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Francisco Cantú Biography

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“Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I'm in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I'm the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home. Fine, my mother said, fine. But you must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people. I looked away from her and a silence hung between us. I glanced down at my hands and weighed my mother’s words. Maybe you’re right, I replied, but stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you. As I spoke, doubts flickered through my mind.”

People Immigrants Systems Border Border Patrol Mexicans

Book:The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

Source: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“What I’m saying is that we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without choosing it, it becomes normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are.”

Learning Violence Normality Learned Behavior

Book:The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

Source: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“In Jung’s view, “the mass State”—his term for government and its structures—has “no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.” Jung asserts that when we come to perceive “the other” as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.”

Government Relationships Distrust Mistrust State Jung Carl Jung Us Vs Them

Book:The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

Source: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“Pain, of course, is intimately linked with fear. “Fear isolates,” writes Rivera Garza. “Fear teaches us to distrust. Fear makes us crazy.” If we follow the arc of her argument, we see that pain has the power to destroy and to produce its own reality, a reality in turn legitimized and given further meaning through the politics and policies that shape our society. This reality is quite often a reality of fear, a reality that makes us—individually and as a society—crazy, isolated, filled with distrust for our fellow human beings, the people who share our neighborhoods, our cities, our country, our borders, our intractably and intimately interwoven global community—the people with whom we share our very lives.”

Reality Pain Fear Distrust Craziness

Book:The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

Source: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border