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Choirs unite in song to bring North Texas and the borderlands closer together

EL PASO — Jonathan Palant was attending a play in Dallas the evening after a mass shooter drove from North Texas to this bruised border community to commit a massacre. He sat there, grappling with a sinking feeling. Then he felt a familiar calling: Do something.

This Martin Luther King weekend, Palant, an associate professor of music at the University of Texas at Dallas and founding conductor of the Credo Community Choir, will get his chance with a binational festival that he spearheaded aimed at healing through music and dance.

Palant and his supporters want music to bring North Texans and people on both sides of the border closer together. He and an entourage of more 160 performers and family members from North Texas will join musical ensembles from the University of Texas at El Paso, Chorus Ciudad Juárez and the Esperanza Azteca Youth Orchestra, a group of youth rescued from the reach of organized crime. This festival also features opera legend Frederica von Stade and other guests.

All come together with an urgent call.

“The message is, ‘We’re more alike than different,’” Palant said. “When the shooting in El Paso took place, and the fact that the shooter was a North Texas kid, compelled me to find a way to bring the two cities, regions together. Rather than be the cities that shared grief, I want our communities to share love.”

On Aug. 3, the confessed shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius from Allen, drove nearly 800 miles to El Paso. He initially confessed in the shooting and killing of 22 people at a Walmart here but in October pleaded not guilty. Another 24 people were injured in the mass attack. Many of the victims were Mexican nationals, including eight of the dead.

Police said Crusius, who was indicted on capital murder charges, published a white nationalist, anti-immigrant manifesto online shortly before the shooting.

Director Jonathan Palant leads the Dallas Street Choir during the opening session of The Dallas Festival of Ideas at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Saturday, April 29, 2017.
Director Jonathan Palant leads the Dallas Street Choir during the opening session of The Dallas Festival of Ideas at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Saturday, April 29, 2017.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

The attack was the deadliest against Latinos in modern history. It shook residents in both countries, including Cecilia Ochoa Levine, a binational businesswoman and co-founder of Esperanza Azteca.

After the shooting, Palant reached out to her, via the El Paso Community Foundation, and the two began planning what seemed like a mammoth task: events in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez on consecutive days.

Saturday in Juarez from noon to 4 p.m., a free, family-friendly event titled, “Reunidos en arte” will be held at El Punto, or the point — a popular outdoor venue constructed for Pope Francis’ visit in 2016. On Sunday, the same artists perform from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the historic El Paso County Coliseum in El Paso for the celebration called “Reconnecting Though Art.”

The El Paso event is in cooperation with The Opportunity Center for the Homeless, a local nonprofit serving El Paso’s unsheltered population. Entry is free with a donation to the 20th annual MLK Canned Food Drive.

Cecilia Ochoa Levine is a binational businesswoman and cofounder of the  Esperanza Azteca Youth Orchestra, which will perform in two free concerts over the Martin Luther King weekend in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
Cecilia Ochoa Levine is a binational businesswoman and cofounder of the Esperanza Azteca Youth Orchestra, which will perform in two free concerts over the Martin Luther King weekend in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.(Alfredo Corchdo / The Dallas Morning News)

The chemistry between Palant and Levine was instant.

“His heart and the heart of this group are all there,” Levine said. “This is just the beginning of what we want to accomplish to create strategic partnerships with groups that have music in their hearts.”

Esperanza Azteca was founded in 2011 to promote music among underprivileged young people in Juárez where such children are too often the targets of drug cartels who recruit them with promises of quick, easy money. Organizers have said they hope that orchestra recruits would find more attractive alternatives.

The plan worked. Instead of becoming thugs, smugglers or assassins, hundreds of children and young adults have been performing throughout Mexico, the U.S. and beyond, winning accolades for their music, organizers said. They’ve also shared their newfound appreciation for musicians such as Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, all the while inspiring their parents, grandparents, siblings and neighbors.

“They represent the best of our region,” Levine said. “They are wonderful, wonderful border ambassadors for the world.” Levine said the kids have overcome the harshest of obstacles and discovered their own resilience.

“I think we have a lot to learn from this group that is coming from Dallas, and we have a lot to share with them as well,” she said.

Juarez had nearly 1,500 murders in 2019. Levine said North Texans and El Pasoans can, in a word, learn “resilience” from them.

“If we can offer hope here, offer a possibility, I’m sure Dallas and other parts of the world can, too,” she said. “If this young man from Dallas had met these kids, heard their stories, heard them play, his views of Mexicans would have changed. He wouldn’t have committed these terrible atrocities against Mexicans.”

Palant was moved by a similar outbreak of violence nearly four years ago when five Dallas police officers were gunned down. Five days after the tragedy, he organized a concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center featuring nearly 700 singers, including homeless people who perform with the Dallas Street Choir, which Palant directs.

After the events of Aug. 3, he knew he needed to do it again.

“I thought we needed to go to the border to sing, to lift our voices in unison,” he said. Then added, “But I thought, ‘That’s not edgy enough. We have to bring the musicians, delegations from North Texas to Mexico.’ ”

The biggest challenge, he said, was convincing North Texans to cross into Juarez, “because everyone told us it’s dangerous. But in the end, we also felt doing something was the right thing to do. And sometimes doing the right thing is uncomfortable.”

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