Paul Mena

“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

“As I swam toward a bend in the canyon, the river became increasingly shallow. In a patch of sunlight, two longnose gars, relics of the Paleozoic era, hovered in the silted waters. I stood to walk along the adjacent shorelines, crossing the river time and again as each bank came to an end, until finally, for one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape trembled and breathed as one.”
― Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border

“Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.”
― Mark Twain