Francisco Cantú

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things, the sense in what we do when they run from us, scattering into the brush, leaving behind their water jugs and their backpacks, how to explain what we do when we discover their lay-up spots. Of course, what you do depends on who you’re with, what kind of border agent you want to become, but it’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze, and Christ, it sounds terrible, and maybe it is, but the idea is that when they come out from their hiding places, when they return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize their situation, that they’re fucked, that it’s hopeless to continue on, and they’ll save themselves right then and there, they’ll struggle toward the nearest highway or dirt road to flag down some passing agent or head for the nearest parched village to knock on someone’s door, someone who will give them food and water and call us to take them in—that’s the idea, the sense in it all.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

We found them one by one, huddled in the brush and curled up around the trunks of palo verde trees and cholla cactus. Not one of them ran. We made them take off their shoelaces and empty their backpacks and we walked all 10 of them single-file back to the road. For a while I walked next to an older man who told me they were all from Michoacán. It’s beautiful there, I said. Yes, he replied, but there’s no work. You’ve been to Michoacán? I nodded. Then you must have seen what it is to live in Mexico. And now you see what it is like for us at the border. 

At the station I processed the man for deportation and after I had taken his fingerprints he asked me if there was any work at the station for him. You don’t understand, I said, you’ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. I understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.