THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER - FRANCISCO CANTÚ

A impulse pickup at the library where the library staff had stocked dozens as part of their policy to provide lots of copies of new trendy books that you can’t reserve or renew. I actually got this one and that new book about post-post-Wonder Knee Native American history but since you can only have such books for 3 weeks, there was no way to read both. Besides being shorter, this book is lyrical and poetic and strange right out of the gate. We get lots of wonderful descriptions of the desert and the mountains that, of course, double as the wasteland and charnel house that Cantú patrols for 4 years. The book has a strange format. It starts where I assumed it would, with Cantú joining the Border Patrol and reporting on what that experience was like. Not unlike the Shane Bauer book about private prisons or, to a lesser extent, NICKEL AND DIMED. But the experience, or his description of it, peters out as he both gets numb to what’s going on and as he’s moved out of the field and into an “intelligence” job in an office. There’s some stuff in the middle about the border in history including a part about the Juárez femicides that 2666 is so interested in. The final section of this book concerns years later, when Cantú befriends a man who, after building a life for himself in the USA, returns to Mexico to visit his dying mother and is detained and removed when trying to return home. Partly, this section makes me feel like Cantú didn’t grasp how awful and terrible the US-Mexico border situation is until it destroyed the life of his friend. It’s hard to think of what to make of this section because the meat of the book, his time as a BP agent, is likewise tonally confused. It wasn’t clear he wanted to write an expose on what’s going on at the Border, though it does seem monstrous. And it also isn’t the case that this is someone who gradually came to regret what they’ve done or been a part of. He seems pretty passive the whole time, the only explanation he gives us w/r/t motivation is a vague “I’ve always been into the border, I studied it in school” which the other agents are likewise confused by. Even by the end it isn’t clear to me how he feels about the border. It’s devastated his friend and his friend’s family and he’s seen firsthand the cruelty of our immigration policy but he stops short of an outright condemnation, let alone suggestions. Either way, the writing was good and I’m always interested in stuff about Juárez. 1 horrible border.