March 2003
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.
LINCOLN PARK IS GONE. DISAPPEARED. We are rolling along in Oscar Casares' maroon Toyota Tacoma, searching for the place where a decent portion of his teenage days was spent shooting hoops, flirting with girls, and picking fights now and then. We pass the Lopez Supermarket, the housing project where his first girlfriend lived, the community clinic where sick people spend entire afternoons in waiting rooms. But no park. In 1998 the city cleared the playground and replaced it with a row of concrete pillars that now extend U.S. 83 into Los Tomates, Brownsville's third and newest international bridge. Word has it the city is building a new Lincoln Park nearby to preserve the neighborhood's old spirit. But as we abandon pavement and explore patchy dirt tracks, with the beams of free trade floating above us, all we encounter are dead ends.
This aging neighborhood of little wood-frame houses and thinning palm fronds, sandwiched between two international bridges in the southernmost tip of Texas, serves as the backdrop and inspiration for most of Casares' first book, Brownsville, a short-story collection titled after his hometown, which will be released this month by Little, Brown and Company. The book will appear just after Casares, one of the Texas Institute of Letters' Dobie Paisano writing fellows, completes his six-month residency at the 265-acre ranch of legendary Texas folklorist and writer J. Frank Dobie, fourteen miles southwest of Austin. The author's excursion into the publishing spotlight has taken him six years, but in Brownsville his contribution to the literary world is already evident. Casares writes about the lives of characters who are mostly working-class and ethnic in a way that makes them neither victims nor heroes nor martyrs, that acknowledges their social difference only as background material and recreates their world from the inside out—so that the margins become the mainstream. While many local youths commiserate about being stuck in a city that seems to march a step behind the rest of the country, in Brownsville Casares captures the magic—and the normalcy—of having been raised in an American city where nine out of ten residents have Mexican roots.
What emerges in this slim collection of stories is a Brownsville where parents scold bilingually ("No me digas que you brought that chango inside my house"), where driving a Toyota or a Honda is a sign of status, where one has to install an alarm and put the Club on his car or it will promptly end up on the opposite side of the border. It is a Brownsville where a Mexican American nicknamed Bony listens to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. A Brownsville of electricians, receptionists, livestock inspectors, police sergeants, and Avon saleswomen. A Brownsville of mesquite trees and bougainvilleas, flat as sea level, where people eat H&H chorizo and life pivots around places like the Friendship Garden, International Boulevard, and Brownsville Coffee Shop No. 1. "It's certainly just a little sliver of Brownsville. There are so many subcultures here," says the 38-year-old, floppy-haired Casares, a towering, handsome guy who always appears to be relaxed. "But setting the stories in Brownsville gives me something concrete to start from. I can say 'the Vermillion,' and I can say 'the Madonna tree,' and I can say 'Boca Chica,' and then I go from there."
Embedded in this community of quirky characters and bizarre plots—one character makes friends with a dead monkey's head, another sells prearranged funerals to his relatives—is the raw encounter with human emotion. Brownsville, Casares mused one afternoon at the Vermillion Restaurant and Watering Hole over a lone beer, is really about "the struggles, the challenges, the frailties people have—how they fail, how they love, in this very subtle but very profound way." And it is precisely at these moments, when the unlikely is revealed as the comically or painfully familiar, that the storytelling soars.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE ACCOMPLISHED author typically reads something like this: Young child is enthralled with the world of story and reads voraciously under his bedcovers while everyone sleeps. As a young adult, he disses college and takes some badly paying job as he begins experimenting with words and paper. He continues this for any number of years, but when he finally musters up the courage, after God knows how many sleepless nights, to send off his stories for publication, he receives the first of what will become a growing pile of rejections. Finally, when hope is nearly lost, some wise agent in New York decides to give him a break, and a door into the literary scene is opened.
Turn this story entirely upside down and you get Oscar Casares' life. The boy didn't read. In fact, he watched TV obsessively. (He says he probably read two books in his entire youth but doesn't recall which ones.) After spending two years at the local community college, he transferred to a very respectable school—the University of Texas at Austin—and earned a very respectable degree, in advertising. He went off to seek his fortune, then came back for a job with GSD&M, a prestigious Austin firm where he courted huge clients and made lots of money writing and directing important promotional campaigns ("They're the 'Don't Mess With Texas' people," he says). Then, at the height of his professional triumph, he quit his job—just strolled into his boss's office and gave notice that he was leaving to write stories. Yes, stories. And in less than two years, two of them had been published. And a few months after that, he was enrolled in a fully paid MFA program—no less than the Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of the best in the country. Within a couple of years, he was weighing offers from two major New York publishing houses.
Question: How on earth? Answer: Rewind to that brief, happy moment after his college graduation.
Before Casares got the job with GSD&M, he moved to Minneapolis, a creative hub of the advertising world, where he thought he'd launch a successful career. "It turns out," he says today, "everybody had that idea. Only they had far more experience. I was on the fringes, and every now and then somebody would throw me a bone." So he took a job in the stockroom of a canoe store and dissipated his disappointment with beer. For the first time in his life, Casares missed Brownsville. So much so that at the bar, he began telling his friends stories about his hometown—and it turned out that his friends loved them. In fact, they paid for his beer so he wouldn't stop. "It was so far removed from anything in the Midwest," he recalls. "They were just, like, 'Oh, my God, there's this place, and all these weird things happen.'"
That's when Casares realized he had inherited a special gift from his family, especially from two of his uncles: Tío Hector and Tío Nico. The tíos, who are in their sixties and seventies now, are natural-born storytellers, and back in the days when Oscar was growing up as the youngest of four siblings, their tales were the only thing that could pull him away from the television set. The two men could dramatize life's little moments—something as mundane as a fumbling attempt to cut down a tree branch—in ways that made the everyday seem extraordinary. Casares recalls the time his entire family sat in a hospital waiting room and a nurse walked in to notify another family that their father had died. The teenage son of the dead man began to cry. Half an hour later, Tío Nico was spinning tales for his own family, propped up on a table imitating a dog that had once bitten him. His relatives roared. At that moment, Oscar turned to look at the boy who had just lost his dad—and the kid was smiling.
