ABSTRACT
The immigration policy during the Trump era was conceived and enforced as a war against the influx of Latinx immigrants knocking on the country's doors, strangers who allegedly threatened national security, identity, and a familiar way of life, which led to what anthropologist Leo Chavez termed “The Latino Threat Narrative” (2008). This chapter will focus on the hospitality debate—the acute paradoxes between theory and practice in the migration dilemma—through the analysis of Francisco Cantú's The Line Becomes a River. Dispatches from the Border (2018). Here the author lays bare how the increasing dangerization of the Latinx Other has canceled out hospitality in this vast zone of exception that is the southern border and paved the way for hostility and necropower (Mbembe 2003 , 2019) with its characteristic “society of enmity” (Mbembe 2003 ) and its disregard for human life. In relation to the hospitality/hostility dynamic, Cantú shows the ways in which affect, manifested as fear, hate, and disgust, is involved in the unhospitable host's very making of boundaries, while it is also represented in the hope, love, and fear behind the unwelcomed guest's attempts to overcome those boundaries at all costs and often at the risk of their own life. This personal, philosophical, and historical account of the killing borders, based on Cantú's own experience as a Border Patrol agent, engages the violence that takes place on the US-Mexico border region, people's exposure to it and complicity in it (his as well), a violence that is also manifested in the derealization of the precarious Other (Butler 2004), who is dehumanized and whose life is not considered a life at all. In the last part of the chapter, I argue that the author counters the hostility and violence effected by necropower and border enforcement with the amplification of affective links, a politics of human recognition and convivial solidarities as the only possible solution to this human(itarian) crisis.
