Two playwrights and actors, Brian Quijada and Nigel D. Robinson, have created a stage production together, a show built around a chapter of history they say is rarely told. The piece centers on what they described as the under-told story of an underground railroad that led not north but south, toward Mexico. For both men, bringing it to audiences was a way of sharing something they felt they should have learned long ago.
The idea began with an article. Quijada said the pair came across a piece on history.com about the underground railroad that led south to Mexico, and that reading it was, in his words, mind blowing. Their first reaction, he recalled, was to ask how they had never learned about it, a question that quickly became part of the reason they wanted to put the story on stage in the first place.
At the heart of the production is a historical claim the two men returned to again and again. According to the playwrights, Mexico abolished slavery some 30 years before the United States did, and went on to give citizenship to runaway slaves who reached its territory. That detail, they said, was both astonishing and central to the show they would go on to build around it.
For Robinson, the project was tied to a belief in the power of education. We perish for our lack of knowledge, he said, arguing that teaching people history this way can help bring about change. The pair described themselves as little misfits of the American theater, saying they never fit the mold that New York City and other cities had created, and so they set out to make their own thing instead.
Music is the glue that holds the production together. Robinson said hip hop is the common ground between them, recalling that he had been rapping since he was about nine years old. Quijada grew up on boleros and Mexican music, while Robinson leaned on Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire and Luther Vandross, and the two mashed those influences together. Hip hop's own tradition of sampling disco and funk, they said, made the blend feel natural and contemporary.
On stage, the two begin as themselves. They come out as Brian and Nigel, they explained, telling the audience they have learned something most people have not heard about, before launching into the story. That story follows a man named Henry, first found on a plantation speaking about the monotony of each day, before an incident forces him into a stark choice between killing or being killed.
From there, Henry becomes a runaway. He learns of a folktale about crossing the Rio Grande on a bale of cotton, kept afloat by its weight in the water, and makes the crossing during a storm before washing up on the shores of Mexico. There he is met by Carlos, a character the playwrights described as a veteran of the Mexican-American War who had been forced to abandon his men and was himself displaced, and who rescues the new arrival.