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“Witnessing beyond Recognition”: An Existentialist Reading of Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border”

This paper proposes an existentialist reading of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018), a memoir by former U.S. Border- Patrol agent Francisco Cantú. Drawing upon Anya Topolski’s political ethics of relationality, grounded in Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of alterity and Hannah Arendt’s concept of plurality, and Luna Dolezal’s re-reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of shame, it examines the triangulation of the personal, the intersubjective, and the public in Cantú’s autobiographical act. The paper argues that by articulating its protagonist’s experience from the perspective of both a law enforcer and an emotionally involved immediate observer of the hazards and horrors of undocumented immigration, Cantú’s memoir negotiates subjectivity in relational terms, exposing complex human realities of the U.S./Mexico borderlands that signify the immigrant body as a product of alarmist discourses, illegal industries, and geopolitical mapping, and hence adds new perspectives to the human tragedy produced by the global economic apartheid. The paper also maintains that by turning the private lives of immigrants from abstractions into subjects of the polarizing (trans)national debate and foregrounding both its protagonist’s and its readers’ ethical and critical response, The Line Becomes a River affirms the existentialist view that the ability to sustain personal responsibility and relationality within a network of Others by making a conscious authentic choice is the ultimate signpost of our humanity and self- determination.

Francisco Cantú ; U.S./Mexico borderlands ; immigrant body ; memoir ; relationality ; existentialism ; Sartre ; Levinas ; Arendt ; shame

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