The Line Becomes a River: Part 2 Summary & Analysis

The scenes Cantú now sees in daily emails are far more gory than the real-life tragedies he saw in the field. They are also more difficult to process, because there’s a sharp disconnect between the photographs and his surroundings in the office.

Again, Cantú’s suppressed stress expresses itself in dreams about his teeth. Here, the dreams—and, by extension, his stress—seem to be escalating in intensity, suggesting that the move to office work has not alleviated his emotional distress at all. 

This moment speaks to the extent of death and violence along the border. The complex symbolism of cartel murders indicates a total loss of respect for the value of a human life, in which a body is simply a canvas on which to convey a message to one’s enemies.

Cantú’s mother offers a perspective from outside of Border Patrol—a perspective that is still connected to nature and humanity. By contrast, Cantú’s perspective has been warped by institutionalization, as demonstrated by his earlier shooting of the bird.

Again, Cantú’s mother offers a valuable external perspective on the institution of Border Patrol. When communicated in her voice—which throughout the book is associated with nature, humanity, and empathy—the true inhumanity of the policy of allowing people to die in the desert has even more moral weight.

By trying to justify a policy that his mother framed as inhumane and out of step with their values, Cantú reveals just how far he’s been institutionalized by Border Patrol and how far it’s shifted his moral compass.

Here, Cantú explicitly expresses the sense suggested earlier, that being in an office is more emotionally taxing than being in the field, rather than less, precisely because it lacks field work’s immediacy. This, in turn, increases the work’s capacity to make Cantú detach emotionally.

Cantú illustrates the way in which manmade borders, particularly militarized ones, can increase crime and suffering, while still failing to stop the natural phenomenon of migration. In addition, he suggests that the sheer scale of the institution of modern U.S. border enforcement has given rise to equally huge illegal institutions, such as cartels, which operate in the shadows of border enforcement’s regulations. As such, one element of the border’s institutional violence is in the violence of the institutions that spring up to counter it.

By considering the powers his job affords him, Cantú highlights how powerless he actually feels—since, for example, staring into the eyes of a photograph doesn’t achieve anything. The underlying argument is that, for all its complexity and self-importance, the institution of Border Patrol has no power to improve life for anyone involved with it.

These scenes from inside a morgue indicate that at the height of Mexico’s drug war, the value of a human life has been completely eroded. The bodies become endless mountains of flesh, which the doctors have to depersonalize in order to do their work. Like Cantú, their own interactions with violence along the border lead to trauma and emotional detachment.

Cantu’s perspective shifts between small-scale tragedy (the death of two men) and large-scale tragedy (the uncountable dead bodies in the desert). The shifting scale hints at the impossibility of fathoming the value of one human life, when so many are being lost.

Cantú struggles with his institutionalization: both with the knowledge that the institution he works for is perverted by rule-bending agents like Cole, and with the knowledge that he is advancing farther away from interacting with migrants and into Border Patrol’s more abstract structural mechanisms. His discomfort indicates that he knows the work is changing him for the worse.

Cantú’s dreams about work reveal the stress and anxiety he is attempting to suppress in order to keep doing his job. This dream suggests that he feels threatened and unsupported, since nobody responds to his call for help.

Again, Cantú’s dream reveals the stress he’s under, which he suppresses until it explodes out of his subconscious in dreams. The dream suggests a general fear and an anxiety that he’s not doing his job well enough.

This exchange reveals how cheapened human life has become in Cantú’s eyes, as it takes him quite some time to register the tragedy of a death.

The heightened response to the loss of a Border Patrol agent contrasts with the unceremonious responses to migrants’ deaths in the desert. This contrast forms an implied argument about the injustice of treating human lives with such wildly varying degrees of respect.

Hayward’s casual use of a racist slur suggests that within the institution of Border Patrol, contempt for migrants is common and accepted—a condition that lays the groundwork for the mistreatment of migrants.

Cantú’s family’s history of migration highlights just how old and natural a phenomenon migration is, long predating the militarization of border enforcement. Additionally, Frances’s insistence on the family’s Spanish origins highlight the colonial power dynamics that led to the establishment of manmade national boundaries.

The dead, hanging bodies recall the mutilated bodies of the present-day drug war, which Cantú witnesses every day at work. The echo suggests the sheer, unfathomable scale of lives lost in Mexico in recent centuries.

Cantú’s mixed cultural heritage highlights how natural and commonplace migration is, and how blunt an instrument manmade borders are in a world where so many people’s identities are split across national boundaries.

Again, Cantú highlights that his own family’s heritage is split across the U.S.–Mexico border: his grandfather was born in Mexico and now lies at rest in the U.S., with a view of his native country.

The belief that Mexico suffers 100-year cycles of disturbance contains an implicit acceptance of the inevitability of mass dying, suggesting that recurring tragedy can erode a people’s belief in their right to life. They may not value their own lives less, but they feel powerless to defend them.

The failure to investigate murders during Mexico’s drug war suggests both a lack of respect for the lives of the everyday poor people who died and a sense that large-scale dying is somehow inevitable or even unremarkable. Both explanations point to a society that has lost sight of the value of a human life.

In being left out of the official death tolls, the disappeared and uncounted are written out of history; the value of their lives is entirely negated. 

Again, Cantú notes that the situation on the border is one of complete disrespect for human life and its sanctity: partly because so many lives are left uncounted, and partly because even counting is a profoundly impoverished way to measure the uncountable value and needs of human life.

Cantú dissociates because the information he’s absorbing is too traumatic to process, and because there’s such a disconnect between the violence of the story and the comfort of his surroundings. The episode marks one stage further in his traumatized emotional detachment.

The language used to describe migrants obscures the tragedy of the deaths and disappearances on the border by diminishing migrants’ individuality and humanity. This also normalizes the tragedy and all but ensures it will continue.

Hayward’s suggestion implies that the cure for Cantú’s emotional struggles with his work is to progress further into the organization—a typically institutionalized response that will in fact entrap Cantú farther in the institution’s damaging grip.

Throughout the book, birds symbolize freedom. Here, Cantú’s resistance to the bird’s urging suggests how much freedom of spirit and mind he has lost as a result of his work in Border Patrol. In addition, his fear that the violence won’t affect him is in fact a fear of the ways the work and its necessary emotional compartmentalization are changing him, trapping him in the border’s cycle of pain.

Cantú has overridden his emotional misgivings about the new job, plunging himself into a demanding new work scenario. There’s an implication that he’s so detached from his own needs and instincts that he no longer knows how to listen to them—which, in turn, would be a sign of diminished connection to his particular humanity.

Again, Cantú highlights the anonymity of people who disappear while crossing the border, drawing on poetry to illustrate how much life and value that anonymity obscures.

The little boy’s attraction to the officers’ guns and badges reveals that in border regions, militarized, violent border enforcement are normalized and even lionized—thus perpetuating the institutional violence of border enforcement. The boy’s reverence seems even more jarring in the context of a Mexican restaurant—a site that nods to the importance of Mexican culture and Mexican migrants in the United States.

In Cantú’s dreams, wolves symbolize the violent side of human nature that must be acknowledged and neutralized rather than repressed. Following a day back in the field, this dream suggests that Cantú is subconsciously glad to once more be confronting the violence of his work head-on rather than from behind a computer screen, where he can so easily compartmentalize it.

The camaraderie between agents relies on light-hearted mutual mocking. Part of the institution’s violence is the way its culture deters members from processing their trauma by talking openly and honestly about their experiences.

In this book, wolves are associated with the violent shadow side of human nature. The story of their extermination suggests a cultural unwillingness to acknowledge this universal shadow side, while the careful conservation projects Cantú mentions suggest some hope that repressed elements of human nature might be reintegrated, either in Cantú or in society at large.

Beto becomes more conscious of the wildlife around him after hearing of his cousin’s death because nature humanizes people and reminds them of the full richness and complexity of the human experience. In the context of a book in which human life is so often devalued, nature becomes a crucial reminder of the true worth of life.

Only in connecting with his coworkers as humans, rather than in their professional capacities, does Cantú feel a sense of happiness and promise. The evening points to how institutions usually dehumanize people by requiring them to leave their personal lives out of their interactions in the name of professionalism. 

This passage highlights the illicit, unofficial land boundaries (determined by cartels) that flank the official U.S.–Mexico border. Cantú suggests that whether it’s done by cartels or governments, claiming territory is always about control and power, and thus that such arbitrary and unnatural boundaries will also contain the possibility of violence.

The sicario’s testimony shows that even those who perpetrate the most extreme violence of Mexico’s drug war are emotionally affected by it. These sicarios have to work while high or drunk in order to shield their psyches from the violence—an extreme form of the emotional detachment readers see in Cantú as he struggles to navigate the trauma of his work. The implication is that trauma and emotional detachment are universal among those touched by the violence on the border.

People buried in mass graves are anonymous; they are denied any individuality, and as such, their lives seem less valuable. This passage reinforces the book’s claim that the tragedies on the border are reinforced and perpetuated by the impossibility of valuing every individual life lost—both because of the sheer number of deaths and because so many people remain unaccounted for.

Here, Cantú is reckoning with his own identity. From his uncle’s possessions, he gets a new perspective on his own life, in which he is just one of his father’s many children. The effect makes him slightly anonymous and strange to himself, just as the migrants he encounters are strange to him. The passage thus becomes an implicit commentary on the way humans understand others, in which value is contingent on how much of a person’s individual story is known.

In this book, reverence for nature is associated with living in full humanity and an appreciation for life in all its forms. By revealing that he complied with the professional requirement to harm nature, despite his reverence for it, Cantú’s uncle underscores Cantú’s own experiences in Border Patrol: that the structures of work and society can cause a person to act against their own values—and harm them psychologically in doing so, as indicated by Cantú’s uncle’s comment about feeling overwhelmed.

By not telling his uncle about the destruction he has seen while working with Border Patrol, Cantú reveals that he’s still emotionally suppressing that destruction because it’s too painful to confront. In addition, Cantú’s bewilderment about his uncle’s behavior reveals that he can’t yet see the parallel with his own: that he, too, is destroying something he loves (i.e., the cultural and personal exchanges between Mexico and the United States).

Cantú’s inability to express his troubles at work signals emotional detachment and repression—his coping strategies for dealing with the pain of border enforcement. His immediate fear about having a degenerative disease indicates both how psychologically damaging this repression is and that he has internalized the suffering on the border, convincing himself that there is something wrong with him rather than the institution of Border Patrol.

Cantú notes that the emotional detachment necessary for his work as a Border Patrol agent is also widespread in the general population. Living in such proximity to the tragedies and violence in Juárez, the whole city of El Paso has to emotionally detach from the suffering in order to live their lives—and in so doing, they perpetuated the suffering.

The U.S.–Mexico border seeks to establish a binary: “us and them,” “here and there.” Having crossed the border fluidly throughout his life, Cantú understands that such an arbitrary binary overlooks the humanity of people on either sides of the line—and yet he knows that he won’t go back because he, too, has internalized this cultural lesson.

Cantú offers a contrast to the present-day emotional detachment from the violence in Juárez: evidence that, in the past, citizens of El Paso have been more callous, seeing the loss of life in Juárez as a source of entertainment. The incident stands as proof that the human capacity to ignore the value of others’ lives is not a new phenomenon.

Stars are often interpreted as clues to destiny or aids to help people navigate. By imagining his own family stargazing in Mexico many years ago, Cantú illustrates a more gentle, inspiring side of the age-old phenomenon of migration: people experiencing awe and a sense of destiny before seeking a new life in another country. This is the kind of migration that has been curtailed by the militarization of the border.  

Beto’s comment about the “narco” and Cantú’s concern about the woman highlight the sense of perpetual threat in areas along the border. The episode suggests that nobody and nothing are ever fully safe here, which consequently suggests how devalued human life has become for some people in these areas.

The serial murders and disappearances of women in Mexico are evidence of the devaluation of human life. Moreover, the murders fit into a self-perpetuating cycle in which society never confronts or metabolizes the tragedies, so the victims are dehumanized, life loses yet more value, and the likelihood of more murders increases.

The narratives Molloy highlights are designed in part to lessen the tragedy of these women’s deaths by insinuating that they deserved their fates or were worthless in society. Victim blaming and diminishing the value of lost lives are some the ways societies avoid assuming responsibility for their own ills, thus perpetuating cycles of loss and suffering.

Again, Cantú reveals the ways in which failing to value and seek justice for human life and death locks a society in cycles of suffering. In this instance, the danger is specifically aimed at the women of Mexico, who increasingly become targets after their society reveals how little it values their lives. However, also Cantú implies a parallel to the loss of migrant lives on the border, where loss of life is stoked by callous treatment.

The mixing of body parts from different women signals that these women have been stripped of all individuality and dignity. Much like the migrants who disappear on the border, these women’s lives are treated as valueless.

Here, Cantú presents two perspectives on the devaluation of human life. First, he argues, once tragedy and death have been normalized in a society, more are likely to follow, as they did in the form of Mexico’s drug war. Second, he notes that the devaluation of human life is never universal: those in more powerful social categories (such as U.S. citizens in El Paso) rarely have their lives devalued in the way that more vulnerable groups do.

Cantú highlights that the devaluation of human life is widespread. And again, he highlights that tragedy can initiate a self-reinforcing cycle, in which individuals and societies detach emotionally from suffering, thus allowing more suffering to occur.

Manuel’s mother’s memories of the border highlight that there is nothing essential or inevitable about the current militarized border, and that it hasn’t even been around that long. As such, Cantú questions the validity of militarization.

This conversation illustrates how society can trap people in institutions, even when those institutions harm them or their communities, by offering no valid alternatives. In this way, the violence of the institution of Border Patrol is reinforced by broader social injustices.

This comment highlights the gulf between the naïve, idealistic Cantú who entered Border Patrol, and the more jaded person he has become. This difference has been wrought by the harshness and violence of the institution of Border Patrol, which, Cantú implicitly argues, is far more powerful than any individual.

Again, Cantú notes how much border enforcement has changed in recent decades, implicitly suggesting that the current state of militarized enforcement is unnecessary. In addition, he notes the ways in which manmade borders sever families and individual identities, such as Beto’s.

As with Cantú’s other dreams, the disturbed tone here suggests repressed trauma and stress finding an expression through his subconscious—thus signaling the profound emotional and psychological impact of his work. In addition, the specifics of the dream—the violence that occurs in the midst of a party—suggests that Cantú has come to feel there is no element of life that’s safe from violence. Again, this suggests that his work is taking a heavy toll on his life and conception of the world. 

Here, Cantú returns to the theme of the value of a human life, arguing that cases where death is widespread enough to be reported in statistics are precisely where individuality and human stories must be respected most, in order to fully weigh the import of the mass tragedy.

Hayward’s confession reveals the violence that institutions like Border Patrol can perpetrate against those inside as well as outside them. In addition, there’s a secondary, implicit question about whether an institution like Border Patrol can feasibly do its job fairly if it’s staffed by individuals who have been traumatized in the course of their work. Cantú suggests that institutions can traumatize their members, who then perpetuate the suffering of non-members. 

This research emphasizes that social institutions that perpetuate poverty, inequality, and other injustices are much more culpable for violence than individual psychology. In addition, Cantú implies that the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, racism, and other inequalities might create conditions in which violence in inevitable.

By revealing violence’s universality in the animal kingdom, this incident somewhat contradicts the idea that violence is largely attributable to institutional failings. However, Cantú implies that it’s a base, animal instinct—and by extension that, given the right conditions, humans can and should override it.

Institutions are inherently violent, Cantú implies, because they create environments in which rules are more important than a person’s moral compass. As a result, they require people to betray their own values, causing damage to their psyches—and thus, possibly, damage to the people whose lives they impact in the course of their work.

In the context of their work with Border Patrol, whose agents so often dehumanize the migrants they encounter, Manuel and Cantú’s kindness to this woman seems like a remarkable sign of respect for the value of her life. However, Cantú’s inability to make small talk with her illuminates the power imbalance between them, which devalues the woman’s life, no matter how personally affable Cantú and Manuel are.

Throughout this book, nature is associated with wisdom and the full range of human experience—however, here, Cantú suggests that only those privileged enough to enjoy nature freely can access this sense of wisdom and freedom.

Cantú’s discomfort with the woman’s gratitude indicates his awareness of the power imbalance between them: he may value her humanity, but he has chosen to work for an institution that does not, and he must bear the responsibility for that.

Cantú implicitly compares himself to the sicario, suggesting that he believes his work with the institution of Border Patrol to have been damaging and violent, both to others (like the sicario’s) and, as a result, to his own psyche.

This passage suggests Cantú’s hope that he may one day, like the sicario, find relief from the psychic wounds of his work. By extension, it reveals his hope that the cycles of pain and emotional trauma incurred at institutions like Border Patrol are not inevitable and can be stopped.

Cantú uses the exact sentence used by a recruit who quit the agency during their training, suggesting that he, too, wishes he had realized earlier on that this wasn’t “the work for him,” and thus saved himself the pain of institutionalization in such a problematic agency. 

Again, Cantú highlights the ways in which trauma perpetuates pain. A society that has experienced great pain, he suggests, is predisposed to experience and perceive even more pain in the future.

This passage implies that the end of violence lies in the human capacity to draw from more elevated human instincts such as those for creativity and imagination.

Again, Cantú’s dreams reveal how much his work with Border Patrol has impacted his subconscious psychological and emotional health, seeming to trap him in a cycle of pain. His fear that he will never escape the violence also speaks to the cyclical nature of his pain.

However, in waking, Cantú seems to remember that escaping the cycle of pain is possible, but will require him to accept and confront the difficult emotions he has suppressed during the course of his work—including his own violent instincts.