The Line Becomes A River - Softcover

Francisco Cant�

3.97

14,486 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847925227 ISBN 13: 9781847925220

Publisher: Riverhead Books,, 2018

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A former Border Patrol agent's haunting experience of an unnatural divide and the lives caught on either side, struggling to cross or to defend it.

For Francisco Cant�, the border is in the blood. His mother, a second-generation Mexican American, raised him in Arizona's desert scrublands and the national parks where she worked as a ranger, driven to protect the places she loved. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cant� joins the Border Patrol. Stationed at the remote crossroads of a drug route and a smuggling corridor, he learns how to track other humans under the punishing glare of the sun and through dark, frigid nights. He detains the exhausted, the parched, huddled children yearning for their families. He hauls in the bodies from where they have fallen.

Plagued by nightmares, Cant� abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when a friend, a regular at the caf� where he now works, travels back to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantu discovers that the border and its stories have migrated with him. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River brings home to us the destruction that US policy inflicts on countless migrants' lives, and the violence it wreaks on the humanity of us all.

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About the Author:

FRANCISCO CANT� is an author and translator with an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona. His essays and translations appear frequently in Guernica and his work can also be found in Best American Essays 2016, Ploughshares, Orion, and Public Books, where he serves as a contributing editor. A Fulbright fellow, Cant� also served as an agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, working in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

Review:

"Fresh, urgent...A devastating narrative of the very real human effects of depersonalized policy." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“There is a line dividing what we know and do not know. Some see the world from one shore and some from the other. Cant� brings the two together to a spiritual whole. My gratitude for this work of the soul.” –Sandra Cisneros

“A beautiful, fiercely honest, and nevertheless deeply empathetic look at those who police the border and the migrants who risk – and lose -- their lives crossing it. In a time of often ill-informed or downright deceitful political rhetoric, this book is an invaluable corrective.” —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

"Cant�’s story, and intelligent and humane perspective, should mortify anyone who ever thought building a wall might improve our lot. He advocates for clarity and compassion in place of xenophobia and uninformed rhetoric. His words are emotionally true and his literary sensibility uplifting.” –Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men

"This book tells the hard poetry of the desert heart. If you think you know about immigration and the border, you will see there is much to learn. And you will be moved by its unexpected music." –Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway

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