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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Line Becomes a River, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Emotional Detachment
Natural Migration vs. Human Boundaries
The Value of a Human Life
Nature, Beauty, and Humanity
Institutional Violence
Summary
Analysis
Just before Thanksgiving, Francisco Cantú and his mother drive through West Texas on their way to visit a National Park where she worked as a ranger when he was a young boy. They stop at salt flats and look at the Guadalupe Mountains.
Cantú and his mother bond over their shared love of nature, which enriches their relationship by inviting into it the depth and complexity of the natural world. Meanwhile, the mountains represent geological time, and the fleetingness of human land interventions such as borders.
Themes
They arrive at the park’s visitor center, where an old friend of Cantú’s mother greets them. Cantú’s mother tells the friend that Cantú is studying the U.S.–Mexico border at college, and that they’re on their way to visit Ciudad Juárez. The woman tells them to be careful because Juárez is dangerous.
The juxtaposition of college with the danger in Ciudad Juárez underscores how different life is for Cantú compared to people on the other side of the border.
Themes
Cantú and his mother hike through a canyon in the national park the next day. She acts like a ranger again, explaining the landscape and pointing out a dragonfly’s shell, which she explains it would have shed in order to migrate. She wades into a stream and invites Cantú to join her.
Over Thanksgiving dinner later that night, Cantú asks his mother why she joined the National Park Service. She says she wanted to protect the landscape and help people love and care for nature, but that looking back on the experience, she isn’t sure how she feels about the experience. She doesn’t give more detail.
Cantú’s mother’s love of nature is associated with wisdom and humanity, thus adding weight to her later objections to his work with Border Patrol. Her ambivalence about her time as a park ranger, despite her love of nature, indicates that even an institution as seemingly benign as the National Park Service can have a complicated or negative impact on a person’s interests and belief systems.
Themes
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The next day, Cantú and his mother drive to El Paso, Texas. The owner of their motel says that he used to see the grass on the hillside opposite move every night, but it wasn’t the wind, it was “wetbacks”—a slur for a Mexican living in the United States. The owner says he doesn’t see the grass move anymore.
The changes in the movement of the grass reflect changes in border policy over the preceding years, as the border became more heavily militarized, cutting off people’s gentle, natural migration. Meanwhile, the motel owner’s vulgar language shows the ways people dehumanize those border crossers and devalue their lives.
Themes
The next morning, Cantú and his mother walk over a caged bridge over the Rio Grande into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Among the flow of migrants, they see a family saying goodbye—the parents are hugging while their son cries. The customs agent waves Cantú and his mother through without asking for their passports.
The tearful departure scene demonstrates the heavy emotional toll the border takes on individuals and families, and thus the way it devalues human life.
Themes
As they walk through Juárez, Cantú’s mother starts to feel overwhelmed and has to stop and sit. Cantú goes to a store to get her water and hears two women arguing about the upcoming election. One supports Calderón’s “tough on crime” policies, while the other tells her she’s mistaken.
Cantú’s mother’s country of origin is so unfamiliar to her that it overwhelms her, highlighting that the policing of the natural phenomenon of migration harms people by severing them from their roots.
Themes
Cantú and his mother decide to go to a nearby market to eat and rest. But while crossing the street to get there, she twists her ankle in a pothole and can’t get up. Cantú panics about the traffic and unsuccessfully tries to drag her on, but passersby get out of their cars or cross the street to help.
The warmth and communal spirit of the people of Juárez serves as an early counterpoint to the picture of the city that will emerge in the rest of the book, as it is engulfed by drug violence and becomes one of the deadliest places in the world. The kindness Cantú finds there underscores the residents’ humanity and the tragedy of the mass deaths that will occur there.
Themes
One man helps Cantú carry his mother to the sidewalk where she can sit. Cantú thanks the man, but he replies that in Juárez, people take care of one another and invites them to come visit him and his mother at the market, saying they’ll make them some quesadillas. Before leaving, he tells Cantú, “Aquí están en su casa”—“You’re at home here.”
Again, Cantú underscores how much people value human life in Juárez—and thus how tragic the city’s later violence is. The man’s comment that Cantú is “at home” in the city again underscores the arbitrariness of human borders, which sever people from their roots, since Cantú feels far from “at home” in the city, despite having Mexican origins.
Themes
