Oscar Casares: tales of the border

By Tom Moore

The world found in the stories of Oscar Casares would be familiar to many in South Texas. It is the world just outside our doorways, where Spanish mingles effortlessly with English in conversation, where policemen, salespeople, fireworks stand owners, and nurses are just as likely to be Mexican American as not, where cultures mix and match along the border of two countries. These stories have been collected in Brownsville, Casares' first book.
Telling stories runs in his family. A native of Brownsville, and until recently an instructor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the 38-year-old Casares started out working in advertising in the Midwest. Remembering the family stories told by his uncles helped diminish the geographical and cultural distance from home. Casares himself began recounting the stories to friends, eventually adding his own. He took the next logical step and began writing, eventually selling stories to literary journals such as Threepenny Review and Northwest Review and receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
After more than ten years, Casares has returned to live in Brownsville. Following a book tour in March and April, he moved back to his hometown in early May. "I'd always wanted to," he said. "When I had the other job I didn't have the opportunity. Now I have a career I can do from anywhere. I had the chance and I took it. I'm on the border, I'm surrounded by what I'm writing about, I'm close to family and friends. It's pretty normal. No one's reacting to me any differently, and that's what I was hoping for."
The move has recharged Casares creatively. "Being back brought out the language, the nuances that I remember," he said. "It either clarified things or kind of qualified what I had thought about initially. It's refreshing to be right next to the source."
The book tour took Casares to New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Berkeley, and other cities, as well as stops in Texas, including Laredo. "It was pretty incredible, going to so many different places," he said. "Generally it's been positive, but it was a pretty exhausting process. I was real fortunate that I got that kind of support, though."
Casares noted different reactions to his stories in different parts of the country. "There was probably more of an emotional connection to the material in the Southwest, especially in Texas, and California as well," he said. "In some of the more outlying areas, it was more literary. They were looking at it from more strictly a story standpoint."
That standpoint naturally informs reviews of Brownsville. Are they of great concern to Casares? "Not particularly," he said. "They've been really nice. I guess I'm more interested in where I've been reviewed than what they're saying -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune -- just all these publications with really good reputations. Getting that kind of attention was pretty important. It's also particularly difficult for a paperback to get that kind of attention. That was one of the risks of going with the paperback."
As a Latino writer, Casares has also had to contend somewhat with the added baggage of cultural criticism. "There's always a little bit of that," he said. "But it hasn't been all that bad. There's always a feeling that you have to speak for the entire culture. It's kind of silly, because there's no way to carry the entire perspective of everyone. I was more interested in the stories. Where some kind of commentary came in, I tried to make it as natural as possible, not a big deal. I was more interested in the people rather than some social statement on ethnicity."
For a relatively new writer, the process itself can be more involving than such issues. "I had to find my own voice and my own style within the literary fiction field," he said. "I didn't have a specific voice that I started out with. It was something that I had to learn."
Casares was one of two recipients of the Dobie Paisano writing fellowships for 2002-2003. Sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, the fellowships allow writers to spend six months at Paisano, the late author J. Frank Dobie's 265-acre retreat west of Austin, now owned and maintained by UT Austin. The fellowships include a $2,000 a month living stipend.
Casares began his residence at Paisano in September 2002. "It came just about on the heels of learning that I was going to have Brownsville published," he said. "It's an ideal situation because of the time you get. You learn pretty quickly that time is the commodity that you're after as a writer. People can have a nice-paying job and try to write, but at the end of the day you're left with no time. At Paisano you're on this beautiful ranch, you have a living stipend. So it is ideal."
Next up for Casares is a novel, begun when he was at Paisano and part of his two-book deal with publisher Little, Brown and Company. "It's based in South Texas and Northern Mexico" is all he will say about it. "I'm trying to keep it under wraps for now. A significant portion of it has been laid out already. I hope to have a good part of it done by the end of the year."