Oscar Cásares brings the border to the stage
The lights dim; the theater goes quiet. On stage, a screen lights up with a video shot of someone’s desk, and the sound of a phone ringing echoes through the room. The call goes to voicemail, and someone leaves a message: “Hi Carrie! It’s me, Oscar. Listen, I have an idea for a show! It’s about the border…”
What follows is part performance, part multi-media experience. There’s video, live music led by singer-songwriter Carrie Rodriguez, and gorgeous photography from across the Texas-Mexico border. And, perhaps most importantly, sitting at a desk to stage left, there’s Oscar Cásares as himself: a man obsessed.
A few years before Cásares, a professor of English and director of the New Writer’s Project at The University of Texas at Austin, made that opening phone call — or, rather, one very like it — he’d published an article in Texas Monthly titled “The Other Side of the Border.” The piece follows a road trip Cásares and his friend and collaborator, the photographer Joel Salcido, made along the length of the Texas-Mexico border shortly after the release of Cásares’ second novel, Where We Come From. As the pair traveled, both sought to record evidence of the border region where they grew up — one markedly different, more joyful, richer, and more complex, than the relentlessly negative version they saw in the news. Salcido photographed locals as they played in the Rio Grande, walked the streets of El Paso’s El Segundo Barrio, or harvested grapefruits near Mission, Texas. And, in a series of postcards addressed to his daughter Elena, Cásares told their stories.
“The idea behind that essay came from my daughter calling me out and saying I was obsessed with the border,” says Cásares, who grew up in Brownsville and still has strong family connections to the region. “I couldn’t quite deny it, so I had to ask myself why I was so obsessed and why I felt so compelled to counter the narrative the media was making out to be the border.”
Cásares’s passion for the region is evident in his writing in the original essay, which is rich in moving detail even as it’s condensed down to its sparest form. He carefully describes a family playing in the river under the watchful eyes of border guards, oblivious to their observers, “like they’d forgotten there was a this side and a that side.” We read of a young music teacher walking her daily commute across the bridge from Ojinaga to Presidio, carrying her mariachi outfit for a performance with her students. At the essay’s end, two fishermen wave smilingly across the water at Boca Chica, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf.
“Writing these was an interesting exercise, because I understood that they had to communicate quite a bit in a very short amount of time,” Cásares says. “I studied a lot of narrative poems to try to compress my language down to its bare essence. And we’ve continued to shorten the original ones for the show, because there are more postcards in the show.”
For years the essay version of “Postcards” was the only one; a theatrical adaptation wasn’t in Cásares’ or Salcido’s minds when they filed the original story. After all, few magazine articles make the jump to the stage. But the idea of adapting the piece for performance emerged organically from the pair’s web of connections and interests, then bloomed into something like its current form in the dark days of the pandemic. Several years later the show version of “Postcards From the Border” was ready for audiences — it debuts in UT Austin’s McCullough Theatre on January 24th — and it really did start with a cold call.
“I called Carrie out of the blue. I mean, she barely knew me,” Cásares says. “But surprisingly she heard me out, and then I sent her the essay with the cards and she was like, ‘I’m really into this. I like it, let’s see where this goes.’”
In some ways the project was a natural fit: Rodriguez, an Austin-based, award-winning singer-songwriter and performer, is no stranger to the border, or to UT. As the university’s current songwriter in residence, she leads workshops, discussion panels, and concerts for the UT Austin community, and her signature project is the “Postcards” show, for which she composed four new songs. But when she, Cásares, and Salcido first discussed the possibility of working together, they had no way of knowing where the postcards would lead.
After some early experiments performing the cards alongside music by Rodriguez as part of her Laboratorio concert series at downtown Austin’s State Theatre, the three collaborators decided to seek outside funding to expand the project. That support soon came through in the form of a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, made possible by the Mellon Foundation, and it enabled Cásares and Salcido to take Rodriguez and a film crew on a second tour of the border.
That trip resulted in the video footage included in the final stage show, which includes clips of Cásares and Salcido driving down miles of border highway, swapping stories both old and new. It also features interviews with Cásares’ family, filmed during a family reunion in Pharr, Texas, organized by his cousin Eddie, that he hopes will shed light on the unique beauty of day-to-day life along the border.
“Those interviews were quite moving, and there was a lot of family history and things that, because of my age and the fact that some of my cousins are much older than I am, I just had not experienced. Stories about my own family, my own siblings, that I didn’t know,” Cásares says. “And what is connecting with our audiences is those themes of family and that humanness.”
The humanity the show aims to display is at the core of Cásares’ border “obsession,” and his hope for the production is that his passion will be catching. At each step of the development process behind the “Postcards” show — which involved Cásares, Salcido, Rodriguez, and her bandmates gathering for a series of residencies to hash out the details of their performance — Cásares emphasized the importance of showing audiences the full experience of living along the border.
“Part of what I was telling the team when we got together is that, whatever this ends up looking like, I wanted to recreate the experience of what it is to take someone to the border. I wanted the 75 minutes to be this kind of feverish dream where you are on the border and you’re hearing the border, you’re seeing it, you’re experiencing it in this utterly immersive way where your sense of direction and perspective is altered,” he says.
Sitting in the theater before the lights come back up — as Cásares reads his last postcard about swimming between the U.S. and Mexico “under a sky that belongs to all of us” and Rodriguez and her band play through the show’s final song, the appropriately titled “Cumbia Frontera” —the show does feel like a kind of dream. In an hour the audience has travelled some 1,250 miles from El Paso to the Gulf and met an incredible array of people who live their lives, full of difficulty and beauty and family and loss, the same as any life, where two countries meet. And Cásares and his collaborators want as many audience members as possible to encounter the show – and, through it, the region that they care about so much.
“We want to take the show to the border,” Cásares says, “so we’re talking to people in Brownsville, we’re talking to people in El Paso and in New Mexico, but we’re also talking to people in California and New York.” The grant that made the “Postcards” adaptation possible also facilitates taking the final show to communities that may not have the resources to pay for the entire program, he adds, which should help expand the project’s reach.
Wherever the show goes, Cásares wants the audience to have the same experience.
“It’s like, ‘Hop in the back seat, we’re going down to the border,’” he says. “Let me actually show you what my home is like.”