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. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they 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. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there.
Plagued by nightmares, 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 whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River goes behind the headlines, making urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line
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.
