2021 Fall Read

Hello, Radio Readers! I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City KS and I am reveling over the wonders our Fall 2021 Book Series wrought, wonders of travel and wonders of conversation, in just a few short months, through our series “Rivers and Meandering Meanings.”

In 2007 I began making yearly trips/pilgrimages to walk the border and photograph objects left behind by undocumented migrants crossing the U.S–Mexico border between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas. My work takes an ever-evolving imagined space and concretizes it as a collection of specific objects, first as they are found and photographed in the landscape, then as they are re-photographed and archived, and, finally, as they are united in exhibitions.

Hi I’m Valerie a radio reader from Topeka and I wanted to share my thoughts about our final book which is part of this fall’s Radio Readers theme of “Rivers: Meandering Meanings”, the book is the Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú.

Hi, I am Marco Macias, a history teacher here at Fort Hays State University. Thank you for tuning in, and welcome to a BookByte of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, a fascinating narrative from Francisco Cantu. In the book, he describes his experiences growing up on the border and then pursuing a career in border patrol for several years. Traversing through the desert, he learns to understand the inhumanity of forcing immigrants across the desert and returns to civilian life. Afterward, he discovers the particularities of family separation as an undocumented friend visits his dying mother and can’t come back after decades of living in the United States.

I’m Hannes Zacharias from Lenexa for High Plains Public Radio, Radio Reader’s Book Club. The book is “The Line Becomes a River, Dispatches from the border” by Francisco Cantu’. “A book that whips across your face like a sandstorm, embedding bits of the desert into your shin that, like it or not, you’ll carry forward” says the San Francisco Chronicle.The book describes in striking and disturbing detail the reality of the current state of life on the US southern border for those enforcing and circumventing OUR immigration policies.

Hi, my name is Marcos Morales. I’m glad to share my story with the Radio Readers Book Club. I have been here in southwest of Kansas since November of 2003. I am from Guatemala from a little poor place. I came here because my dad brought me here in U.S.A. He’s here with me. I came here because I thought I had more opportunity than living in my country because when I was younger what I thought was to go to school to have a career, improve myself so that’s one of the reasons that I came. And that’s what I am doing right now.

Hi, I am Marco Macias, a history teacher here at Fort Hays State University. Thank you for tuning in, and welcome to a BookByte of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, a fascinating narrative from Francisco Cantu. In the book, he describes his experiences growing up on the border and then pursuing a career in border patrol for several years. Traversing through the desert, he learns to understand the inhumanity of forcing immigrants across the desert and returns to civilian life.

I’m Mike Strong from Hays for HPPR, Radio Reader’s Book Club. The book is “The Line Becomes a River” by Francisco CantuNot since World War II have refugee numbers been so high. 82.4 million people. These people did not leave their homes and jobs and lives by choice or whim. They are fleeing for their lives, even more so than their livelihoods.

This is Nicole English coming to you from the Sociology Department at Fort Hays State University for HPPR's Book-Bytes. This is a discussion of the book, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, by Francisco Cantú.This 2018 book gives a very unabashed view of what working as a Border Agent along the Mexican Border is like, and the experiences the author relates to readers illustrate his own moral struggles with the work. The author, Francisco Cantú, is a child of Mexican immigrants, and draws upon his personal experiences as a border agent for four years in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, to create a touching and emotionally trying memoire.

Hi, I am Marco Macias, a history teacher here at Fort Hays State University. Thank you for tuning in, and welcome to a BookByte of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, a fascinating narrative from Francisco Cantu.