Bard of the Border
Oscar Casares is Texas' most intriguing young storyteller, whose tales of his native Brownsville describe a place where Latinos have moved from the margins to the mainstream.
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Oral storytelling is a strong tradition in South Texas, where, for a long time, literacy and a formal education were inaccessible to many people. In his novel George Washington Gomez, fellow Brownsville writer and folklorist Américo Paredes describes a culture that developed around the turn of the century in which evenings were occupied sitting on front porches, the elders telling enthralling tales while nosy little children like Paredes eavesdropped. What Casares found, after he quit his advertising job and began taking books more seriously, is that traditions like his uncles' had a certain technical merit. These guys knew how to tell a good story. Without any formal training, they intuitively knew that they should begin their accounts with an exposition and slowly build up tension. They saw real-life people as characters in their own mini-dramas and found stories where others would miss them. To teach himself to write, Casares began studying the classics of fiction as if they were textbooks—but always filtering them through the lessons he had gleaned from his uncles, "my first literary experiences."
"Here's a piece of advice for you," begins "Jerry Fuentes," one of Casares' stories in Brownsville. "If a guy named Jerry Fuentes comes knocking at your front door trying to sell you something, tell him you're not interested and then lock the door." Fuentes, as it turns out, is the narrator's sleazy cousin, a con-artist type who will do whatever it takes to peddle his products—from scalped tickets and frozen steaks to, in this case, funeral prearrangements. The story unfolds as the reader witnesses the narrator's futile efforts to resist his cousin's sales pitches, which the latter disguises in rambling soliloquies about the inevitability and tragedy of death. Casares was partly inspired to write this piece because his father worked as a funeral home greeter after he retired. To research the story, the author went to a local funeral home and played a potential client interested in purchasing caskets and burial plots for himself and his wife.
Several of the stories in Brownsville revolve around everyday dramas, showing how insignificant events matter to us and even change our lives. "RG" is a comical, almost absurd narrative about one man's years-long obsession with the hammer his neighbor borrowed but never returned, while "Charro" follows a character who is driven to a violent, heartless insanity by his neighbor's barking dog. And then there are pieces that broach much weightier subjects like domestic violence and the silent, clumsy suffering of fathers who grieve for their children's misfortune. The most gripping of these is "Domingo," about an old and utterly lonely undocumented Mexican yard keeper who can't come to terms with the memory of his little daughter, who died after falling into a fire. One night he decides to reconcile with God. But the church is closed, so he pays a visit to the Madonna Tree instead, where locals believe the Virgin Mary has appeared on the tree's bark with her arms wide open. "He explained to the Virgin how much he wanted to be on a bus headed home so he could wake up the next morning to the warm touch of his wife," Casares writes.
Ultimately the man climbs the tree's branches so that he can see across the border into his own country. And it is up there—in the precariousness of an unsteady tree branch and the beauty of a starry night—that his emotional burden is finally lifted. The story closes with the most breathtaking passage in the book:
When he opened his eyes, he gazed out toward the horizon, farther than he ever imagined he could. He looked across the river, past the nightclub lights on Obregón, past the shoeshine stands in Plaza Hidalgo, past the bus station where he caught his long ride home, past all the little towns and ranchitos on the way to Ciudad Victoria, past the Sierra Madre and the endless shrines for people who had died along the road, and even farther, past the loneliness of his little room next to the tire shop, past the reality that he would work the rest of his life and still die poor, and finally, past the years of sorrow he had spent remembering his little girl, past all this, until he clearly saw his wife and then his daughter, Sara, who was now a grown woman.
This kind of lyrical writing is difficult to maintain, and throughout the rest of the book, Casares often opts for a simpler prose that imitates the spare style of his characters' speech: "It felt like a road trip is what it felt like." There are spots where the description is deliciously vivid, but it is the dialogue that really carries his writing. Casares is, above all, a storyteller. His stories take wonderful, often triumphant twists, and the social commentary—on the increased presence of Border Patrol agents, on white flight, on the farmers' need for rain—is effectively subtle.
Casares is hardly the first writer to find beauty and literary value in the idiosyncratic culture of the border region. Writers along the Texas-Mexico border have produced important works of fiction in English since the twenties and thirties. Among his most notable predecessors and contemporaries—some of whom are widely known across the United States and Latin America—are Jovita González de Mireles, of Roma; John Rechy, of El Paso; Tomás Rivera, of Crystal City; Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, of Mercedes; Sandra Cisneros, who is from Chicago but has lived in San Antonio for many years; David Rice, of Edcouch, who provided feedback on Casares' first stories; and Dagoberto Gilb, of El Paso, himself a 1988 Dobie Paisano fellow, who became Casares' close friend and a strong literary influence. Many of their works have played an important role as political instruments, aimed at raising social consciousness and documenting cultural conflict between Anglos and Mexican Americans. Certain themes are prominent: labor exploitation, urban ghettoization, the cultural homeland. Casares, on the contrary, had the luxury of growing up in an era after the decades of border conflict that followed the U.S.-Mexican War and after school segregation, in a city, he says, where he didn't always have to think about race. In his stories he passes on this option to the reader. While his characters are glaringly different from the average Texan in a cultural sense, there is something about their experiences that resonates broadly. "The literature becomes accessible while remaining distant," says Casares. "This isn't what's traditionally been thought of as Mexican American literature. This is the mainstream. We are the mainstream in Brownsville. I think we need the literature that is considered activist. That just wasn't my experience in Brownsville."
In his hometown Casares is preceded in letters only by Paredes, and his emergence seems particularly timely as the city grows exponentially and sacrifices its small-town character to the suburban aesthetic of Bennigan's and Old Navy. He will be spending the next several months on the road; plans for his book tour include stops all over Texas, Iowa City, and New York. As he did with his earlier short stories (he has been published in the Iowa Review, the Colorado Review, the Northwest Review, and the Threepenny Review), Casares likes to test his work on non-Texas audiences, to see if his literature can "hold" beyond the Southwest, the traditional court of many Latino authors. He bristles at others' suggestion that Mexican American writers are getting big breaks these days because their ethnicity is fashionable in the publishing world and seems a bit irritated when the question of ethnic labels arises. "In the past ten months since I signed a contract, I have not had one conversation about 'Mexican Americans' or 'Latinos,'" he says. "I just don't have that conversation with Little, Brown."
Today Casares spends his mornings in front of a Macintosh plucking out his first novel, scheduled for release in October 2004. I ask if he will reveal the basic storyline or at least one tiny character. But he smiles broadly and remains mum, though he does admit this: Prepare yourself for another trip to Brownsville.
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