Postcards From The Border aims to challenge skewed 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.