In The Line Becomes a River, teeth represent the extreme repressed stress and inner turmoil that Cantú experiences as a United States Border Patrol agent. As he gets increasingly entrenched in the world of Border Patrol, Cantú has repeated stress dreams involving teeth. In one dream, for instance, he grinds all his teeth out and holds them in his hands, but there’s nobody for him to show them to. When he moves into intelligence work, he visits a dentist who tells him he’s been grinding his teeth at night and asks whether his work is stressful. Cantú is evasive and even aggressive with the dentist, as if he can’t admit even to himself how stressed he’s been, because he’s still in the midst of the stress. His intelligence work involves studying extremely graphic accounts of murder and mutilation perpetrated in Mexico’s drug war. Soon, Cantú is having so many stressful dreams involving teeth that he can’t seem to wake up from them, though he’s desperate to. The dreams seem to become less frequent in the book’s third section, when Cantú has left Border Patrol, which seems to affirm that his choice to leave Border Patrol was a healthy one.
Teeth Symbol Timeline in The Line Becomes a River
