the line becomes a river francisco cantu

There are echoes, too, of McCarthy’s spareness in Cantú’s eschewal of speech marks and his rendering of Spanish dialogue untranslated.

It’s hard to imagine Charles Bowden or Cormac McCarthy, with their disdain for embellishment and indulgence, writing out of, say, Maine or West Virginia or any other more forgiving environment. The literary voices of the region have often sublimated something of the landscape’s austerity. The borderlands are a zone of exception, set apart from their contiguous nations, and not only by climate – what the writer Tom Miller has called a “thin Third Country”. Told in three progressively more soul-searching parts, Francisco Cantú’s memoir of his nearly four years as a border patrol agent describes the borderlands and his work there with a raw-nerved tenderness that seems to have been won from both the landscape and, disconcertingly, the violence he was implicated in.įrancisco Cantú.

The wanton waste of lifesaving water, in other words, is consistent with preserving the desert’s lethality. In 1994 the Clinton administration instituted a strategy called Operation Gatekeeper, the purpose of which was to “harden” security in towns close to the Mexico border, thereby funnelling those determined to cross unofficially into more arid and isolated parts of the desert, where they were more likely to die. The agents’ actions have been officially disowned, but the US’s arid borderlands have been deployed as a natural barrier against unwanted incomers since long before the current president began fantasising about his “big, beautiful wall”.

I n January an Arizona humanitarian organisation issued a report citing numerous instances of border patrol agents slashing water containers left for undocumented migrants crossing the desert on foot.

The line becomes a river francisco cantu