In 2019, UT alum Oscar Cásares and his friend, Joel Salcido, drove to the border along the Rio Grande from El Paso to Brownsville. Cásares wanted to tell his children the stories of the border he grew up on, which aren’t often mentioned in the news: the stories of family, love, endurance and survival.
With Salcido’s photographs, Cásares wrote these stories in the form of digital postcards for the August 2019 edition of Texas Monthly. Cásares addressed the postcards to his then 10-year-old daughter, Elena, whom he hoped would be guided to see her heritage in a more positive light. Cásares said he and Salcido felt there was a cinematic aspect to the magazine piece as they created the project. Nearly six years later, Cásares developed a multimedia stage show that brings new life to the article, which premieres at UT’s McCullough Theatre on Friday and Saturday night — 40 years after Cásares started at UT.
“What happens with the media is that they don’t spend a lot of time on the border,” Cásares said. “When they go to the border (it) tends to be because of some tragedy … and usually it’s negative.”
Salcido said he originally chose to take on this project because of his connection to the border.
“This particular story was something that defined Oscar and I because we are a product of the borderlands,” Salcido said. ”We grew up there within all the depth and culture of that environment that is very foreign to a lot of people.”
Cásares said that as journalists, he and Salcido noticed the opportunity to cover the negative stories, but kept their original mission in mind.
“We had to keep reminding ourselves, somebody’s already telling that story,” Cásares said. “We’re going to tell this story.”
Cásares hoped to change the border’s narrative with the Texas Monthly article, and he hopes the stage show will do the same through its unique approach, incorporating music, interviews, photos and narration.
“We (told) the story about the border in a way that would be accessible to people,” Cásares said. “(To) both (people) who are from there and who know very little about the border, (and) more importantly, who have misconceptions about the border.”
Carrie Rodriguez, an Austin singer-songwriter performing in the show, said while writing “Miles Away,” a song dedicated to Cásares’s daughter, she found herself connecting deeper to her own roots.
“I was thinking about her growing up so far away from this place that her father has spent his life writing and talking about,” Rodriguez said. “When I first started writing the song, I thought I was writing it to her, but I realized by the end, I was also writing it to me.”
Salcido and Rodriguez said if audiences can come away from the show with a greater understanding of humanity, then they have done their job.
“I hope they can relate to the stories that are told,” Rodriguez said. “and feel like they know the characters and the people that they’re hearing from … and (feel) connected to them, no matter where the audience comes from or grew up.”
