Border & Immigration

This week on Fronteras:

• Texas lawmakers are making efforts to reverse maternal mortality rates, which are the worst in the U.S., including allowing Medicaid-covered mental health screenings.
• South Texas college students are getting help from Washington in gaining access to STEM opportunities (9:14).
• Latina Hollywood composer and Texas native Germaine Franco talks about staying true to Mexican influences when orchestrating music for “Coco” (11:59).

Today on Fronteras, we look at:

• The evolution of immigration law since 9/11.
• An undocumented immigrant crossing the border for the first time is not committing a criminal violation (1:46).
  
• Maternal mortality is on the decline across most of the U.S., except in Texas. What can the Lone Star State learn from California’s success? (11:45)

This week on Fronteras:

We continue our conversation with Francisco Cantú, former Border Patrol agent and author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.”

The book recounts Cantú’s time patrolling the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where he encountered drug smugglers, as well as immigrants looking for better lives in the U.S.

In part two of our interview:

• Cantu recounts his time living and working in El Paso.
• The stresses of the job are revealed in nightmares (3:07 ).
• Realizing it was time to leave the agency (4:34).
• Why writing was a way to come to terms with internal struggles from his job (7:40).
• Befriending Jose Martinez, an undocumented immigrant after leaving the agency (10:06).
• Reads an excerpt from the book recounting Martinez’s deportation courtroom hearing (13:42).
• Why immigrants like Martinez are determined to cross into the U.S. despite increased border security (17:25).

In his memoir “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border,” Francisco Cantú uses a writing technique that might strike readers as unusual.

When he is writing dialogue, he omits quotation marks.

Cantú said quotation marks pull us away from the action on the page.

This week on Fronteras:

A conversation with Francisco Cantú, former Border Patrol agent and author of “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.”

He begins by talking about becoming an agent in 2008 and what he witnessed in the harsh Arizona desert. Cantú also discusses the inspiration behind the title “The Line Becomes a River” (3:35), and why he felt he needed to join the Border Patrol to understand immigration issues (6:30). 

From his first days as a field agent in the Tucson (11:19) to tales of the immigrants he encountered in the field (16:36) to Cantú's eventual transfer to El Paso, where he begins to see how U.S. immigration policy “weaponizes the landscape.”