Tired of reading about the U.S.-Mexican border in books, Francisco Cantú, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, decides the best way to understand what's really happening is to join the Border Patrol himself. What we get is a strange narrative where men are trained against the threat of violent drug cartel, but arrest mostly the "little people," or migrants, "people looking for a better life." As he battles bad dreams and personal guilt, Cantú takes you through a casually harsh system, revealing deeply tragic stories of migrants and bizarre scenes of the agents who track them.Publisher description:
For Francisco Cantú the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story