Cantú’s story of working the U.S.–Mexico border is a story of institutionalization. He enters the United States Border Patrol as an idealistic young man hoping to learn about the border so he can someday use what he learns to help people. However, as he enters the machinery of border enforcement, he grows ever more detached from the migrants he meets as well as his own friends and family, and he witnesses numerous acts of callousness and cruelty from his coworkers toward the migrants they intercept. Instead of getting a clearer picture of the border, he grows increasingly confused as he senses his own moral compass slipping. After leaving, he sees that he was naïve to assume that he would be able to hold fast to his personal ideals in the midst of an institution designed to enforce its own agenda at all costs. He realizes that institutional power is overwhelmingly potent, and that because it’s an impersonal power located in organizational machinery rather than human hands, it is inherently violent in nature.
Over the course of his time in Border Patrol, Cantú watches Border Patrol bring out the worst in many of his coworkers and even in himself. In each instance, Cantú implies that herd mentality and the power enshrined in the institution exacerbate the agents’ cruelty. During his early days as a border agent, Cantú and the group he’s patrolling with come across some abandoned belongings in the desert. Cantú’s coworkers ransack the belongings, and one agent, Hart, giggles as he urinates on some. The giggle suggests that he knows he’s transgressing, and that he feels his status as an agent has given him license to do so. Later, toward the end of Cantú’s account of his time in Border Patrol, he discusses “moral injury,” a condition in which individuals “learn to accept the things [they] know are wrong.” Cantú implies that Border Patrol is a broken institution that has integrated wrongdoing into its core functioning, thus inflicting moral injury on its agents by rendering them powerless to resist its wrongs. Cantú also points out the ways in which Border Patrol traumatizes its own agents, thus trapping them and the migrants they encounter in an ever-deeper cycle of suffering. After an agent shoots and kills someone, Cantú’s boss, Hayward, speaks of his own lingering pain after shooting someone decades earlier. While he speaks, “an old and quiet pain [spreads] across his face the likes of which [Cantú] hopes [he] would never be made to carry.”
Cantú probes the question of whether the violence he sees is rooted in the individual or the institutional, and ultimately decides that on the individual level, humans have goodness in them and are most often triggered to violence by institutional or broader social failings. He discusses the “warrior gene”—the evidence that some people (primarily men) carry a gene that predisposes them to aggression. However, he notes that the gene “can be triggered by childhood exposure to trauma,” and that those who carry the gene but aren’t abused in early life have a low risk of expressing it—suggesting that institutional and social failures are more powerful causes of violence than genetics. The testimony Cantú includes from a sicario (a drug cartel’s hitman) reveals that he, too, suffers a kind of moral injury after being sucked into the institution of the cartel, and that he’s been left traumatized by the work. In this way, Cantú suggests that it’s institutions, not people (even the most violent people), that are heartless and inhumane.
The Line Becomes a River offers a rare insider’s perspective on the institution of Border Patrol. However, Cantú also questions the trustworthiness of an insider’s perspective on an institution that skews its members’ moral frameworks, and so includes several external perspectives, too. While helping his friend José with his immigration problems, Cantú speaks to a court-appointed attorney, Walter, who doesn’t know that Cantú used to be a border agent. “I’ve almost never seen these guys express any humanity, any emotion,” the attorney says of border agents, adding, “How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?” The comment serves as a reminder that whether or not they experience inner turmoil like Cantú does, from an outsider’s perspective, those within the institution of border enforcement are simply the perpetrators of inhumane acts. And earlier in the book, while Cantú bandages the damaged feet of a woman he has apprehended crossing the desert, she says, “Eres muy humanitario”—“You have a lot of human goodness.” Cantú looks away and shakes his head, disagreeing and seeming ashamed. He is aware of all he’s done as an agent that is inhumane and also of how inhumane the institution must be if the simple act of tending to someone’s injury seems like a great humanitarian kindness.
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Institutional Violence Quotes in The Line Becomes a River
I wondered if he thought of his body as a tool for destruction or as one of safekeeping. I wondered, too, about my body, about what sort of tool it was becoming.
You must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people.
Hay mucha desesperación, he told me, almost whispering. I tried to look at his face, but it was too dark.
There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?
My uncle began to recount all the natural things he had been made to destroy in the years he worked as a contractor in Santa Fe. At one job site he tore down a mighty pine tree and cut it into pieces. […] It’s overwhelming sometimes, he said, to think of all the trees I’ve killed, all the scars I’ve left in the land.
Mostly I arrested migrants, I confessed. People looking for a better life.
I tell you, Walter said, the Border Patrol, the marshals, it’s like they forget about kindness. I’ve almost never seen these guys express any humanity, any emotion. I don’t know how they do it. How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?
Of course he has fear. La violencia, she said, la delincuencia, la corrupción.
All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.
The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. […] You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison.
