The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“I wondered if he thought of his body as a tool for destruction or for safekeeping. I wondered, too, about my own body, about what sort of tool it was becoming.”

This quote near the beginning of Part 1 marks one of the first instances in which Cantú thinks critically about the role he will play as a Border Patrol agent. As he goes through training, he sees that the Border Patrol will view his body as a “tool,” which is a form of objectification. Asking whether he is being trained to become a tool for violence or “safekeeping” suggests that serving with the Border Patrol will likely blur the lines of Cantú’s moral and ethical boundaries. This passage also foreshadows the physical, mental, and emotional toll the job will have on Cantú.

“Look, I told [my mother], I spent four years in college studying international relations and learning about the border through policy and history. You can tell whoever asks that I’m tired of studying, I’m tired of reading about the border in books. I want to be on the ground, out in the field, I want to see the realities of the border day in and day out. I know it might be dangerous, but I don’t see any better way to truly understand the place. […] I don’t know if the border is a place for me to understand myself, but I know there’s something here I can’t look away from. Maybe it’s the closeness of life and death, maybe it’s the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I’ll never understand it until I’m close to it.” 

Cantú’s conversation with his mother about his decision to join the Border Patrol provides a glimpse of his motivations. He spells out the tensions that interest him and his personal investment in border issues. For him, the job is less about arresting or deporting undocumented migrants and more about spending time seeing and experiencing the border for himself. Rather than studying the border from afar in abstract terms, Cantú recognizes that he feels a pull toward the border as a place, and that what is happening there that he is something he “can’t look away from.”