The Line Becomes a River

What a tricky book to review. Longtime readers and friends will know I read a lot of books about immigration, the border, and Latin America. So when this book of "dispatches" from a former Border Patrol agent started garnering some buzz, I knew I'd need to pick it up.

Francisco Cantú has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona. While this means his prose is certifiably beautiful, it also means he sounds nothing like a Border Patrol agent – neither the ones I've met nor the ones who feature prominently (often crudely) in these pages. Between Cantú's increasingly frequent nightmares and his poetic longing for the beauty of the desert, this book is a rollercoaster. Unfortunately, when every ray of sunshine and every footprint in the sand is imbued with transcendent meaning, it all becomes a bit of a blur. Case in point: "As he ate, my uncle seemed to me like a small and gentle bird, and I wondered at his capacity to demolish the landscape, despite his need for solace in wild places." Um, what?

It's not entirely clear to the reader (or to the author's mother, it turns out) why Cantú joined the Border Patrol in the first place. Having studied migration policy in college, he was not naïve about how unpoetic – indeed, how ethically fraught – the job would be. And while it does seem that Cantú was committed to bringing a humanizing touch to the migrants he encountered, the whole premise of the book is a little too convenient not to wonder if he didn't have a bestselling book in mind when he took the job in the first place.