Didier Betofe, from the Congo, Africa, and his 6-year-old son clean windshields and beg for money in the Mexican town of Ciudad Acuña across from Roma, Texas. Didier arrived in Ecuador and traveled north to Ciudad Acuña, where they have been living the past three months.
Joel Salcido
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Joel Salcido
A new performance project in Texas wants to challenge the dire image of the Southern border as a no-man’s-land of destitute migrants, razor wire, and men with guns.
Postcards from the Border is a new production by three acclaimed Latino artists using music, photographs and spoken word to give a more organic view of the often misunderstood region.
Oscar Cásares conceived this work as a series of postcards written to his daughter, Elena, who was 10 at the time. He’s a writer, English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a native son of the South Texas borderlands. Cásares and his photographer friend Joel Salcido zigzagged down the international river from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico stopping along the way.
“Hi, Elena. In the little town of Los Ebanos there is no bridge to get to the other side of the river,” Casares reads from one postcard.
In this vignette in the production, Casares and Salcido cross the Rio Grande in a hand-pulled ferry. Attendants muscle the tiny barge across the stream by means of a rope anchored on both sides of the river. It was there long before the U.S. border was bristling with electronic sensors and surveillance cameras.
The Rio Grande remains a playground for children and adults as they relish in the cool waters at the border of Presidio and Ojinaga.
Joel Salcido
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Joel Salcido
“The ferry has no engine so it only moves across the water when the men begin to pull on the thick ropes above them. Two steel cables stay hooked at the top of the boat and to both sides of the Rio Grande. This is the last hand-drawn ferry along the entire river. So when you’re on it, it feels like the men are pulling you back in time…”
During rehearsals for the opening, Casares stood onstage reciting his postcards while a screen showed Salcido’s photos, and a hot Austin Tejano group waited to accompany him. .
“I think I’ve been sitting on this story for years and years,” Casares says in an interview, “in the sense that there’s something very special about the border that just wasn’t being covered in the media.”
The Postcards production chronicles all manner of life along the international divide: a Mexican family playing in the river under the suspicious eyes of a U.S. immigration agent, a transgender singer in El Paso who “crosses a border that’s inside of her,” and a father and son from Africa cleaning windshields for tips trying to survive in a Mexican border town. There’s also a miracle-seeker who treks to a Catholic shrine in Texas carrying a 3-foot wooden Jesus, and a visit to the graves of Casares’ grandparents with his cousin Eddie.
“I think when we took this trip we had a very clear sense of the story we were looking for,” Casares says. “We understood the story that the Trump administration was telling about the border. Our mission was to go out and find that other story, because we’d lived it.”
Cásares and Salcido made the downstream journey in 2019, during President Trump’s first term, with its headlines about the wall and migrant detention and family separation. Now the border is heating up again with the returning president’s new initiatives to shut it down and initiate mass deportations.
“If there was an agenda, it was to humanize what they’ve politicized,” says Salcido, who worked as a photojournalist in El Paso before turning to art photography.
“I mean, while we were out in the field we encountered what the news media gravitates to, but our agenda was to showcase the humanity of the border through these images.”
Raised in the Rio Grande Valley, Cásares is weary of seeing his homeland defined by encounters between migrants and the Border Patrol.
“I imagine that people who weren’t from there could only think of it as some sort of wasteland deprived of any civility, of anything that makes that area so incredibly rich—the families, the culture, the languages.”
L to r, Joel Salcido, Carrie Rodriguez, Oscar Casares
John Burnett
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John Burnett
His musical collaborator is Carrie Rodriguez, the nationally celebrated singer, songwriter, and fiddler based in Austin. She describes her music as Ameri-Chicana.
She has assembled original songs for a new album that is being released alongside the premiere of the stage production. Like her life, the songs flip back and forth between English and Spanish. They invite listeners to consider twin border towns, not as centers of mayhem, but as places of joy and resilience.
Presidio/Ojinaga bailan (dance) la cumbia,
Reynosa/McAllen bailan la cumbia,
Brownsville/Matamoros bailan la cumbia,
All the way to Boca Chica (the mouth of the river) bailan la cumbia.
“I really knew nothing about the border,” Rodriguez says. “And as soon as I got there I just felt like I was in…” she searches for the right words, “…it’s like it’s its own country.”
As it happens, Rodriguez grew up in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood of Austin.
“In my very younger life I think I was afraid, honestly, to be even seen as Mexican-American because of what I witnessed around me in my neighborhood. I just saw really ugly racism at such a young age.”
Some of her music—including the Postcards project—is an exploration of this bicultural identity. Her introduction to the border was a Cásares family picnic with tacos, piñatas and ice-cold beer.
“And I just completely fell in love with the way of life,” she continues, “and the people, and the way that English and Spanish flows back and forth like water.”
“I think a part of me felt a little bit of sadness, too, because I got to know Oscar’s family and I saw so many families who had been able to hold on to their culture in a way a lot of Mexican Americans here in Texas haven’t, including my own family.”
Field workers harvest honeydew melons at a steady pace near Citrus City outside Mission, Texas.
Joel Salcido
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Joel Salcido
“Hola Elena, this is my last postcard,” Cásares intones in the show at Austin’s McCullough Theatre. “Today we reached the very end of the river where it meets the Gulf. On the other side men used large nets to catch fish and women kept their kids from going in too deep. The mothers’ voices were so close it didn’t feel like another country.”
Cásares tells his daughter that when he reached the mouth of the Rio Grande, he slipped into the warm river by accident. And then he decided to swim to the Mexican side.
“I only stayed long enough to feel the sand between my toes,” he says. “Then I swam out again, but this time I let the current push me closer to where it stopped being a river and became a sea, out to where suddenly there were no sides and it was just me floating on my back under a sky that belonged to all of us.
See you soon, Dad.”
The premiere of Postcards from the Border, this weekend in Austin, has sold out. Oscar, Carrie and Joel plan to take their stage production to Texas border cities and then, hopefully, nationwide. For the duration of the project, they are artists in residence of Texas Performing Arts at the University of Texas.
The vibe of Postcards is best expressed by Miles Away, the most haunting song on her album:
Let’s turn the radio on, play a new corrido song,
Tell me a story–something other than the news today,
Let’s feel our roots grow strong, beyond the banks that roll along the Rio Grande, even when we’re miles away, miles away.
