'Postcards from the Border'

I love stories that connect with individuals rather than generalizing with stereotypes and labels.


https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/npr-news/2025-01-23/postcards-from-the-border-aims-to-challenge-dominant-portrayal-of-u-s-mexico-border

 https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/npr-news/2025-01-23/postcards-from-the-border-aims-to-challenge-dominant-portrayal-of-u-s-mexico-border

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.

"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 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."