Postcards’ Journey From the Border to the Stage
Writer Oscar Cásares, photographer Joel Salcido, and musician Carrie Rodriguez collaborate on a multimedia production
By Benton Graham, Fri., Jan. 24, 2025
Of all the five senses, postcards are perhaps the least associated with sound. We see our grandmother’s tight cursive telling us of her travels. We feel the smooth, glossy cover image of a palm tree on the beach. We smell the chemical scent of a blue pen’s ink. We taste... Well, maybe we don’t taste postcards, but our taste buds perk at special meals recounted.
But sound doesn’t come into play with postcards, not typically. Writer Oscar Cásares wanted to give new life to a series of postcards he published in a 2019 essay titled “The Other Side of the Border” in Texas Monthly – postcards he had first mailed to his then-10-year-old daughter, Elena, to further her understanding of the border. To do that, he would need sound.
The hum of a car zipping down a border highway while old friends Cásares and Joel Salcido tell old stories. Cásares softly reading the postcards. Carrie Rodriguez belting out a cumbia original. The range of sound ascribed to each postcard in the 80-minute production Postcards From the Border would feel almost gluttonous if it weren’t so harmonious.
“I know it’s going to appeal to people in a way that the essay couldn’t,” Cásares said. “Particularly with the music, certainly with the visuals, not just the still imagery, but also the video. It’s just going to engage people in a way that the written word – as potent as I’d like to believe it is – it can’t compete with it being animated in that way.”
For years Cásares and Salcido have made it their mission to tell the story of the Texas-Mexico border. Not the story you might see in the media, or in campaign stump speeches, but the story they know from their lived experiences in the region.
The multimedia theatre work, which was commissioned by Texas Performing Arts and premieres January 24 in the McCullough Theatre at the University of Texas, is drawn from the postcards Cásares sent Elena during that weeklong road trip Salcido and Cásares took across the Texas-Mexico border. On that trip, the pair traveled east from Salcido’s hometown of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to Cásares’ hometown of Brownsville and Matamoros.
Along the way, they met a cast of borderland true originals: a singer in El Paso who performed as a man and a woman, a couple who crossed the border from Del Rio to Ciudad Acuña for corn tortillas, and high school students in Los Fresnos learning to play conjunto music. “Sometimes I play this type of music in the car and you tell me to please, please, please turn it off,” Cásares reminded his daughter in one postcard.
Cásares said he never planned for the work to be anything more than a personal essay. But eventually the pair began to think the piece might work as something more. Shortly after the essay was published in 2019, Cásares did a bilingual reading of the postcards at the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio. Then in 2021, Agarita, a quartet in San Antonio that works with artists in a range of genres to put on concerts based on the artists’ work, did two performances about the essay.
As the idea came together, there wasn’t a clear blueprint for the type of production they wanted to create. Cásares and Salcido began to think about who could put together the music in a way that reflected the border’s rich and varied musical history. Rodriguez, currently the songwriter in residence at the University of Texas, was the perfect fit.
But Cásares and Salcido weren’t sure if they could get her to agree. Or, at least, if she could fit the production into her busy schedule. The opening scene of the production pokes fun at this dynamic, with Cásares pitching his idea in a flurry of excited voicemails. But Rodriguez, who acknowledged that she can’t figure out how to work her voicemail, said it didn’t take much convincing.
As it turned out, after working together on a Texas Monthly project in 2019, Rodriguez had binged Cásares’ work. Recalling her reaction when she first heard about the project in 2021, Rodriguez said, “I was like, 'Wow, this guy’s calling me for something. How cool.’”
The Texas Performing Arts production draws on multiple art forms, interspersing Cásares’ reading of the postcards with music, videos, and photos. Rodriguez performs seven bilingual songs live onstage. (Alex Marrero, David Jimenez, David Pulkingham, Greg Gonzalez, and Sergio Mendoza round out the band and also contributed to some of the compositions.) While an Austin audience might not be filled with fluent Spanish speakers, Cásares said using Spanish in the multimedia theatre work was not “a huge preoccupation.”
“One of the things that I think would surprise most people is that in my writing, whether it’s essays or fiction, when my characters, real or otherwise, are speaking, it’s written in English, but they’re not speaking in English,” he said. “They’re almost always speaking in Spanish.”
The show also includes videos of Cásares and Salcido talking while driving, as well as Cásares’ family members sharing their memories of the border. Filmed in Cásares’ cousin Eddie’s kitchen in Pharr, Texas, the videos were shot by Luke Jacobs, Rodriguez’s husband, during a Cásares family reunion. Jacobs served as the production’s creative director.
Over the course of a lunchtime interview at El Chilito about all of their work on the production, it became clear that it meant a lot to the trio. But it also seemed to mean something a little bit different to all three. And, in some senses, they all had their own postcard to write about Postcards From the Border.
From: Carrie Rodriguez
Rodriguez, who grew up in Austin, wanted to learn more about the border, so she tagged along with Cásares for the family reunion. The experience left an impression on both her and her 9-year-old son, Cruz, who she said has become obsessed with the border since they visited. “The culture there is so unto itself,” Rodriguez said. “It is its own world, its own country.”
The Cásares family welcomed her as if she were family too. Before setting foot in the house, Rodriguez asked if she could do anything to help prepare for the family festivities. Cásares’ cousin didn’t hesitate.
“Yes, actually, because we got this piñata for the kids, but we need candy for it,” the cousin told Rodriguez, who then offered to go on a run to H-E-B. Rodriguez asked for direction on piñata candy preferences.
“Well, we have little kids, so I don’t want hard candy because I don’t want them to choke, but don’t get anything with too much chocolate, because it’s really hot and it’s gonna melt. Get M&M’s, but don’t get the ones with peanuts,” the cousin told her.
While Rodriguez went to H-E-B, Cruz got to work loading the cooler with drinks and ice. At the store, all Rodriguez could think was that she didn’t want to screw up the piñata, but also how warm her reception had felt.
Rodriguez’s family mostly hails from San Antonio and Memphis, Texas, in the Panhandle. Her father’s side comes from San Antonio, which is sometimes viewed as the northern tip of South Texas. She said that she grew up “very distanced” from her father.
“In my artistic life, so much of it has been trying to understand more about where I come from,” she said. “This project has been a dream come true for that reason.”
One of her favorite South Texas stories came while observing some young people at a Starbucks. After carrying on a conversation in English, one of them made a joke in Spanish. The joke was “way funnier” in Spanish, Rodriguez said. They switched to Spanish for a bit and then back to English. The trio wanted to reflect exactly this type of linguistic flexibility in the show.
From: Joel Salcido
Language has played an important role in Salcido’s family life. He grew up mostly in El Paso, but once he graduated college, his mother moved back to Ciudad Juárez. “She never really liked the U.S.,” Salcido said. “She never learned English, which I’m not terribly proud of... In my younger years, she always insisted that we don’t lose our language. As soon as you lose your language, you’re going to lose your identity.”
He tried to impart the importance of Spanish language onto his children, too, taking them to the same places his parents would take him in Mexico. He wanted them to see all sides of the border, from its beautiful natural offerings to the poorest parts of Ciudad Juárez.
Despite this education, his son decided he no longer wanted to speak Spanish at one point. “That was hurtful for me,” Salcido said. Language had been a “religious mantra” for his mother. In order to recover that Spanish language, Salcido jumped on an opportunity to move with his wife and children to Spain in 1999 for a sabbatical year. They did it “with the intention of them not losing who they were,” Salcido explained. Now, he said, his son pursues projects around the world as a digital imaging technician.
Salcido has been looking for a different way to tell the story of life on the border. He’s seen the media portrayal of the region up close, when he was the chief photographer at the El Paso Times for 10 years.
Salcido photographed the Texas Monthly essay, and his shots are projected on a large screen throughout the production. At one point during their initial drive across the border, Salcido and Cásares learned about an asylum camp. Salcido’s background as a journalist kicked in, and he asked if they should go there. But they decided not to. “'Somebody’s already doing that,’” Cásares said.
Despite his journalistic instinct, Salcido said his work at the El Paso Times wore him down over time. “I got burned out by the onslaught of just negative, negative, negative,” he said. He wondered where the portrayal of the people in his life was, the primos and uncles with a story to tell. The production has given him an opportunity to tell those stories.
“I am proud of where I come from, and I want the world to know that,” he said. “Through this project, it’s a phenomenal opportunity to enlighten people beyond what has been entrenched in their psyche.”
From: Oscar Cásares
It has become difficult to separate the border from politics. And, while a president who has consistently painted a dark picture of the border has been inaugurated the same week that their show premieres, Cásares doesn’t see the production as political. “We never set out with a political agenda, other than to give voice and to represent an underrepresented group,” Cásares said.
Cásares, who is the director of the New Writers Project at the University of Texas, said that too often the media’s portrayal of the region is the same thing over and over again. “We had these treasures that we had grown up with, and we never see them in the media,” Cásares said. “Never.”
He has seen the media’s inclination firsthand. Outlets have contacted him to write a story where the essential narrative has been predetermined. They just need someone with “authority” to write about it, he said. It’s a story that’s recognized and that the outlets’ audiences expect to hear.
However, there are moments in the production that feel inherently political, like when they encountered a father and his three children in the Rio Grande. They saw immigration guards watching the family. “It’s hard to look at a scene like that and not think something might be about to happen,” Cásares said.
But the actual scene was less tense. It was simply a father and his kids playing in the water. “It subverts that narrative of: 'They’re in the water, obviously they must be crossing over,’” Cásares said.
The guards continued to observe, but the family ignored them. “The father and his kids never noticed they were being watched, and the whole time they stayed in the middle of the river, equal distance from either side, like they’d forgotten there was a this side and a that side,” Cásares wrote in one of his postcards to his daughter.
As the production weaves its way through a diverse array of border scenes, it’s easy to speculate about what Cásares’ daughter, Elena, back in Austin thought of these postcards. She was the initial audience after all. Cásares said he talks about the border with her. Sometimes she’ll hear negative things about the region at school, but she understands that it’s a nuanced and complex place.
“She has a sense that there’s a different truth, that they’ve got a piece of the story, but they don’t have the complete sense of it,” Cásares said. With Postcards From the Border, Cásares, Salcido, and Rodriguez hope the audience will walk away with an understanding of the border as rich and complicated as that of Elena.
Postcards From the Border runs January 24 & 25 at McCullough Theatre on the University of Texas campus. Find tickets and more info at texasperformingarts.org.
Sounding Out: Listening to Postcards From the Border
A Postcards From the Border album featuring songs from the theatre work performed by Carrie Rodriguez and her band along with postcards narrated by Oscar Cásares and produced by Sergio Mendoza will be released in early 2025. Sample audio clips now: laboratorioarts.org
