The Spire

William McHale ’26

Features Editor

Acclaimed author Francisco Cantú spoke in the Booth Media Lab on the 31st of October as part of the Working Writers Series at the College. Cantú, originally from Arizona, is a former border control agent, translator, and author of The Line Becomes a River. His book was met with rave reviews, and he has been featured in This American Life, The New Yorker, and a number of other publications. After a craft talk in Smith in the afternoon, students gathered in the Prior Performing Arts Center to hear a reading from Cantú’s writing. He selected two different readings to highlight the history of the US Southern border landscape as well as his personal experiences creating stories out of the landscape with his mother. 

Cantú has a unique perspective on the border crisis as he is a third-generation Mexican-American and a former border cop himself. He told the stories of his childhood in the West Texas desert, where his mother worked as an interpretive park ranger and crafted narratives of the Wild West in the desert. His family had to drive an hour to reach a grocery store and these drives taught him to create stories out of his surroundings like his mother did.

Much of the talk was about the perception of the border landscape, which varies from being beautiful and ecologically-diverse in some places to desolate and lonely in other stretches. One of his readings told the history of surveyors tasked with surveying the boundary lines of the border after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Cantú spoke of how the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the Wild West continue to shape current conversations about how to resolve the border crisis. 

Cantú was writing about places close to where he had grown up but also places he had worked in as a border patrol agent, which was hard for him to reconcile with and lead to bad dreams for a while. During the Q&A, he explained that his perception of the landscape changed because of his work, losing its awe and instead becoming “weaponized” through his work. He says that thoughts of migrants crossing are always in the back of his head when he is in the borderlands. His book contains a number of stories from his time as a border patrol agent that were notable to him for being moments of shared humanity with the migrants. Remembering names and providing care became important to him even as he felt that he was developing an instilled hostility to those he interacted with on the border. He believes that a humanitarian response is needed at the border instead of a militarized reaction. 

Cantú now teaches at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson. He continues to write and is also the founder of Detained, which collects oral stories from detained immigrants.