Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Daniel Olivas

199 Daniel Olivas aniel A. Olivas was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1959. Along with his four siblings, Olivas was raised by first-generation Mexican émigré parents with an overwhelming sense of the importance of education. They helped drive Olivas to do well in school and eventually gain entry to Stanford University. Always interested in literature and in the craft of writing, he earned his degree in English literature. However, he shelved this interest to follow a career in law. He received his J.D. from UCLA and now works for the California Department of Justice in land use and environmental enforcement law. However, his passion for writing continued to grow. With his professional career fully afloat, he was able to turn once again to writing. When not working as a lawyer, Olivas spends his time writing short stories, novels, poetry, and children’s books. In each of these genres, he constantly challenges storytelling conventions and employs different techniques and subgenres (realism, postmodern metafiction, surrealism, and the fantastical) to explore many different experiences of middle-class Chicano life, as well as interracial love and romance. In his powerful collection of short stories, Assumption and Other Stories (2003), Olivas introduces us to a variety of characters and portrays the complex relationships between Jewish and Chicano middle-class characters. In his historical novel, The Courtship of María Rivera Peña (2000), he stretches the boundaries of the romance and the historical narrative to texture the twentieth-century growth pains of Mexicanizing Los Angeles. In Devil Talk: Stories (2004), he gives a new shape to the Latin American storytelling tradition of the fantasma. In his recently published children’s book, Benjamin and the Word, Olivas both simplifies and complicates racial identity as it intersects with various religions , such as Catholicism and Judaism. Olivas is committed to reaching a wide range of readers, publishing stories in both book form and other media, including newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, magazines, journals, and the Internet. Frederick Luis Aldama: You work as a lawyer, and you’re an author. How did you come into this way of becoming a writer? DanielOlivas: Igrewupinaworking-classneighborhoodneardowntownLos Angeles; my father worked for years on a turbine assembly line near Watts, and my mom was a homemaker. They wanted to improve their lives, he to wear a suit and she to teach preschool, so they both went to community college. They did this to make a better life for their five children, whom they intended all to go to college. Needless to say, when I did get to Stanford and majored in English, the goal at the back of my mind was to be able to make a living. But from an early age, when my father pushed James Joyce and other authors on me, I fell in love with the written word. I was always very creative. In grammar school and high school and in college, I drew cartoons. I was very artistic. But I always liked to write, too. When I was in college, majoring in English, I decided not to take any creative writing classes in college because I thought it would be a frivolous thing to do. I thought that it was important for me to major in something that I could use: perhaps become an English professor, or go into the law, or do something where I knew that I would have a steady paycheck, but also fulfill myself emotionally and intellectually. And creative writing didn’t fit into that. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t being creative. I was art director of Stanford’s student humor magazine, Chaparral, for a year, and staff artist for a year before that. So I was always writing and drawing and getting involved that way, artistically and creatively. Then I went to law school at UCLA, where I eventually became editor-in-chief of the Chicano Law Review. And as a lawyer I do a ton of writing. I specialize in environmental enforcement and land use for the state government. Inthemid-’90sIstartedtowritearticlesforthelegalnewspaper,TheLos Angeles Daily Journal. And those articles became more and more like short stories. They started to develop, with characters who confronted legal 200 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Daniel Olivas 201 issues. And then in the late ’90s, my wife suffered the fifth of what would be six miscarriages. I was trying to deal with...