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Mapping the Southwestern Frontier in the New Millennium – Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

This paper discusses the rethinking of the American West in Francisco Cantú’s recently published memoir, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018). Written by a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, Cantú’s text chronicles the protagonist’s journey along the U.S.–Mexico continental border, from Arizona to Texas, during and after his 2008–2012 Border Patrol service. Like most memoirs, it straddles the private and the public and produces diverse and multiple subject positions. As he articulates his experience both from the perspective of a law enforcer and as an emotionally involved immediate observer of hazards and horrors of undocumented immigration and the bordering practices that “resignify human body with indifference, ” Cantú inevitably brings into conversation the legal and the spatial, juxtaposing the border, a geopolitical, historically constructed project crisscrossed by economic (both legal and illegal) investments in the land, to the human reality of the borderlands, an ambiguous contact zone shaped by multicultural and multigenerational memory, oral tradition, and a spiritual correlation between people and place. Drawing upon Jane Danielewicz’s view of the memoir as a genre whose function is not only personal or expressive but also public, with a potential to challenge cultural master narratives, create opportunities for political or social action, and provoke change, the paper argues that Cantú’s text itself functions as a contact zone as it negotiates subjectivity primarily in relational terms. Turning private lives of immigrants from abstractions into subjects of public discourse by adding a personal face to the human tragedy produced by the global “economic apartheid, ” it exposes contested cultural narratives and provides new perspectives to both the ongoing border fencing and immigration debate and the human reality of the contemporary West.

Francisco Cantú ; The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border ; the American Southwest ; borderlands ; immigration ; memoir

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