The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
Written and Narrated By: Francisco Cantú
Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
Often haunting but, ultimately, as muddy as the Rio Grande
Having grown up in a border town, with relatives living on the other side of the Rio Grande, many friends from there also, I can kinda sorta feel for Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River. It’s a memoir built upon his childhood on the Border, his few years as a Border Patrol agent, and his life post-said employment with a friendship with an illegal tacked on. And while parts of it are very good, the man is HAUNTED! parts of it were rather all over the place and came to feel like he’d grouped stream-of-conscious musings together to put out what appear to be several books in one.
There is history of the Border, nice. There’s the story of José at the end, even nicer tho’ some right-leaning reviewers thought it was all wah wah wah: All Americans bad/All Mexicans good. The most compelling part to me, though, was seeing how all that Francisco experienced and researched during his time as a BP agent metastasized into something horrifically malignant within his soul.
I TOTALLY understand how research (He reeeeally dived into all that happens, all that could go wrong, during border crossings, enough to where his dreams were taken over by visions seen into photographs) can by itself give a person PTSD. I developed a nice case of nightmares by the time Hurricane Rita hit the Gulf, simply by seeing what all was coming out of the region after Hurricane Katrina—If you care, if you involve yourself, if you look? You’re gonna be struck dumb by it all, make no mistake. So hearing Francisco say that his dreams were of lopped off heads casually displayed, of bloated bodies abandoned in the desert, was quite understandable to me. That he couldn’t NOT look, couldn’t NOT stop researching during his desk job with the Border Patrol, only added to what he saw when he worked the field. That crud can overwhelm a person, and I understood his dreams.
It’s just that a good chunk of the book is dedicated to those dreams, what they were, how he tried to interpret them… blah blah blah… got to be a bit of a distraction to what I was feeling was the humanization of what goes on at the Border. Yes, there’s a black and white line that separates Mexico from the United States, but have we forgotten our humanity so much that it should turn gray when we add the names and faces to the problem? Francisco gives the story its gray, but much of that is muddied when he addresses it then jumps around to mulling over the meaning of dreams then hops on outta the Border Patrol picture to tell us about how he quit to lick his wounds by working at a coffee shop.
That’s where he makes friends with an undocumented worker, one who goes back to Mexico to visit a dying mother, then can’t come back across. I DID like the story, the attempts to reframe José as a hardworking man who’d lived years in the country as a good citizen, to show that America’s workers don’t all come from America’s rank and file but who might come of more humble stock, across that black and white line, who come for dreams of a life less fraught with desperation. But alas, there’s no cohesiveness to this addition, this showing of a person’s hopes, dreams, family—it kinda sorta goes nowhere, and we’re left with much ambiguity.
There’s some mighty fine writing here; to be expected with Francisco’s education and his self-awareness. But it’s lost in the way the stories jump around and morph into entirely new things, go in different directions, midstream. Add to that, he narrates his own work as tho’ he’s reading his own story as a lifetime away from the trauma and the horror show—sorta plodding—and I lost the sensation of immediacy, of connection to the horror show. Indeed, I lost the sense that any of this mattered to the author. But I should add to that the acknowledgment that major pain can numb a person, cause detachment when things get too difficult, so p’raps the distant tones of his reading are simply par for the course.
Great bits, some horrific imagery, but several books rolled into one make this a good listen but not a great one. Humanizes Border Patrol agents and all they see and do while giving the human side, the human cost, of desert crossings to the multitude (And yeh yeh yeh, there are DEFinitely bad apples in the lot!) who make the journey.
It’s just that there’s a bit of blah blah and then I woke up blah in there too. Not enough to make it a bad book, but enough to make me scratch m’ head, let m’ thoughts wander off… And that’s never a good thing…!
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