The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantu

NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

• ISBN10: 0735217718
• ISBN13: 9780735217713
• Publish Date: 6 February 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Riverhead Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780735217713

Reviews

[Beth C.]

Border difficulties have been going on for as long as there have been borders. And yet, in some ways, those borders only exacerbate those difficulties - or create new ones. Some people holler about open borders, and everyone should have a place...while others yell about closed borders and drugs and guns. What so many refuse to see or to admit is that both are correct to at least a certain degree, and there *is* a way forward, once people stop thinking politically and with hatred and fear, and start thinking with humanity in their hearts.

Cantu shows all sides of this issue. He is Hispanic, and he worked for the Border Patrol. He has also had a friend deported - one who had been in the US for roughly 30 years, and who was someone the US should be proud to call a citizen. He highlights the difficulty of border crossings, and the legal system, as well as some of the history from the beginning. He doesn't shy away from the cartels and the killings, either. What Cantu does do is give a reader a nuanced look into the world that most of us have never seen, and could never imagine. And he does it in a way that doesn't scream "LOOK AT ME!", but instead whispers, "This is where we are.". The writing is poetic and beautiful, and all the more heartrending because of the topics covered within.

I highly recommend this book. It offers a much-needed clarity, a perspective most do not have, in the ongoing argument that revolves around that line that becomes a river - the border.