Arturo Hilario
El Observador
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic Brian Quijada was going through the lows of being an artist with nowhere to perform. While people stayed in, theaters and venues stayed dormant and he paced around wondering what would come next for his artistic pursuits.
Then a fruitful opportunity came to him, the option to work on a show that had only been an idea within the notes app in his phone based on a history article he had read about the Mexican portion of the underground railroad, and how Mexican abolitionists helped enslaved people escape too.
Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and researchers have estimated that up to 10,000 people, and possibly more, escaped into Mexico on this little known Southern tail of the Underground Railroad.
In order to properly present this project about Black and Brown experiences, Quijada reached out to multi-instrumentalist/writer/actor Nygel D. Robinson. Although they had only met once but never worked together, Quijada saw Robinson as the perfect partner to bring to life what would become Mexodus.
Mexodus is a live-looping musical that tells a fictionalized story based on the real history of the Southern portion of the underground railroad which led into Mexico. It revolves around two characters, Mexican sharecropper Carlos (Quijada) and the formerly enslaved Henry (Robinson) and how they both come to terms with their past experiences and what connections they share.
Live-looping is the practice of using digital or analog hardware to create music through layers of sounds using samples, live instruments or even the performers own voice. In Mexodus, Quijada and Robinson tell the story by creating the music in front of audiences, all while performing in the musical as well.
The show entertains, while also brings light to historic connections between Black and Brown communities, as well as inform on systematic racism, colorism in Latinidad, and looking towards a better future.
Find out just how the show came to be, and most importantly why Quijada would like audiences to take away a hopeful but knowledgeable message within the entertaining and inventive show.
Mexodus is hosting its West Coast premiere from now until October 20, 2024, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Tickets are available at berkeleyrep.org
To start off I just wanted to ask what the initial spark of idea was that led to Mexodus?
I want to say, 2018, 2019, Somebody posted an article from history.com called “The Little‑Known Underground Railroad That Ran South to Mexico”, And I clicked and I read it, and I was incredibly interested in this part of history that I’d never heard about.
And as I was reading the article, I was like, “Whoa, how have I never heard about this?” And then after I finish it, I’m like, “This makes absolute sense!”
A lot of my writing in general is typically about border politics. It’s a lot about my parents. My parents crossed the border in the ’70s. And so I remember reading that article and being like, “This is a border story.” This is just a reverse border story in the way that we typically see border stories like that. But I remember just saving it to my notes application on my phone, being like, “Man, I can’t write this piece alone. It’s going to take a lot of research. So I’m going to put it on the back burner for a second, but it would be a great play.”
In 2020, I met Nygel D. Robinson and then I brought up the idea to him, and he was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And we met once before the pandemic shutdown, and then we decided to write it during the pandemic. So that’s how it all started.
2020 was not the best year for the performing arts, how did that affect you and how did you get this project off the ground in those circumstances?
I mean, nothing was happening. Everybody had lost all their jobs in the theater. We couldn’t do our jobs over Zoom. But when the shutdown happened, I got a call from Liz Carlson from New York Stage and Film. And she reached out saying, “Hey, listen, we have some money to support some artists. Do you have anything you want to work on?” And I said, “I just met this guy,” and I brought up this idea for this play.
But what’s the point? What are we doing it for? We’re not going to get to perform it or anything. And then she said, “What if you write one song every month for a year, and then hopefully a year from now, you get to perform it live?”
And that’s exactly what happened. So, we wrote one song every month for a year, and then the following year, we showed up to Poughkeepsie, New York, and we performed this concept album, this 12-track concept album of Mexodus live. And so, it was really great because it kept us working. It kept us, our mind, off of how unemployed we were. But it was amazing.
We had the time; we released the very first track a couple of days after George Floyd was murdered. So, we were writing in isolation, but we were also writing with the culture of political landscape of what was going on racially in the country. So, it was a really fertile time to be writing. By that, I mean, it felt easy. It felt like an easy stream of consciousness to be writing about race politics in America.
And could you make connections back from that turmoil in 2020 to the history that you’re talking about in your project?
Oh, yeah, for sure. The history that happened in the 1850s with slavery, it’s even more predominant. But even with the loss of the Mexican-American War and a taking of the land, a stealing of the land, losing Texas to the United States, I think there is a bit of resentment that still remains however many years later and the way that I think certain politicians talk about Mexico. I think it’s those things, those topics that we talk about in 1850, a lot of those talking points still remain today.
Was the looping, the improvisational aspect always intended to be part of it? How did that come to be the artform you would focus on in the show?
So I’ve live-looped now for like 15 years. I love it. It’s my favorite. I think it’s inherently theatrical. You see something get built right in front of your eyes in a way that if you were just put on headphones and listen to somebody looping, you wouldn’t get it. You want to see the person making it.
And so, what attracted me to working with Nygel was that he played a bunch of instruments. I saw him play a bunch of instruments, and I’m like, “Oh, man, this guy would be really, really good on a live loop machine.” So I approached him and said, “Hey, you’re really good at this.” And so he caught onto it very, very quickly.
And the reason I think that the art form works pretty well in this format is because I feel like there’s a lot of thematic elements of looping that I think are helpful. There’s a lot of themes that stay, that haven’t changed from 1850 to now. And that is reflective in the music. How do we break the loop? How do we not repeat past mistakes? Or how do we shift? How do we make a good change?
And by that, I mean, it’s crazy that Black and Brown people often, systematically, are kept apart, shifted. And there’s a lot of paradigms that exist because of white supremacy that keep us apart. But if we were to come together, it’d be a much more beautiful and powerful thing. Also, the fact that these two guys are working. A lot of the themes of the show is Nygel D. Robinson plays Henry, who has spent his entire time on a plantation cultivating cotton.
And so to see him looping and picking up instruments and triggering loops, and me who plays Carlos, who fought in the Mexican-American War, and now is a sharecropper in Mexico, I’m also working.
Us doing all of this, us controlling the sounds. Every single sound in the play is made by us, and we’re controlling it. So it’s super reflective. All to say is that the looping feels very much a part of the storytelling. It isn’t like some gimmick that we’re just like, “Oh, we’re just looping because it’s cool.” It feels very ingrained into the storytelling elements.
Since you are involved in the playwriting, composing and acting, how does Mexodus flex those artistic muscles for you compared to other work that you’ve done in the past?
Honestly, most of the stuff that I’ve been doing has been wearing all the hats since I started writing 10 years ago. So to me, it feels like riding a bike, it’s very familiar. I will say that this is Nygel’s very first play. And with that, it feels like At least in the beginning, it felt like, very teacher-students. It always felt equal, like a guide.
“Hey, this is the story of Mexico. He’s going to cross the Rio Grande. He’s going to show up in Mexico, blah, blah, blah.” A lot of big picture stuff. And then telling Nygel, I’m like, “Okay, cool, here, write this song about living on a plantation and cotton.” And so he would go off and he would write that song. But then once the play was completed, he caught on very quickly. He’s a very fast learner. Eventually, we were building it together as opposed to me being like, “Do this, do that, do this.”
So, all to say is that I’ve written plays and written music for stuff that I’ve also been in, and it It’s really great. In fact, most of the stuff is about my family. This is the first one that isn’t directly about my family. But it’s cool to be doing it with somebody else. I think that’s what makes it new. And he’s fabulous. He’s an incredible writer, and I can’t believe it’s his first time.
One of the last things I wanted to ask was if you could touch a little bit on the story and what you hope that people take from Mexodus when they get out of the theater?
I mean, I think with a play like this, you want people to leave with compassion and empathy. I’ll speak personally, that in the play I bring up anti-Blackness, even in Latino communities, which is a real thing. And honestly, not something that we often discuss within the Latino community. Colorism exists in Latinidad.
Nygel’s told me stories, for example one about how he’s had an older Black woman come up to him and be like, before I saw this play, I was totally, “Build the wall, and they’re taking our jobs.”
And so to me, the important conversations are the ones that feel like good is happening, is when our communities can watch this and be like, “Oh, why are we so afraid of the other?” And then that can shift. If they could see Nygel and I making something like this, which is insane. It’s an insane thing to do, this huge looping show, this crazy feat of research, then imagine what they could do in their communities. And so to me, that’s what seems most exciting.
And the acknowledgement that anti-Blackness is a real thing. It’s stupid and systematic, it goes so much farther back than they could even imagine. But anyway, all to say is that that’s the part that in a weird way excites me because I’m like, “Let it be called out, let it be recognized, and let it change.”
I just think that for how much trauma there is in the story, it’s actually filled with a bunch of joy, and we have a great time doing it. And it’s like a concert. I mean, we play 15 different instruments, We make the music live, it’s a wild ride. Everybody in that room, I think, at the end of this play, feels emboldened, emblazoned to be good. It’s a really fun concert.
