Francisco Cantú

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019, an electrifying memoir from a Mexican-American US Border Patrol guardââ?¬Ë?Stunningly goodââ?¬Â¦ The best thing Iââ?¬â?¢ve read for agesââ?¬â?¢ James Rebanks, author of The Shepherdââ?¬â?¢s LifeFrancisco CantÃ?º was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012.

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cant , 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, Cant 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. Cant 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, Cant discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River goes behind the headlines, making urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden's third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden's growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America's ""New West."" Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that measures how rapid growth takes its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden offers us his trademarked craft and wit to take us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the darker side of development—where ""the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land""—and defies us to ignore it. In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, ""In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert."" Blue Desert is a critical piece in the oeuvre of Charles Bowden, and it continues to remind readers of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.