Interview
At the border the king is naked
We spoke with Francisco Cantú, author of the book The Becomes a River, about his time working as a US Border Agent because he thought he could help people. The reality was different.
“When I think of the new administration, the terms ‘naked’ and ‘nakedness’ come to mind. The intention is to strip American mythology, rhetoric and discourse of all the embellishments that have always tried to mask its deeper undercurrents of violence, oppression and white supremacism,” Francisco Cantú told us at the start of our conversation, on the occasion of his visit to Italy.
A great-grandson of Mexicans, the theme of the border is central in his work, not only in its political and humanitarian aspects, but also embedded in a broader discourse on personal identity.
In your book, The Line Becomes a River (2018, published in Italian by Minimum fax as “Solo un fiume a separarci”), you tell about the time when you joined the Border Patrol because you thought you could help people crossing the border illegally that way. Then your understanding of the border changed dramatically.
Yes, I was young and also very naive when I made that decision. Looking back on it today, I can say that I had just finished college and had enrolled in a university in Washington, D.C., an institution that actually prepares people to work as public servants. And I thought that since neither the Border Patrol nor migrant rejection policies were going to disappear in the immediate future, it would make sense to try to understand them from the inside, to try to change them from my position. I counted on staying there for a couple of years, enough time to get all the answers that somehow seemed to elude politics, public administration and people. Then maybe I would work to rewrite those policies, or become an immigration lawyer. But it didn't work out that way.
In these first few weeks, the new administration has followed through on its announced intentions, throwing off the mask even before its European allies – on this side of the Atlantic, that's something quite frightening.
Yes, the new administration marks a return to very old rhetoric, narratives that we thought had been worn out by now – immigrants stealing our jobs, what it means to be an American and who America is meant for, who this country was founded for. Who can participate in the American dream and who is excluded from it. The American myth of the “Land of the free” seems to be fading, shrinking and dying out. And white supremacism is sprouting underneath: all American mythology and all American rhetoric were like the frosting on a cake, serving to hide what was underneath. At certain moments in our history, some of us could say that this is what America is: the civil rights movement, the first black president and so on. But if we think about the reaction set off by those events, well, we have to accept that that's the real America, too. Taking into account the tension between these two opposing views and the fact that the country is shifting more and more to the far right, I think we can now say that the frosting of the cake is finally coming off to openly expose what lies underneath.
If birthright citizenship is revoked – as Trump intends to do, though his executive order on the matter has been suspended by the courts – it is as if that land is less sacred than before, and no longer sufficient to guarantee anyone born there the right to be an American citizen. Something has changed. What is it, in your view?
Many things. It used to be that immigrants landed at Ellis Island in New York or Angel Island in California, underwent an inspection by immigration officers or a couple of days of quarantine, and then they were free to move about on American soil until they found a little piece of land on which to settle. The journey these people face today is very different, especially for those from Central America: it is dangerous, painful, violent. Lately, fewer and fewer workers and more and more asylum seekers are arriving. And once at the border, these people end up in government-subsidized private detention centers – there has been an enormous proliferation of these facilities, which the press rarely covers, run like federal prisons, where these people stay for months or years waiting for their asylum claims to be evaluated. And for them, the boundless expanse of American territory is reduced to the cramped space of the cell in which they are locked up. If you will, attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship seems like a contemporary addition to the doctrine of manifest destiny: if we are the chosen people, just as we once exterminated the Indians and conquered the West, we now have a divine right to keep these people out of the country at any cost.
You live in Tucson, which is right in the borderlands. How has the region changed in recent decades? I imagine that the wall is not only a physical barrier, but also an obstacle to imagination, altering the perception of the territory.
Yes, I find this notion to be very powerful, that the wall can also block the imagination. I think the wall represents, in a truly tangible and also symbolic way, the final moment in the mythology of the frontier.
According to historian Greg Grandin, who won the Pulitzer Prize with his book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, we have reached a point in our country's history where further expansion is no longer possible – there are no more frontiers to conquer. Although it is widely believed that the conquest of the frontier ended in the last decade of the nineteenth century, in the rhetoric of American politics, there has always been a reference to some new frontier – in the Cold War it was the fight against communism, then the conquest of space, then globalization, that is, bringing the free trade economy to the rest of the world. But in the last two decades, these movements have also reached their final point. This is why the wall stands out nowadays as something that seems to reflect the tensions and motives of Americans. It is a mirror that reflects our own image back to us: we are a people caught in a maelstrom, convulsively flailing in the grip of our own hostility and differences in views that we can no longer escape.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/al-confine-il-re-e-nudo on 2025-02-18