Under the lights of Minetta Lane Theatre this September, two performers will summon a nearly forgotten chapter of North American history—a southbound Underground Railroad—and score it in live hip-hop, proving that migration stories can be an act of reclamation, not fear.
Reversing the Border Narrative
“Mexodus” opens with an inversion of a familiar image: a young Black teenager fleeing not toward Canada, but across the southern border into Mexico. Nygel Robinson plays Henry, the runaway whose search for freedom anchors the piece. Brian Quijada, who co-wrote the work, plays Carlos, a Mexican man who offers refuge.
Their meeting unfolds in a contemporary climate where migration south is rarely discussed and where “Mexico” is more often a political flashpoint than a place of sanctuary. For director David Mendizábal, that reversal is the point. “It’s a counter-narrative to the horrible stories and lies we hear,” he told EFE. “It reminds audiences of what migrants have to offer—and that the movement of people has always been more complicated than the soundbites.”
The script is lean but layered, setting the relationship between Henry and Carlos against modern rhetoric about deportations, raids, and fear. It asks its audience to imagine a different kind of border crossing—one defined by mutual recognition rather than suspicion.
Music as Second Script
The world of “Mexodus” is built in real time. Robinson and Quijada move between more than a dozen instruments, feeding sounds into an RC-505 loop station that layers beats, harmonies, and textures as the performance unfolds. The score jumps from reggaeton to hip-hop to folk riffs, blurring cultural lines just as the story does.
Each loop carries narrative weight: the thrum of a chase, the hesitant rhythm of new trust, the bustle of a Mexican city alive with possibility. “We’re not so different,” Robinson said at the press preview, black-clad and behind sunglasses. “We all eat rice, beans, and chicken—we just season it differently. Strip away what society imposes, and you see we live under the same system, with the same problems.”
For Quijada—born in the U.S. to Salvadoran parents who crossed through Mexico—the music is also a personal bridge. He told EFE it’s “easy” in the current climate for immigrant communities to live in fear, which makes it even more vital “to lend a hand” to those still navigating the journey.
A Forgotten Corridor Brought to Life
The project’s roots go back to 2017, when Quijada stumbled on an article about enslaved African Americans escaping south to Mexico—an Underground Railroad few history books mention. He shared it with Robinson, and the two realized they’d found a story neither had been taught.
Rather than turn that history into a static lesson, they filtered it through the intimacy of two characters learning to trust one another. Legal history is there—Mexico’s nineteenth-century laws offering refuge to the formerly enslaved—but the heart of the piece beats in smaller moments: a first cautious “sí,” a meal shared, the silent weighing of risk against hope.
Mendizábal told EFE that grounding the work in these lived details is key to its relevance. “We want audiences to imagine the world they want to be part of—and to see that the choices we make in the present are part of that imagining.” The timing feels deliberate, arriving in a season when migration is too often framed as a threat, and when art has the chance to remind people of the human stakes.
From One Stage to Many
“Mexodus” premieres September 18 and runs through October 11 at the Minetta Lane Theatre, an Off-Broadway space intimate enough to catch every shift in breath, every beat dropped into the loop station. But its life won’t end there. Audible will release a full recording as an Audible Original, carrying the work into classrooms, living rooms, and earbuds far from Manhattan.
That accessibility mirrors the piece’s ethos. If the show’s narrative is about crossing borders to find common ground, its distribution is about crossing the boundaries of who can access theater. Mendizábal hopes the recording will “bridge the gap” between communities often reduced to caricature and the audiences who might see them differently through art.
For Robinson, Quijada, and Mendizábal, the goal is simple but expansive: make space for a version of Mexico in the American imagination that is neighbor, sanctuary, and collaborator. In the Minetta Lane’s close quarters, that vision will be built one beat, one harmony, one shared story at a time—and in headphones later, it will travel much farther.
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“Mexodus” asks its audience to do more than applaud. It asks them to reimagine the border, to recognize how much history lives beyond the headlines, and to consider what kind of crossing they’d want to make if the roles were reversed. As Robinson told EFE, “We’re not so different.” The challenge—and the opportunity—is to act like it.