Narrating Cross-Border Migration, Writing Subjects without History: On Luis Alberto Urrea’s the Devil’s Highway and Francisco Cantú’s the Line Becomes a River

After the techno-militarization of the US-Mexico border, the criminalization of undocumented migration, and the subsequent human rights violations against migrants, writers have been narrating the journeys of migrants across the US-Mexico borderlands as a form of state violence that hinges on notions of rightlessness. Founded on humanitarian discourses, contemporary nonfictional accounts about cross-border migration center their narrative approach on the struggles of migrants from a perspective of economic injustice. Through a reading of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004) and Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018), I argue that, in framing the migrant struggle as a problem of economic injustice, these texts obscure the ongoing dispossession, exploitation, and forcible displacement of historically subordinated populations in the region. In so doing, I urge an alternative approach to think cross-border migration by centering how dispossession, exploitation, and forced displacement are key to understanding longer histories of violence in Latin America and its connections to contemporary undocumented migration to the United States.