Trauma and Emotional Detachment Theme Analysis

After studying the U.S.–Mexico border at college, Francisco Cantú takes a job with the United States Border Patrol, hoping that firsthand experience will help him understand the border better. However, he is unprepared for the reality of confronting death and desperation every day. His job as a field agent entails tracking migrants crossing the desert in harsh conditions, many of them fleeing danger at home, and processing anyone he finds alive into the legal system. He excels at his work and quickly climbs the agency’s ranks; however, his personal relationships suffer and he begins to have nightmares. It is only many years after leaving Border Patrol that he can access the emotions he suppressed while working for the agency. Cantú observes a similar emotional detachment in others whose lives intersect with the border, suggesting that it’s simply impossible to witness suffering on such a grand scale without shutting down emotionally. This fact creates a self-reinforcing cycle of pain, in which the magnitude of suffering at the border breeds detachment and complacency, which in turn allow the violence to continue.

Cantú struggles to sustain meaningful human relationships during his time as a border agent, because to do so would require him to draw upon the emotional parts of himself that he’s shut down in order to do his daily work. When his fellow patrol officer Morales is in a motorcycle accident, Cantú visits him in the hospital but leaves when he starts feeling emotional. Standing in the parking lot, he writes, “My face became hot and I could feel moisture collecting in my eyes […] I would not go back, I decided, I would not let the water gather into tears.” Cantú’s unwillingness to cry implies both that he has become used to suppressing his emotions and that he fears what might happen if he allows himself to feel them. Later—years after leaving Border Patrol—Cantú calls his mother, who can tell he’s withholding something. “This feels like it used to,” she tells him, explaining, “It’s like when you were on the border […] All those years I knew things were weighing on you, but you were so sensitive to my questions—I couldn’t ask about it, I couldn’t show concern, I could never reach you.” The emotional burden of his work forced Cantú to suppress a core element of his humanity: his ability to sustain close relationships.

Cantú also describes others detaching from the suffering at the border, suggesting that this phenomenon is fairly universal in border-adjacent communities and thus an integral part of the way the border functions. Most notably, Cantú quotes from the writer Charles Bowden’s interviews with a former sicario, a hitman employed by a drug cartel. The sicario explains that “almost as a rule, he and all the cartel men he knew and worked with were always high and drunk while carrying out their work”—work that involved killing and torturing people—and that this sicario often didn’t fully realize what he’d done until he sobered up days later. By including this testimony of emotional repression, Cantú humanizes the sicario and shows that this kind of detachment from the suffering along the border is terribly common. Cantú also quotes a doctor who works at a morgue in Ciudad Juárez, where she processes the countless bodies that have been mutilated and killed in the city’s drug violence. The doctor reveals that “in order to make it through the day she had to regard the cadavers as medical evidence, not human bodies”—meaning that in the face of unimaginable violence, she has to shut down her capacity for empathy in order to survive.

Over the course of his work, Cantú also begins to suffer from nightmares—a clear sign of repressed emotions struggling for expression—again emphasizing that those who live in proximity to the U.S.–Mexico border have to emotionally numb themselves in order to deal with the suffering around them. Cantú prefaces his account of his time in Border Patrol with a dream of visiting a wolf in a cave, writing, “The animal seems truly fearsome, but also wise.” Later, wolves haunt his dreams, symbolizing a violence he has suppressed to his subconscious but which is “wise” in that he must reckon with it if he’s to emerge whole from his experience. Later, Cantú introduces the psychoanalyst Jung’s concept of “shadow”: the repressed thoughts and emotions that silently shape a person’s life. Cantú suggests that just as he personally will have to reckon with everything he’s repressed, healing the tragedy at the border will require society to contend with its own shadow—namely, the humanity it has refused to see in all those whose lives have been ended or destroyed by the border. Thus Cantú illustrates that the repression of human and empathetic responses to the trouble at the border ravages both individual psyches and society at large.