Postcards From The Border aims to challenge the dominant representation of the US-Mexico borderExBulletin

Didier Betofe, a native of Congo, Africa, and his 6-year-old son clean windshields and beg for money in the Mexican town of Ciudad Acua, across from Roma, Texas. Didier arrived in Ecuador and traveled north to Ciudad Acua, where they have been living for three months. Joel Salcido .

rock the legend Joël Salcido

A new performance project in Texas wants to challenge the disastrous image of the southern border, a no-man's land of destitute migrants, barbed wire and armed men.

Postcards from the Border is a new production from three renowned Latin American artists using music, photography and spoken word to provide a more organic view of this often misunderstood region.

Oscar Csares designed this work as a series of postcards written to his daughter, Elena, then 10 years old. He is a writer, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and a native son of the South Texas borderlands. Csares and his photographer friend Joel Salcido zigzagged the International River from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, stopping along the way.

“Hello Elena. In the small town of Los Ebanos there is no bridge to cross the river,” Casares reads a postcard.

In this vignette from the production, Casares and Salcido cross the Rio Grande on a hand-pulled ferry. The attendants take the small barge across using a rope anchored on both sides of the river. It was there long before the American border bristled with electronic sensors and surveillance cameras.

The Rio Grande remains a playground for children and adults who enjoy the cool waters on the border of Presidio and Ojinaga. Joel Salcido .

rock the legend Joël Salcido

“The ferry has no engine, so it only moves on the water when the men start pulling on the heavy ropes above them. Two steel cables remain hanging from the top of the boat and the two sides of the Rio Grande It's the last hand-drawn ferry on the entire river. So when you're there, you feel like the men are taking you back in time.

During rehearsals for the opening, Casares was on stage reciting his postcards while a screen showed Salcido's photos, and a sexy Austin Tejano band waited to accompany him. .

“I think I've been sitting on this story for years and years,” Casares said in an interview, “in the sense that there's something very special about the border that just wasn't covered by the media.

The Postcards production chronicles all kinds of lives along the international divide: a Mexican family playing in the river under the wary eyes of an American immigration agent, a transgender singer in El Paso who “crosses a border that is within her » and a father. and his son from Africa cleaning windshields for advice on trying to survive in a Mexican border town. There's also a miracle seeker who visits a Catholic shrine in Texas with 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 idea 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 seek out this other story, because we had lived it.”

Csares and Salcido made the trip downriver in 2019, during President Trump's first term, with its headlines about the wall, migrant detention and family separation. Now the border is heating up again with the returning president's new moves to close it and launch mass expulsions.

“If there was a goal, it was to humanize what they politicized,” says Salcido, who worked as a photojournalist in El Paso before turning to fine art photography.

“I mean, while we were on the ground, we learned about what attracts the media, but our goal was to show the humanity of the border through these images.”

Raised in the Rio Grande Valley, Csares is tired of seeing his homeland defined by encounters between migrants and the Border Patrol.

“I imagine that people who weren't from there could only view it as a sort of wasteland deprived of all civility, of everything that makes this region so incredibly rich in families, in culture, in languages.”

From left, Joel Salcido, Carrie Rodriguez, Oscar Casares John Burnett .

toggle captionJohn Burnett

Her musical collaborator is Carrie Rodriguez, the nationally known Austin-based singer, songwriter and violinist. She describes her music as Ameri-Chicana.

She has collected original songs for a new album which will be released alongside the premiere of the stage production. Like his life, the songs oscillate between English and Spanish. They invite listeners to view the Twin Border Cities, not as hotbeds of chaos, but as places of joy and resilience.

Presidio/Ojinaga dance cumbia,

Reynosa/McAllen dance cumbia,

Brownsville/Matamoros dance cumbia,

Until Boca Chica (the mouth of the river) bailan la cumbia.

“I really didn’t know anything about the border,” Rodriguez says. “And as soon as I got there, I felt like I was in,” she searches for the right words, “…it’s like it’s its own country.”

Rodriguez happened to grow up in a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood in Austin.

“In my very young life, I think I was afraid, honestly, of being seen as a Mexican-American because of what I witnessed around me in my neighborhood. I saw racism that was really horrible at such a young age.”

Some of his music, including the Postcards project, is an exploration of this bicultural identity. His introduction to the border was a Csares family picnic with tacos, pinatas and ice-cold beer.

“And I completely fell in love with the way of life,” she continues, “and the people, and the way English and Spanish flow back and forth like water.”

“I think part of me felt a little sad too, because I got to know Oscar's family and I saw so many families who had managed to maintain their culture, like many 'Mexican Americans here in Texas don't, including my own family.

Field workers harvest honeydew melons at a brisk pace near Citrus City, outside of Mission, Texas. Joel Salcido .

rock the legend Joël Salcido

“Hola Elena, this is my last postcard,” Csares intones during the show at Austin’s McCullough Theater. “Today we reached the end of the river, where it meets the Gulf. On the other side, the men were using large nets to catch fish and the women were stopping their children from going too far. The mothers' voices were so close that it didn't feel like another country.”

Csares tells his daughter that when he reached the mouth of the Rio Grande, he accidentally slipped into the warm river. And then he decided to swim to the Mexican side.

“I stayed just long enough to feel the sand between my toes,” he says. “Then I swam again, but this time I let the current push me closer to where it stopped being a river and became a sea, where suddenly there was no had more 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 is sold out. Oscar, Carrie and Joel plan to take their stage production to the border towns of Texas and then hopefully across the country. For the duration of the project, they are Texas Performing Arts artists in residence at the University of Texas.

The mood of Postcards is best expressed in Miles Away, the most haunting song on its album:

Let's turn on the radio, play a new corrido song,

Tell me a story other than today's news,

Let us feel our roots growing stronger, beyond the banks that run along the Rio Grande, even when we are miles, miles away.

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