Alejandro Escovedo’s Return to the Border

Preparing to perform his new album, “The Crossing,” the singer-songwriter and son of Texas takes a sentimental journey backward through time, from Dallas down to old Mexico.
Recently finding Austin overrun Escovedo moved to Dallas. He blames himself for 8220telling people how great Austin is.8221
Recently, finding Austin overrun, Escovedo moved to Dallas. He blames himself for “telling people how great Austin is.”Photograph by Drew Brown for The New Yorker

Alejandro Escovedo, the singer and songwriter, likes to have a proper Mexican breakfast before a long drive. “Let’s go here,” he said. He pulled into the back lot of a restaurant called El Pueblo, across from the Tornado bus terminal on East Jefferson Boulevard, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. El Pueblo, he said, is where travellers arriving by bus from Mexico often go to eat and to get their bearings. He ordered in Spanish, then remarked that his Spanish was poor. The plates came quickly. Chorizo con huevos. “This is badass, man,” he said. An elderly vagrant looked in through the window and then walked in. Escovedo gave him a dollar. “When I was small, I used to be able to see the pain in people,” he said.

This was the Friday before Labor Day. The following week, he was due in Philadelphia, to begin a tour that would take him to Brooklyn, then south, and west, and eventually back to Dallas. Typically, he’d be resting up, but that night he had a benefit gig in Austin, his former home town, and so, prior to leaving Texas, he was sneaking in a three-day road trip, a kind of sentimental journey—south to Austin and beyond, backward through time, down to the border of old Mexico. He had rented a black S.U.V., with room for a guitar and an amp; he joked that its tinted windows and low clearance gave it a slight cartel vibe—good for Laredo.

Escovedo, who is sixty-seven, was about to release a new album, his fourteenth as a solo artist, on top of a few with a run of beloved but luckless punk-ish bands. For this one, he’d teamed up with an Italian musician and former journalist named Antonio Gramentieri, known to all as Don Antonio. The album, “The Crossing,” tells an imagined story of two young immigrants working in an Italian restaurant in Texas: a Mexican named Diego (a kid not unlike Escovedo) and an Italian named Salvo (a version of Gramentieri), who share a love of punk rock, as well as the hardships and wonders of their experience as less than welcome newcomers to America. They recorded it in Italy, with a band comprising Gramentieri’s childhood friends and neighbors in Modigliana, a small comune east of Bologna—a long way from the Rio Grande. The album has the customary Escovedo mixture of romping Stooges guitar and plaintive folk, but also, in places, a cinematic heft that suggests Ennio Morricone—a whiff of the spaghetti Southwestern. Escovedo and Gramentieri didn’t have Trump, or his wall, or ICE square in their sights when they started, but the tragedy of the lives disrupted on both sides of the southern border suffuses the album; the context deepens an idiosyncratic cycle of songs. As Escovedo sings at the end, “We all become history when we make the crossing.”

Four years ago, Escovedo got married for the third time, to a hair stylist and photographer named Nancy Rankin; a year later, they moved to Dallas from Austin, where he’d lived since 1980, and where he’d made a name for himself. Alejandro splitting Austin? It was as if Joey Ramone had moved to Boston. Rankin had a job on a television show in Dallas, and they were looking for a clean break. But, also, Austin had got too gentrified, too popular, too expensive. “It’s overrun with this hipster thing,” he said. “I’m told it gets a thousand new people a week. I blame myself for going around the world telling people how great Austin is.” The bumper-sticker invocation “Keep Austin Weird” had apparently come up short.

Now Escovedo was an evangelist for the weirdness of Dallas. He and Rankin rent an apartment above the reception desk in the Belmont Hotel, a former stucco motor lodge reborn as a kind of bohemian citadel, with a view of downtown. He often performs in the lounge there, and hosts talks with writers and musicians. Their apartment is cluttered with books and records, the spare bedroom a studio of sorts, filled with old guitars. There are makeshift shrines to Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Juan Marichal, Escovedo’s favorite baseball player as a kid, and to his seven children—six girls and a boy, ranging in age from fifteen to forty-eight.

After breakfast, Escovedo drove down Jefferson Boulevard, admiring the pawnshops and the quinceañera storefronts, and the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was cornered after the assassination up the road. Escovedo had on a straw hat, a burgundy T-shirt, stovepipe Levi’s, running shoes, and, around his neck, a caramel-colored bandanna, held with a silver clasp. He has an overbite and big cheeks, which add an affable and perhaps misdirecting ingenuousness to his presence, in person and onstage. His hair is Elvis-ish, black and combed up, with wisps falling in front of his ears, as stand-ins for sideburns. He put on a Muddy Waters song, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and set a course for Austin.

One night in 2003, Escovedo was preparing to go onstage, in an auditorium in Tempe, Arizona, when he succumbed to a wave of what felt like a bad flu. He vomited blood—three bowls of it, he said—and felt better. After the gig, he collapsed backstage and was rushed to the emergency room. In the hospital, a nurse asked him, “What are you in here for?”

“Hepatitis C,” Escovedo said.

She said, “You’re going to die if you don’t get a liver transplant.”

He’d received the diagnosis five years before, when he was forty-seven. How he’d caught hep C he didn’t know, but there had been some intravenous drug use, in the late seventies, when he was a punk rocker living in the Chelsea Hotel and the East Village. Since the diagnosis, he’d had some good months and some bad ones, but now, with advanced cirrhosis and a bleeding esophagus, it seemed as though there might not be any more months at all. In the hospital, he again started throwing up blood. A nurse said to his sister, who was at his bedside, “If we don’t do something soon, we’re going to lose him.” And then he passed out. He soon found himself in a space without walls, in a void of light, where he was visited by his children. They wore brightly colored serapes and headdresses festooned with little balls, and they were laughing and singing and playing tambourines and flutes, and grabbing onto his legs. He thought, There is nothing here but love.

When he came to, hours later, he learned that he’d received a blood transfusion. He had no health insurance, and so in the months ahead an array of friends and collaborators in the music world performed benefit concerts on his behalf. Eventually, many of these friends—among them, Lucinda Williams, Ian Hunter, John Cale—recorded a double album of covers of his songs, called “Por Vida.” Some artists had to be turned away, for lack of space. As musicians age and encounter health problems, they are constantly playing fund-raisers for one another, but Escovedo inspired an almost custodial regard among other musicians, those both more famous than he and less. A cynic might guess that he’d had enough success to touch all of them but not so much as to foster jealousy or resentment. Or maybe there was nothing there but love: here was a sensitive, agile songwriter who could rock out with the blunt force of Johnny Thunders—both a literate soul and a true punk, a humble collaborator and a plucky front man, a pussycat and a tomcat. The attention earned him a new generation of fans, including me; the support—financial and otherwise—got him through. He found a way to manage the hepatitis for the next dozen years, and got back to recording and performing.

Escovedo and Rankin, who is forty-six, met in 2013, at the Continental Club, a popular honky-tonk on South Congress, in Austin. Escovedo was performing. Throughout the set, he seemed to be singing just to her, she felt. Later, he introduced himself, and a courtship commenced. For their honeymoon, in 2014, Escovedo took her to one of his favorite places, El Pescadero, near the tip of Baja California, where an old surfing friend had a villa on the beach. On the seventh day, a Category 4 hurricane named Odile made landfall and ravaged the coast, while they huddled, terrified, in the villa. Escovedo cursed himself for having brought Rankin there. When the eye passed over, hours later, they ventured outside to survey the damage, only to see—or really just hear, because it was dark, and the power had gone out—a flood roaring down an arroyo that ran past the property. The torrent took out a big chunk of the villa and carried it to sea. In the morning, they sifted through the wreckage—the friend’s steel safe stranded in the arroyo, the gutted muddy earth now teeming with rattlesnakes that had been flushed out of the hills—before embarking on a weeklong odyssey to get back to Texas.

“Now, Timmy, you said you wanted a grownup haircut.”

Later that fall, as Escovedo prepared for a tour with a new band that included Peter Buck, from R.E.M., and Scott McCaughey, from the Minus 5, he began experiencing strange fugue episodes and blackouts. On a few occasions, he fell into a kind of psychedelic gibberish, exhibited uncharacteristic petulance, and pulled weird stunts—pouring salt in friends’ coffee, running through the apartment naked—which he barely remembered afterward. To him, it felt as though he were high on PCP; to Rankin, he seemed to be reverting to a seven-year-old version of himself. Was this the hepatitis? A stroke?

Before the second show of the tour, as the band prepared to take the stage, he had a panic attack and couldn’t go on. This had never happened to him. He had always been a game and spirited performer, whether in front of a couple of dozen people or seventy-five thousand. Rankin took him to the emergency room, but tests revealed nothing. Concerned for his health, the band cancelled the tour, and Escovedo entered a period of debt and gloom. Doctors, after Rankin eventually mentioned the hurricane, allowed that he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They recommended rest. He was dropped by his manager—Bruce Springsteen’s man, Jon Landau. “They were tired of me, tired of my records not selling,” Escovedo told me. “I hung up the phone and said, ‘Baby, we’re really on our own now.’ ” (Landau wrote, in an e-mail, “We tried everything we knew how to do. It remains an injustice that such a great guy and great talent has not become more widely known and appreciated for the superb artist we know him to be.”)

Convalescence kicked in. A course of drugs got rid of the hepatitis. As for the P.T.S.D., the treatment, in the end, was getting out of Austin and getting back together with Buck and McCaughey. With another guitarist, Kurt Bloch, they recorded an album, “Burn Something Beautiful,” in 2016, and they went out on the road. I caught them one January night at the City Winery, in downtown Manhattan, where patrons sit at tables and eat dinner while the musicians perform. The three guitarists, Buck, Bloch and Escovedo, none of them young, whipped up a fury that made a mockery of the dinner-theatre conceit. Alejandro was back.

The long way to Austin took us through the towns of Hico, Hamilton, and Lampasas and into the rolling oak-and-limestone hill country of central Texas. In yards and driveways, there seemed to be more signs for the Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke than for Ted Cruz. “Beto’s a punk!” Escovedo said, with admiration.

Texas was where he was born, and where he made his bones, but he’d grown up in California. He dialled up his younger sister Dolly, his closest sibling, to compare memories of their parents. Dolly was driving, too, en route from Southern California to Reno. “Dolly, in your opinion—do you know the real reason we left Texas?”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

Escovedo has twelve siblings and half siblings. The father of all thirteen children had been a mariachi musician and a prizefighter in his youth but worked mainly as a plumber. Known as Don Pedro, or Buck to his bar friends, he was a rake, a pool shark, a horseman, a snappy dresser, and a suave singer and dancer. “My father was basically a rock-and-roll star,” Escovedo said. Don Pedro was born in 1907 in Saltillo, the capital of the state of Coahuila, Mexico. His parents left him there while they went to find work picking cotton and making cedar posts in Texas, but when he was twelve he followed them across, riding the rails with an older cousin. “There was no line in those days,” Escovedo said. “There was the river. It was almost like the same country.” The boys tracked down the parents in Luling, Texas. Escovedo’s grandfather was a hard-drinking watermelon picker who regularly beat his sons. Escovedo wrote the song “Wave” about the children:

Don’t you cry
I made it to the other side
The sun’s not brighter here
It only shines on golden hair.

Escovedo’s mother, Cleotilda Renteria, was from San Marcos, Texas, one of twelve children. Her father sold drygoods and, Escovedo was told, he was the first Mexican shop owner on the town square. “He got burned out twice,” Escovedo said. “Then he got killed by a car while walking along the side of the road.” Cleotilda’s mother raised the twelve kids. Later, she lived with the family, and was, in Escovedo’s memory, a “scary, scary figure, dressed always in black with a veil. She never spoke English. She always said I was too dark. My skin.”

Escovedo, born in San Antonio in 1951, was Cleo’s first child with Don Pedro. They lived in an old Mexican neighborhood on the west side of town. They spoke Spanish. The father caroused, the mother simmered, and there came a day when she decided to leave him. “My mother was going to make her escape,” Escovedo said. “She had hired a man to drive us to California.” Don Pedro, who’d been at large for weeks, found out, came home, gathered up the family, and announced that he was taking them on a vacation. They drove to Orange County, California, leaving everything behind, including Alejandro’s dog. The vacation soon revealed itself to be a relocation. His abiding last memory of Texas, before he returned a couple of decades later, was of a dead cow in the road, beset by vultures.

California was a paradise of orange groves and avocado orchards. Soon after arriving, the family went in their church clothes to see the ocean. “We weren’t allowed even to take off our shoes on the beach,” Escovedo said. “It must’ve looked like some Chicano Fellini movie.” Eventually, they settled in Huntington Beach. He surfed, boxed, played baseball, and hung around the record store. “I learned English from rock and roll,” he said.

Escovedo dropped out of high school and left home at sixteen. “It wasn’t that it wasn’t a loving family,” he said. “But you can’t find one photo of my mother holding me. She was hard to live with. Of my siblings, I’m the most like my father, and as a result I reminded her of him.”

By the time Escovedo was eighteen, he had a wife and a kid. He was hanging around with James Luna, who went on to become a renowned Mexican-American and Native American performance artist, and developing a sense of discernment and taste. Although Escovedo came from a family of musicians, he wasn’t much interested in making music himself. His older half brothers Pete and Coke were Latin jazz musicians who also played with Santana and other bands. Sheila E., best known for her work with Prince, is Pete’s daughter. Not long ago, Pete was recording an album and put out word that he wanted to have as many Escovedos as possible perform on it. Several dozen showed up. At one point, they tried to choreograph a dance routine. Alejandro said, “They told me, ‘We want to see your birth certificate to make sure you’re an Escovedo. Because you can’t move for shit.’ ”

In 1975, after separating from his wife and moving to San Francisco, he and a friend were making a film loosely based on Iggy Pop and the Stooges; they needed to shoot a band. He picked up a guitar and pretended to play, and before long this bit of flimflam mutated into the formation of the Nuns, a foundational Bay Area glam-punk outfit. Eventually, the Nuns made it to New York, and Escovedo was besotted by the scene. The Nuns hung out at Max’s Kansas City, and Escovedo wound up at a table with Andy Warhol, George Clinton, and the members of Blondie. He decided to stay, taking a room at the Chelsea Hotel. He was in residence when Sid Vicious was charged with stabbing Nancy Spungen. A few years later, as a member of another group, Rank and File, the pioneers of so-called cowpunk, he returned to Texas, and fell in love with Austin, then a laid-back but decadent hub of songwriters who were crossbreeding country, blues, rock, punk, and folk, producing new subgenres (including what’s now called alt-country) that are practically mainstream. He left Rank and File and, with his brother Javier, started the True Believers, a raunchy three-guitar group that was briefly the hottest band in Austin. “We were basking in the sense that something big was about to happen to us,” Escovedo said. “But we fell short.”

Our first stop in Austin was Rock n Roll Rentals, a vast warehouse of gear, to pay for the sound equipment that Escovedo’s band would be taking on tour. “I’ve been coming here since it was a little house,” he said. Everyone seemed to know him. A guy spooling cable said, “They been playing the shit out of you on satellite radio.” Escovedo handed over his credit card, and the guy at the register said, “Sorry, I know it’s a pain, but everyone has to do it. Even Robert Plant.”

The gig that night, at the Continental, was a benefit for a longtime Austin fanzine editor who needed a new, souped-up wheelchair. The organizers were hoping to raise thirty thousand dollars, and Escovedo was at the top of the bill. He reunited with Rankin, who’d come to Austin a couple of days earlier for appointments with old clients. She has long blond hair and bangs and glasses and wore a shirt dress with horizontal black and white stripes. In the hotel lobby, Escovedo realized he’d forgotten his guitar upstairs, and Rankin demonstrated no irritation whatsoever when he went back to fetch it. On the road, she works the merchandise table, takes photos, and makes sure Escovedo is taking care of himself: juices, beets, water, sleep.

The Continental is in some respects Escovedo’s home court. The crowd was mostly seasoned Austinites, older but exuberant in reunion. Escovedo hauled his guitar and amp in from the car. Avid greetings ensued, among local eminences and barflies. Escovedo was joined that night by Rosie Flores, a hot-shot local guitarist whose garlanded burgundy wide-brimmed hat brought to mind a shredder Minnie Pearl. The drummer was his longtime collaborator Hector Muñoz, whom he called “the Benicio del Toro of Austin.” They opened with “Sally Was a Cop” (“but now she’s a soldier”) and then went into “Always a Friend,” perhaps Escovedo’s best-known song, in part because Bruce Springsteen used to play it. Clara the bartender climbed atop a speaker case and began go-go dancing, which seemed to send a current through Escovedo. He has an infectious way of spurring his band, barking “Come on!” and “Let’s go!” with a barrage of guitar chords. Suddenly, what had seemed a local favorite’s perfectly nice presentation of well-made songs to a friendly, graying audience became a raucous, sweaty rock show. Escovedo, who’d appeared wistful and weary toward the end of the drive, seemed to shed decades. By the time he wrapped up with one of his go-to bangers, “Castanets,” a New York Dolls kind of thing with the cheeky chorus “I like her better when she walks away” (for a while, he’d stopped playing it, after he learned that George W. Bush had it on his iPod), an anonymous donor had given twenty-five thousand dollars to the wheelchair cause—mission accomplished. Behind the club, the musicians and some friends hung out and drank and smoked things, until Escovedo, looking drained, his eyes a little rheumy, carried his guitar and amp out to the car. He and Rankin went to get some midnight tacos.

In the morning, Escovedo showed me around town. He is a prolific if understated storyteller, and Austin was a thicket of prompts. Here was the site of the old Alamo Hotel, where he sang in public for the first time: “Blue Yodel No. 9.” There was the office building that had replaced Las Manitas, the old restaurant and gathering place, where Jonathan Demme had once planned to shoot scenes for a documentary about Escovedo. He pointed out a vast construction pit, which used to be a rambling apartment complex owned by Willie Nelson. “It was a madhouse full of pot dealers.” On a side street, we passed a grinning gent in a cowboy hat, and Escovedo said, “He used to do my gardening.” At the corner of Oxford and Valeria, he pointed to a modest white clapboard house. “This is where my kids grew up. Bobbi got this house.”

Bobbi Levie was his second partner, his guide and right hand as he came of age in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, who, shortly after the birth of their second daughter, in 1991, took her own life.

“Bobbi was in a lot of pain,” he said. “She was a lovely, beautiful, well-read, sharp, street-smart woman. But there came a time when we went our separate ways.” Escovedo was with her and the girls at the house the day she died; she said she was going to get cigarettes and never came back. “That began the whole process of trying to crawl out of a hole of guilt,” he went on. “You don’t ever rid yourself of the effects of that. And Austin was a small town. I took a lot of blame. I lost friends over it.”

Escovedo’s first two solo albums, “Gravity” and especially “Thirteen Years,” took a lot of this up. They were a departure from his work with the True Believers, much deeper, lyrically, with string accompaniment—Iggy Pop by way of Van Morrison, maybe. He went from being a guy in cool bands to being taken seriously as a songwriter, in a songwriters’ town.

“Bobbi didn’t like my being a musician,” Escovedo said. “In her eyes, I was supposed to be a writer. When I started playing guitar in the Nuns, she was not impressed at all. She didn’t like my songwriting, either. Her guy was Lou Reed. Later, she said, ‘Why are you wasting your time? It’s never going to amount to anything.’ I took great offense to that.” Escovedo is generally fed up with being asked about low sales and small halls. The German press, especially, he said, likes to pursue this line: “ ‘You’re not successful. Does this frustrate you?’ What a ridiculous question. I never got into it for that. It’s never bothered me.”

“We can kill and eat her now, or we can let her live and she’ll feed us for the next fifteen years.”

On the road to San Antonio, a call came in (ringtone: “All the Young Dudes”). The dashboard monitor read “Don Antonio.” “The first time I went to the Continental Club was in 1996,” an Italian-accented voice said. “I was a teen-ager with a big dream.”

Gramentieri grew up (and still lives) in Modigliana, and has long been a fanatic of American blues, especially the Texas style. He estimates that he has been to Texas at least fifty times. But, as exacting as he was in his imitations, he could never get his guitar to sound right. “I was playing the same note and wondering why it is so different,” he said. He had a revelation, brought on by Ry Cooder’s collaboration with the Cuban guitarist Manuel Galbán, that there was a way to bring his own particular cultural influence to his interpretation of American music. His region’s traditional folk music, usually featuring an accordion and a violin, had a great deal in common with old Tejano music. He found particular inspiration in Mexican-American rock music: “Los Lobos was my Beatles. Alejandro was the Latino Clash.”

A few years ago, Gramentieri formed a band with his childhood friends and neighbors, called, naturally enough, Don Antonio, and recorded an album in Sicily, “which to me is the Texas of Italy.” Gramentieri sent the finished recording to his booking agent, in London, who happened to be Escovedo’s new manager, and whom Escovedo, that week, had asked about finding musicians in Europe for him to perform with on a tour overseas. The manager connected them. “It was supposed to be a one-off,” Gramentieri said. “But right away, our first rehearsal, something clicked. Maybe there was a shared Latino perspective on all these sounds.”

On the road in Europe, Gramentieri and Escovedo decided to write and record together. Gramentieri came to Texas for a couple of three-week visits, and he and Escovedo went around Dallas, interviewing Mexican immigrants about their experiences and reconsidering their own. Then Escovedo, with Rankin, moved to Italy for a few months and got down to work with the Don Antonio band in Modigliana. Initially, Escovedo had hired the band to save money, but now he was so keen on the collaboration that he was paying nine thousand dollars on work visas to bring them to America—for this month’s tour and a longer one starting in January, where they will perform “The Crossing” in full.

“Alejandro has this aura,” Gramentieri said. “He has a strong charismatic and spiritual presence. His face is like a Mayan mask, without a specific space and time. He can set the energy of a room without trying too hard. Actually, he reminds me of my mom.”

We rolled into San Antonio and stopped for a bite to eat in the King William district, the seat of the old gentry, which had gone to seed and then been regentrified. He wanted to catch up with John Phillip Santos, a writer and fellow San Antonio native who was collaborating with him on a memoir. Santos was a font of Tejano history; he referred to San Antonio as “a secret Mexican city, the northernmost edge of New Spain, the margin of empire.” Forget, for a second, the Alamo. The city, and the state, was part of Mexico, when Stephen Austin arrived, in the eighteen-twenties, with his roughly three hundred Anglo families: migrants of another stripe. The Rio Grande was not yet a border, or a place to build a wall.

Escovedo ordered but didn’t finish a beer—he tends to have just a taste. We’d planned to see his boyhood home, on the west side, but then he wondered aloud if there might be some minor-league baseball to catch in Laredo. Escovedo pitched in Little League and always brings a ball and two gloves on tour. Los Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos, a ball club in the Mexican League that splits its home games between Laredo, on the American side, and Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican side, had a game, at Uni-Trade Stadium, on Sinatra Parkway. We arrived in time for the two anthems. Outside the chain-link fence between the lot and the field, Escovedo removed his hat and stood still for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, as the Mexican anthem played, we bought, for eight dollars apiece, a pair of third-row seats behind the plate. The Tecos’ uniforms were trimmed in the green and red of the Mexican flag. The visiting team was from Monclova, in Coahuila. The public-address announcements were all in Spanish. By the second inning, the stands had almost filled up, amid the cicada rattle of ratcheted noisemakers known as matracas, and the call-and-response taunts of fans along the first- and third-base lines. Above the visiting dugout, a man in an ape suit made lewd gestures and led chants of “asshole” and “puto,” in an unfolding feud across the field with a chubby güey in a giant sombrero. Between innings, an owl mascot did the merengue. Escovedo, in big square sunglasses and a new Tecos cap, sipped a Tecate and declared that this was the best time he’d had in ages.

In our time together, Escovedo told me a slew of stories of being treated badly, or at least differently, because he was Mexican-American. He recalled a program director telling his record company, “We already have a Mexican band, no room for another.” (This was a reference to Los Lobos.) “We can’t even pronounce his name. How do you expect us to play him?” He has his share of driving-while-Mexican stories, and after we’d passed, on the northbound side of I-35, between San Antonio and Laredo, an elaborate Border Patrol checkpoint, he began to worry about driving back the next night. He called Rankin and had her send copies of his birth certificate, marriage license, and passport. It was infuriating, though perhaps no longer surprising, to contemplate that a son of Texas, one of the state’s most celebrated artists, had to fret about travelling along its highways. There’d been news, that week, of the Border Patrol detaining a Texas man with a passport on his return from Mexico, and of new passports being denied to some people who were native-born. Escovedo recalled a time that he and Bobbi Levie had taken a train from Austin to Mexico City. After disembarking at the border in Laredo to switch trains, police officers wouldn’t let him back on. “They said I was an Indian.”

That night, I walked the streets of Laredo alone. The commercial district was all but dead, except for police and Border Patrol vehicles, and a few rough-looking bars. In the morning, when I told Escovedo I’d gone out, he said, “It’s sketchy here, dude. Look at how desolate this place is.” We were driving to get some huevos and barbacoa. A hearty Mexican breakfast. “Now I’m really worried about going through that checkpoint,” he said.

Escovedo had got up early to go for a run before the heat took hold. He’d always been lean, but he’d recently developed a small paunch, another by-product, he said, of the hurricane: “Cortisol collects itself in the midriff.” Even at 8 a.m., the sun was oppressive; by noon, the temperature would be a hundred and five degrees. He set off in a park along the Rio Grande. For a while, a Border Patrol officer followed him in an S.U.V. He saw an officer watching him from a rise. There were others on boats. On the Mexican bank, some men waded in the river with fishing nets. He ran past the bridge where his mother and grandmother had been caught, decades ago, trying to smuggle Mexican plants under their dresses for their garden in San Antonio—“which is silly,” he said, “because the plants are the same on both sides.”

As he ran, he listened on his earphones to his new album—not because he usually listens to his own music but because he had to learn the songs, so that he could begin performing them, later that week, when he joined Don Antonio and his band in Philadelphia. It dawned on him, as he jogged along the Rio, what “The Crossing” was really about. The song playing was “Texas Is My Mother,” which was partly informed by a conversation he and Don Antonio had had with a Dreamer in a Dallas restaurant who’d lugged his aunt across the Rio Grande. The chorus is: “I would carry you on my shoulders, across the muddy river / Texas feels like Mexico. It reminds me of my mother.” Escovedo began to think about how Mexican culture had always been a part of him, and how it had never fully accepted him. The experience of crossing through life, from one identity to another, was a lot like that of crossing a river or an ocean—another kind of migration and disruption. Self-assertion and self-obliteration.

He was stopped along the path by a lean, gray-stubbled Mexican-looking man. The man said that he was a marathoner. “Where are you running?” he asked, and described some trails away from the river, in the brush above the banks. Escovedo wasn’t sure what to make of this and turned around and jogged back to the hotel. Once there, he changed his plans. Laredo gave him the creeps, he missed his wife, and he wanted no part of that checkpoint on I-35. He ditched the car and booked a flight back to Dallas. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified interferon as the medicine responsible for curing Escovedo’s hepatitis; two other drugs in fact cured him.