The Value of a Human Life Theme Analysis

While working for the United States Border Patrol, Francisco Cantú confronts the enormous scale of death on the U.S.–Mexico border. While working as a field agent in the desert, he finds the bodies of migrants who’ve died while trying to cross the desert into the U.S.—and, later, when he’s stationed in an office in El Paso, Texas, he sees countless images of mutilated and murdered bodies belonging to victims of Mexico’s drug violence just across the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez. He can only continue to do his work and live in proximity to such death by “suspending knowledge and concern” about it—that is, by ceasing to treat each of the dead with the care they deserve as humans. He notes, too, that Mexican and U.S. cultures at large have developed strategies to minimize the trauma of this mass dying by negating the individual humanity of the dead. Years after leaving Border Patrol, Cantú becomes deeply involved in the plight of his friend José, an undocumented migrant whose life is destroyed when he leaves the United States to visit his dying mother in Mexico and is repeatedly captured by Border Patrol while trying to return to his wife and three kids in the U.S. This intimate knowledge of an individual migrant’s case and the suffering the border causes in a family’s life forces Cantú to think about the countless other migrants he’d found dead or been responsible for deporting throughout his time in Border Patrol, who now take on an unbearable weight. Cantú argues that the value of a human life is not relative to a person’s nationality or other origins but is instead incalculable and even infinite. He also suggests that in order to fully value a life, humans need a sense of the subject’s story and individuality—but that this is precisely what is denied to most people seeking to cross the border.

Throughout the book, the deaths and injuries of American citizens and patrol officers are treated with much more gravity than those of Latin American migrants, suggesting that American culture has become blind to migrants’ equal humanity, simply because they’re anonymous and “other.” When a Border Patrol agent is killed, Cantú goes to work “to find the intel center teeming with uniformed agents and high-level command staff.” The agency goes into overdrive seeking resolution and justice for the death of one staff member; meanwhile, an endless flow of dead migrants passes through its jurisdiction with barely any response. Similarly, when Cantú’s friend Morales ends up in hospital after a traffic accident, his visiting room is filled with family, childhood friends, and coworkers—in stark contrast to the silent, anonymous deaths and injuries Cantú witnesses among migrants trying to cross the border.

Cantú often cites statistics about the lives lost in border crossings, drug violence, and human trafficking, while also noting that statistics alone dehumanize the dead and thus exacerbate the problem of migrants being seen as faceless masses. Worse still, even statistics omit the many humans who have simply disappeared in the humanitarian catastrophes on the border. In discussing the femicides (the killing of women) that began to escalate in Ciudad Juárez in the mid-1990s, Cantú describes the discovery of mass graves in which different women’s body parts were mingled—“a literal amalgamation of individual victims into an undifferentiated mass.” In their anonymity, the women lose all dignity and right to justice in the eyes of the authorities. Cantú also cites a study by cultural sociologist Jane Zavisca, which analyzed the most common metaphors journalists use in discussing migrant deaths. Zavisca found that “economic metaphors were predominant, characterizing migrant deaths as a ‘cost,’ ‘calculation,’ or ‘gamble.’” This recurring metaphor dehumanizes migrants by turning them into a currency, thus making their individual humanity and suffering easier to dismiss.

Cantú struggles to reconcile his heartbreak over José’s case with his involvement in enforcing so many other family separations as a Border Patrol officer, recognizing that he himself had ceased to see the migrants he interacted with as individuals. The book’s structure reflects the disproportionate weight Cantú lends José’s story compared to other migrants’: the third of its three sections focuses on José’s story alone, leaving readers to imagine all the equally full and human stories that might surround the countless anonymous migrants in the two earlier sections. After leaving Border Patrol, Cantú struggles with being so invested in José’s case when there are millions like him. His mother reassures him that caring for José is important because it’s helping him remember the humanity of all migrants: “For his family, and for you, José is unique. Sure there might be thousands or millions of people in his position, but it’s because of him that their situation is no longer abstract to you.” The incalculable value of a life, his mother suggests, can’t be appreciated through numbers alone.