Former professor pens children’s books inspired by cultural identity

Diane de Anda’s writing career began when the principal of her high school sat her down with a college application and told her to fill it out.

Creative writing, she said, was her first love, but she did not pursue it professionally while she worked as a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. De Anda, now a professor emeritus, has published more than 90 literary and children’s publications, with one more set to be released by the end of the year.

She is known for writing bilingual children’s books, including “The Patchwork Garden” and “A Day Without Sugar,” which was listed as one of the Bank Street College of Education’s best children’s books of the year in 2013, among other awards.

De Anda said she was inspired to write stories based on her experiences and her family’s strong awareness of how their Latino culture fit into the larger diversity of Los Angeles. Growing up, she went to an Irish Catholic school, ate spaghetti with Italian neighbors and all the while watched the physical and cultural landscape change over time in East and West Los Angeles.

She said she writes children’s books because she wants to increase the representation of Latino children in literature.

“My mission was to get books out there where Latino children could see themselves and their families and see positive things about themselves,” she said.

De Anda said working at UCLA and in the Los Angeles Unified School District before that helped shape her writing because her work often reflects events she witnessed in her social welfare work. The schools also provided her with other life events that she could draw on as inspiration and fictionalize.

“I’ve had lot of experience in my profession with kids who’ve had all kinds of problems, so I really pull a lot from that also in my work because I’ve seen a whole lot of what goes on,” she said. “I try not to make characters too simple because I know the pain.”

She said it is easier to write as she gets older because she had many experiences to draw from.

“What I found was that it was easier to write when I was older, because I had been a woman in various stages and I could remember what it felt like to be a woman at these various ages … whereas before you would kind of fantasize.”

Liz Herrera, executive director of the El Nido Family Centers in Los Angeles and a former graduate student under de Anda, said de Anda frequently works as a consultant for the center. Herrera said de Anda often brings free copies of her bilingual works for children at the center.

Herrera said she thinks the strong cultural message in de Anda’s books is relevant to the mainly Spanish-speaking population that her agency serves, but that the more general messages of self-empowerment can be relevant to all children.

If de Anda had to describe her body of work, she said it would be “eclectic.” She has written poetry describing Dracula’s favorite activities and satire regarding vegan dog food. However, the majority of her writing is based on her Latina cultural identity, and many of her works experiment with mixing Spanish dialogue in English narratives.

Compared to her academic publications in the field of social work, de Anda said she finds it is more difficult and time-consuming to get published for creative writing, and she says many mainstream publishers she approaches say her work is not the right fit. She said she thinks this is because many of her pieces are bilingual.

De Anda tries to give readers an opportunity to establish a personal connection with historical events that they may not have had a connection to beforehand. Many of these events are stories from her grandparents surrounding the Mexican Revolution, which de Anda attempts to contextualize in her short stories.

“People think of historical events as a point in time, (and) in a textbook they are. But it’s not for the people who lived through it,” she said. “It changes people and who they are psychologically; it changes the trajectory of generations … and people don’t understand the collateral damage that goes on, often, in the war.”

Dominic de Anda, one of Diane de Anda’s two sons, said the stories he heard growing up from his grandparents and his mother are made into tangible connections back in time through her writing, as it was for him and his brother.

He said she has never slowed down in her work, and she pursues her creative writing even as she continues to consult for several social welfare agencies.

Dominic de Anda said his mother’s stories give readers a perspective of what it was like to live for different people in Los Angeles.

De Anda said she plans to continue writing short stories because she thinks they more accurately reflect life than longer-form writing.

“Novels are too neat; they’re too tight. I think people’s lives are a collection of short stories, I really do. There’s some kind of central thing that runs through it, but, in the end, you’re still splayed,” she said. “I just think that’s the way reality is, and it’s kind of interesting.”