Wolves Symbol Analysis

For Cantú, wolves represent violence as a shadow side of human nature that must be recognized and understood. He shares his first dream about wolves at the beginning of Part I—the section that charts his training as a Border Patrol agent and his time spent working in the desert. In the dream, after inspecting mounds of severed body parts, Cantú is told he must go see a wolf in a nearby cave. The wolf is frightening and huge, but Cantú holds out his hand, and the wolf approaches him and licks him. Later, Cantú recounts a story his mother used to tell him about Saint Francis and a wolf that was terrorizing a town by eating its animals and even people. When Saint Francis went to the wolf, the wolf ran at him in attack, but Saint Francis calmed it and struck up a deal: if the wolf would stop eating the town’s livestock, the townspeople would promise to feed it every day. Like Cantú’s dream, the story uses the wolf to symbolize a dark force that can only be tamed by friendship rather than retaliatory violence. Cantú continues to dream of wolves throughout his time with Border Patrol, including a nightmare at the end of his time in the agency in which he shoots a man and a young boy. He wakes up vowing to make peace with brother wolf—which is to say the violence within him that’s haunting him. Later, Cantú quotes from Carl Jung on the necessity of accepting humans’ shadow sides. Jung wrote, “When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf … this means: it wants to come to you” and advises that the best stance to take with such a nightmare figure would be “Please, come and devour me.” This final consideration of wolves prefaces Part III, in which Cantú will reckon with his own and his culture’s shadow sides by working with José on his immigration case and seeing for the first time the true scale of the violence he helped perpetrate as a member of Border Patrol.