cycles of pain and emotional trauma incurred at institutions like Border Patrol are not inevitable and can be stopped.
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Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Institutional Violence Theme Icon
After spending a day with his team at the firing range, Cantú asks to speak to Hayward. He tells him he’s leaving the patrol; he’s been offered a scholarship to study abroad. Hayward offers to keep a job open for him, but Cantú refuses, saying, “It’s not the work for me.”
Cantú uses the exact sentence used by a recruit who quit the agency during their training, suggesting that he, too, wishes he had realized earlier on that this wasn’t “the work for him,” and thus saved himself the pain of institutionalization in such a problematic agency. 
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Institutional Violence Theme Icon
Cantú discusses an essay by Cristina Rivera Garza about Mexican pain. Pain, he summarizes, is pervasive in Mexico and “has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality.” That reality, he writes, is often filled with fear and distrust. 
Again, Cantú highlights the ways in which trauma perpetuates pain. A society that has experienced great pain, he suggests, is predisposed to experience and perceive even more pain in the future.
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Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Cantú discusses another Rivera Garza essay, in which she speculates that war will always exist until humans can imagine something more exciting than it. She frames this act of imagining as a radical, revolutionary act.
This passage implies that the end of violence lies in the human capacity to draw from more elevated human instincts such as those for creativity and imagination.
Themes
Nature, Beauty, and Humanity Theme Icon
Cantú dreams that he is in the desert when he gets caught in a shootout between a man and a boy. He shoots them both and then starts to panic, worried that he will never escape violence. Cantú checks the bodies and the boy is still alive. He begs Cantú to kill him, but Cantú walks away instead.
Again, Cantú’s dreams reveal how much his work with Border Patrol has impacted his subconscious psychological and emotional health, seeming to trap him in a cycle of pain. His fear that he will never escape the violence also speaks to the cyclical nature of his pain.
Themes
Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon
Cantú wakes and cries, sensing the familiar wolf nearby. He longs to reach out his hand to the wolf and befriend it.
However, in waking, Cantú seems to remember that escaping the cycle of pain is possible, but will require him to accept and confront the difficult emotions he has suppressed during the course of his work—including his own violent instincts.
Themes
Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Icon