Dramaturgical

SOMEWHERE OVER THE BORDER

DETERMINATION RESILIENCE COURAGE LOVE HOPE JOY

DIRECTOR'S NOTE

These are just a few words that I think of when I listen to Reina’s story. I think of the remarkable journey she (and many, many others) have made, leaving their homes, facing risk and dangers, coming to a new country that promises much and takes much in return. I think of the fortitude it takes to build a new life while learning a new language and navigating prejudice and a complex and unfamiliar culture. I think of the many people who left their homes, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. I think of the personal sacrifices made, leaving behind communities, homes, and loved ones. I think of the doctors and teachers and accountants who have come to this country to work as janitors, taxi drivers and in meat packing plants, of the long hours and multiple jobs they work, all to find a better life for themselves, their children. And I think of how so many, even in the face of difficulty, have held onto joy.

It is an honor and a privilege to help tell this story.

– Rebecca Martínez

REBECCA MARTÍNEZ 

“I think of the remarkable journey she (and many, many others) have made, leaving their homes, facing risk and dangers, coming to a new country that promises much and takes much in return.”

SOMEWHERE OVER THE BORDER

TOLD WITH HONOR AND BLESSING

On the first day of rehearsal for Somewhere Over the Border at Syracuse Stage, Brian Quijada told the story of his mother’s journey from El Salvador to the United States, which she undertook as a teenager alone in the 1970s. Quijada explained that he had known much of his mother’s and his family’s history, but not everything. He wanted to know more, to fill in the missing details. A chance phone call with his mother gave him the opportunity. Even as they spoke, Quijada recalled, his brain was buzzing with the possibility and potential contained in what he was hearing, what this new information revealed fully. His mother’s story. His family’s story. His story. The story of young Reina and her journey to a new life. The story that would become Somewhere Over the Border. Quijada is a theatre polymath: writer, composer, musician, singer, actor, and creator of singular devised works for the stage using a process called theatrical looping. He is an artist who knows how to tell a story, and just as strikingly, has stories to tell. He is a man with a mission.

The following evening over a lengthy zoom call, Quijada told the tale again. Dressed in a gray t-shirt and black Chicago White Sox baseball cap, he was youthful, enthusiastic, and irresistibly engaging. He laughed often, easily, and deeply, and mostly at himself.

You know, in our household, the story of my parents crossing the border was pretty well-known, mostly to shame us into like being better, being grateful to them for making the journey across the border: “Our

 THE PLAYWRIGHT’S MOTHER REINA QUIJADA ABOUT TWO YEARS BEFORE SHE LEFT EL SALVADOR. (PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIAN QUIJADA.)

“You know, my mom is very moved. She has a difficult time with this piece because, she told me, you’ve dramatized the three hardest times in my life, which was leaving Fernando, crossing the desert, and then returning ten years later.”

BRIAN QUIJADA 

lives were worse so you guys better take advantage of the fact that you have better lives.” I knew about my mother crossing the border, crossing the desert, spending three days in the desert, you know, crossing the actual borderline under a board with flowers on top in the back of a pick-up truck. But about four years ago, maybe three and a half, my mother called me and I had nothing going on, so we talked for a long time. I think at the time I was also experiencing this very grim, “I want to ask my parents everything before they go.” Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I wanted to know. I wanted to have these questions answered about our family lineage before I regret never asking them. I asked my mom, why Fernando, my eldest brother, had a different last name. Why he had curly hair? Of course, I knew my dad wasn’t his dad but what’s the story there? And she took a very long silence, of course, it’s very awkward for her because she has to tell me about relations she’s had with another man who is not my dad, and she went on this huge story that was very hard for her to go through. She told me she got pregnant at 16, and had my brother Fernando, and she’d heard about the U.S. and realized that she had to go in order to give herself and Fernando a better life. So she left Fernando as a kid, thinking she would be gone a month, a few weeks, and be able to come back for him. It took ten years. And she was

“Quijada is a theatre polymath: writer, composer, musician, singer, actor, and creator of singular devised works for the stage using a process called theatrical looping. He is an artist who knows how to tell a story, and just as strikingly, has stories to tell. He is a man with a mission.”

able to come back and meet him just before he was about to become a teenager.

And she told all about the people she met along the way, and the people she went on the journey with, in El Salvador and Guatemala and the entirety of Mexico on her way to meet the Coyote who would get her across. She’s telling me this, it was an epic story, epic—I couldn’t even put the whole thing into the play—and I was like “Oh, my God, this is like a classic story.” At first I thought it was The Odyssey and then it kind of clicked, especially with the people she met along the way, it was The Wizard of Oz. I knew I wanted to write it, I just didn’t know how for a while. I spent the next six months daydreaming about it, trying to connect the dots, what each thing meant, you know, what are the ruby red slippers, who was the Scarecrow, who was the Tin Man, who was the Lion, and I would say, six months after that, a friend of mine who teaches at UNCG (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) asked me to come and write a play for his graduate students. So I went and wrote everything during the residency, I wrote the book and the lyrics in seven days, at a little air B&B tiny house, going in every night and sharing 20 – 30 pages, like two or three songs, I was pumping out two or three songs a day, it was insane, but because I had been thinking about it for a long time, it was just pouring out, also I was drinking a lot of red wine, and it was flowing, no inhibitions. It was magical.

Quijada wrote his first play, the autobiographical solo work Where Did We Sit on the Bus, in 2014, and toured it for five years beginning in 2016. Like his subsequent work, it is a play with music, but not strictly speaking a “musical”. With Somewhere Over the Border, Quijada essayed a more traditional book musical drawing on a variety of styles to correspond with the physical landscapes that marked Reina’s journey.

The first track of Somewhere Over the Border is called “Everyday Towns”. It is a kind of mash-up of Cumbia and Hip-Hop. Cumbia is a Colombian genre that El Salvador has embraced as their sound. Cumbia is a very Central American sound and Cumbia varies throughout the Central American and Latin American landscapes. Now the fact that The Narrator is coming to the play in a kind of present day approach, looking back, you know he says, “We’re looking back, y’all, we’re spinning the globe, going back in time to 1978,” that’s

 FAMILY PORTRAIT. REAR FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: OLDEST BROTHER FERNANDO ALAS, GRANDMOTHER JULIA, MOTHER REINA, AND FATHER EDUARDO. FRONT FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: THE PLAYWRIGHT BRIAN AND BROTHER MARVIN. (PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIAN QUIJADA.)

the idea for putting Hip-Hop on top of it. But once the play gets started, a lot of the music in the show is representative of the music of the region. That was important. If a song started sounding too much like Salsa, we were like, “OK, Salsa is not of the region, so it can’t sound like that.” We tried to infuse even the instrumentation with the music of the region that she’s currently in. There’s a lot of indigenous flutes in Guatemalan music. As she makes her way up, it changes into more Mexican sounding music and instrumentation, so it’s really cool, not only to look at dramaturgically in terms of what influence the music has, but it’s also fun to listen to because you’re always hearing something new all along the way. It’s kind of paying homage to a bunch of different genres. Of course, it’s all under the umbrella of American musical theatre. “Somewhere Over the Border” is a nod to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” so it has the style of

the American musical. It’s a very traditional, accessible form; we all know it, we all love it.

“Everyday Towns” also serves as an invitation to view the specific and personal story of young Reina through a wider lens. “The world is filled with dreamers, dreamers like me and you . . . Everyday dreamers with stories that must be told,” sings the Narrator. However humble the phrasing, however simple the sentiment, herein Quijada the artist may be glimpsed.

What I became incredibly passionate about, based off that first play I wrote, was telling our stories. Telling the stories of first generation immigrants. It became kind of a mission statement for me, an artistic mission statement, to bring empathy to the American immigrant. Plays are about a lot of things, but that tends to be one of the things I write about a lot. I think about it often. Had my mom not come, I would not be speaking English to you, my name definitely wouldn’t be Brian, I wouldn’t be doing this, my life would be absolutely different. And so that idea kind of boggles my mind that there is an alternate universe where my mom would have stayed in El Salvador. It’s important to me to try to create an entry point to empathy, compassion, because I literally would not exist, I might not exist, if it wasn’t for her journey. Immigration is a highly politicized topic, and at the end of the day, politics is just a colder word for social issues, you know, it’s just people, the fact that people are looking for better lives. Anyway, I think I might have spent my entire career trying to find more entry points into empathy. That’s it. Let’s just say, right, let’s just say had I not been Brian a playwright, composer, right, my mother’s story probably would be forgotten. I had to ask her, and if I didn’t ask her and I didn’t know this information, even if I wasn’t a playwright, I wouldn’t have passed it on to my kids. No, I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have asked. The fact that I happen to be in this profession and that I wrote it down and made it this musical . . . I mean how many stories get forgotten? You know, exactly like my mom’s. How many? Thousands, millions. You think about all these stories that are epic, that just never get told.

Literature abounds with the wreckage of families dashed on the rocks of fictional portrayal, though not in this instance. There has been no falling out among the family members, no banishment, for which Quijada is grateful.

You know, my mom is very moved. She has a difficult time with this piece because, she told me, you’ve dramatized the three hardest times in my life, which was leaving Fernando, crossing the desert, and then returning ten years later. She’s like, you’ve packed it into an hour and a half. So, it is absolutely hard for her to relive those moments, even dramatized. I know the power in seeing your own story dramatized like that. My brother Fernando, obviously, was born in El Salvador, he’s a healthy number of years older than I am, 16 or 17 years older than me. I still don’t know for sure that he knows what I do. So, I think he’s a little like, “Oh, like yeah, you’ve got a little skit.” I don’t think he quite gets it. But I have got their blessing to tell this story. Luckily, none of them are villains. I’m just trying to tell their story in a way that honors them both.

– Joseph Whelan