He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Brownsville, in a home with few books. But Oscar Cásares was surrounded by avid storytellers, including his parents and the aunts, uncles, and neighbors who would drop by almost daily. His three older siblings had moved out of the house by the time he was ten. “I was,” he said, “basically raised as an only child.” So he spent lots of time in the presence of adults, hearing them gossip about friends and relatives, recount family legends, and tell amusing stories from their jobs—as a cattle inspector, say, or a pastor, or a union organizer.
Oscar studied the way they crafted their spoken stories. “I had these uncles who would tell the same stories over and over but seldom in the same way,” he recalls. “They would try it one way and watch the reactions. Which details pulled the listeners in early? Which laugh line didn’t quite land? Then they would improve it on the next telling: foreshadow something interesting, hold back the surprise. I was intrigued by that and would deconstruct the stories. I would try to predict what would come next and why.”
Today, Oscar leads the New Writers Project, one of the creative-writing programs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 2004. He has authored two prizewinning novels and a collection of short stories. He has won multiple prestigious fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation. And he has honored Texas Monthly over the past two decades by penning essays for our readers, mainly about life along the Texas-Mexico border, where his extended family has lived since the mid-nineteenth century. His latest reflection, in our August issue, describes his perspective today, as a father, on the moment when, at age ten, he alarmed his parents by wandering out of their view at Boca Chica beach. He writes that he appreciates now what it was like for them to contend with “a boy who seemed to live inside his own head and often lost track of time and of where he was.”
When it came time for college, Oscar chose UT, where he majored in a field that offered a steady paycheck: advertising. Upon graduation, he landed a job at GSD&M, the Austin-based agency that created such memorable taglines as “Don’t mess with Texas” and “You are now free to move about the country.” Oscar recalls that he “had no thought of becoming a professional writer.” But colleagues and friends frequently praised the entertaining stories he told to them and asked, “When are you going to write this stuff?”
He eventually heeded those urgings and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where, he says, “I began to build a bridge between the oral storytelling tradition I grew up with and something more literary.” After graduating he began teaching writing at the University of Texas San Antonio and a couple of years later got hired by UT-Austin.
Oscar’s next big project is a theatrical production, Postcards From the Border, based on a 2019 photo essay that he published in Texas Monthly, in collaboration with celebrated photographer Joel Salcido, who grew up in El Paso and in Juárez, Mexico. Backed by a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts and support from Texas Performing Arts, the show will include narration, photos, video clips, and music from beloved Austin songwriter and bandleader Carrie Rodriguez. Postcards From the Border will begin touring the state in January. We’ll keep you posted on locations and dates. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Oscar’s essay and the rest of this issue of Texas Monthly.
This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “An Author Reared on Oral Storytelling.” Subscribe today.
