{"id":1226,"date":"2018-12-31T16:18:01","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2018-12-31T16:18:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:18:01","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-129","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1226","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

MEMOIR\/IMMIGRATION<\/p>\n

Francisco Cant\u00fa<\/span><\/p>\n

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Riverhead Books<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-7352-1771-3, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 256 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n

February 6, 2018<\/p>\n

They come from Michoac\u00e1n and Guadalajara, from Oaxaca and El Salvador.<\/span> Men, women, children, entire families. Some are heroin mules, \u201ccoyotes,\u201d and cartel scouts; some are pregnant women, children escaping gangs, and fathers who want to feed their kids. One man offers to clean up around the station while he waits for the bus that will return him to Mexico. Sometimes the migrants\u2019 backpacks are dumped on the desert floor, the water drained, the clothes and food burned. Other times, the migrants\u2019 blistered feet are washed and bandaged. There are abandoned drug loads and abandoned people, extraordinary cruelty and ordinary kindness, paranoia and compromising situations, kidney failure and the comatose and the dead. The Southwestern desert is a vast graveyard. A Texas sheriff notes, \u201cFor every one we find, we\u2019re probably missing five.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border<\/span> is the first book from Francisco Cant\u00fa,<\/span> a former U.S. Border Patrol agent. His writing has appeared in Harper\u2019s<\/span> and Guernica,<\/span> among other publications, and Cant\u00fa won a Pushcart Prize and the 2017 Whiting Award. The Line Becomes a River<\/span> is a profoundly disturbing memoir of Cant\u00fa\u2019s years in the Border Patrol during years of breathtaking violence, when Felipe Calder\u00f3n was president of Mexico and challenged the cartels.<\/p>\n

Cant\u00fa, whose family came from Mexico, spent time growing up in West Texas, his mother a park ranger. He left the desert for Washington, D.C., and earned a degree in international relations, studying the southern border. Seeking to add practical experience to his academic studies, Cant\u00fa entered the Border Patrol academy. \u201cThe government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose,\u201d his mother warns him. \u201cStepping into a system doesn\u2019t mean that the system becomes you,\u201d he parries.<\/p>\n

Divided into three parts, The Line Becomes a River<\/span> is composed of a series of vignettes, sometimes approximating stream-of-consciousness. Cant\u00fa is conflicted and dreams of wolves and disintegrating teeth; Jungian psychology provides context. He alternates between the anecdotal and the empirical, fitting human faces to the facts and figures\u2014all those numbers\u2014and providing a history of the line\u2014all those broken treaties. Cant\u00fa has read his Charles Bowden<\/span> and Molly Molloy<\/span> and Sara Uribe.<\/span><\/p>\n

After Cant\u00fa left the agency to attend graduate school, he learns that a friend with whom he shared breakfast almost every morning, Jos\u00e9, has been arrested re-entering the country after visiting his dying mother. It\u2019s the first time Cant\u00fa visits anyone in detention, attends the court hearings, witnesses the slow-motion ripping apart of a family. The last part of The Line Becomes a River <\/span>is related in Jos\u00e9\u2019s voice, a very effective technique, visceral and instructive: \u201cThe U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Line Becomes a River<\/span> seems an honest examination of conscious, a reckoning on Cant\u00fa\u2019s part. Though he occasionally strays into melodrama, I admire Cant\u00fa\u2019s writing and was moved by the stories he relates. Still, The Line Becomes a River<\/span> leaves me unsettled, troubled by something I can\u2019t quite put my finger on. Cant\u00fa wonders whether his shame can be redeemed, spiritual sickness healed. I wonder at the costs to human beings of what sometimes seems a personal experiment on the part of Cant\u00fa.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}