Daniel Olivas is a full-time attorney with the California Department of Justice, and he’s also a prolific author, with 10 books and two anthologies to his name across multiple disciplines. As a poet, novelist, short fiction author, and playwright, Olivas interweaves the Chicano, Mexican, Jewish, and Angeleno identities into his work. His new collection of short fiction titled How to Date a Flying Mexican (University of Nevada Press, February 2022) is at turns comic and tragic, and perhaps most poignant when it is both. Employing a range of genres and modes including dystopian science fiction, magical realism, and parable, Olivas uses a whimsical hand to tug at deeper truths about identity and society.
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David Nilsen: Tell me a little about how How to Date a Flying Mexican came together. What was the organizing principle for this book?
Daniel Olivas: In 2020 my dad was coming to the end of his life. He passed away in September of that year. Because he had started home hospice at that time, I decided to take every Wednesday off from work and just sit and talk with him. My dad was a voracious reader and had wanted to be a writer. He wrote a novel and poetry when he worked at the factory as a young father in the early 60s. He never got published. He decided to destroy all his writing and focus on raising his family. And also focus on his education. He and my mom eventually went to community college with five kids in tow. They got their Associates degrees, and my dad eventually got his Masters.
Even though my dad was proud of me for becoming a lawyer, he was extra proud of me becoming a published writer. More than talking about the law, he preferred to talk about literature and my writing. We talked about some of the stories of mine he really liked. One favorite was a short story that eventually became part of a novel, and that’s the title story of my new collection. He always loved that story because it was filled with humor and touchstones of our Mexican culture. That put the idea into my head of doing a review of my writing over the last 25 years and choosing some of my favorite stories and adding some new stories. Then my father passed away and after that I completed my review and last year submitted the manuscript to the University of Nevada Press.
This collection came together from discussions from my dad, and the pandemic has added another layer as well. A lot of folks in my circle have lost loved ones. The whole pandemic has added great difficulty for people who have loved ones with health issues. Visiting with my dad was difficult because it was before the vaccine. I couldn’t hug him. I had to be extra careful because he suffered from lung disease for the last eight years of his life. The pandemic for me as a writer just emphasized my mortality. Going over stories I had written and trying to find my favorite ones, was in a sense bringing back to life stories that meant a lot of me and share them with a new readership.
DN: One thing I’ve noticed about your stories is that regardless of length, they almost feel more like vignettes, just slices of life, rather than tidy narratives with a conventional arc. Does that fit with how you view the process of creating these stories?
DO: That’s a good question, and other reviewers have noticed that about my writing as well. I don’t have an MFA. I have a law degree. My writing approach is pretty much self-taught. It’s true that some of my stories don’t have that typical arc, and some are slices of life. I view real life in that way. Life doesn’t have a clean arc. It’s episodic. It’s ragged. It’s uncertain. It can be filled with great humor and great sadness. I think my fiction mirrors that view of life.
DN: Do you think that view of life changes how you approach the idea for a new story? If you’re not coming at it with an idea for a story arc, what is that inception point and process like?
DO: I view creative writing as a pure joy. I don’t turn it into a job. I don’t outline. I typically get an inspiration, perhaps a bit of conversation I’ve overheard or a spark of an image from something I saw, or maybe after reading another piece by another writer. I’ll give you an example. Gabino Iglesias is a Latino writer who writes crime fiction. He was on Twitter talking about his surgery to remove a lump from his neck, and it wasn’t malignant. I wrote him to say he had just inspired me to write a new story, and I would dedicate it to him. This inspired my story called “Nacho” about a man who one day notices he has a lump. It grows, and he has it removed. He has it put into a jar. It eventually grows into his roommate, and they create a friendship and set up home together. Then he begins to devolve. That story doesn’t have a natural arc. It’s sort of strange and dreamlike, but I think it works — on my terms. This may sound odd, but when I’m writing a short story, I’m not writing for a specific audience. I’m not writing for a specific reader. I’m writing because I want to please and entertain myself. Sometimes my wife finds it funny that I’ll be typing away and start to chuckle. She knows I wrote something that amused me. If I can’t amuse myself, there’s no reason I should be doing this thing called writing.
DN: It feels like when I’m reading your stories, your overarching question is, “Isn’t this interesting?”
DO: Yes. People in my stories are not so strange that they couldn’t be found in real life. Some of them may have magical powers — the character in the title story can levitate — but they’re very ordinary otherwise. I’m sure we all could find people who resemble these characters. Life is filled with great mystery and great strangeness. The whole concept of things not being exactly what they seem is something we often heard growing up. There is a thin veil in Mexican culture between this physical life and what lies beyond that veil. The afterlife or maybe just a very strong memory of those who have passed. That memory can fuzz things up and make some of us believe that there’s not much of a wall between the living and the dead. And I think that comes through in my stories. You’ll see repeatedly the dead not really being dead, but being quite alive and participating in the lives of their loved ones.
DN: “Magical realism” is an overused and misused term in literature, but there are certainly elements in your stories that follow that. How do you decide to include that in a story in a way that isn’t just deus ex machina to fix a problem? How does that get used meaningfully in your writing?
DO: So, magical realism when it appears in my stories will typically be a natural element. Very seldom do I start a story without knowing whether or not it’s going to involve social realism or magical realism or science fiction. I never use magical realism as a fix for any plot point or Macgyver-type of situation where I need to find a way out. My stories don’t work that way. They’re not that type of narrative. They are character driven and driven by our frailties. You’re right, the term is misused and abused, and I’ve read reviews where a Latino writer’s novel has no magical element to it whatsoever, but there happen to be discussions of religion, and a reviewer will call it magical realism. No, there’s nothing magical happening here, it’s just a depiction of a culture that also has strong ties to religion. Typically, Catholic religion. What’s interesting for me with the concept of religion is that I converted to Judaism in 1988. My wife is Jewish. I do have one story in this collection about an old Chicano who had converted to Judaism many years before, and the Devil visits him to offer a deal without realizing that he’s no longer Catholic. Sometimes that part of my personal life will make it into my writing.
DN: I made note of that story as one to bring up. You don’t very often bring together those discordant threads from your own heritage. How does that fit for you when you’re primarily writing about your Mexican culture that is heavily Catholic when you no longer practice that religion?
DO: What’s interesting is on my mother’s side, we have Sephardic Jewish blood. For me, my identity is somewhat fluid in that sense. Shortly before my grandmother passed away, she told my mother the secret that her grandfather was a Sephardic Jew. My mother was shocked. When my grandmother passed and my mother went to Mexico to deal with some property, she confronted her relatives about this, and at first they denied it. They claimed they were Moors. She kept pushing, and they finally admitted. Then they started telling stories. The family wouldn’t eat pork unless they went to someone else’s house and it was offered, and they would eat it because they didn’t want people to find out. All the boys were circumcised up until World War II. They stopped doing that because they were afraid Hitler would win. They would cover mirrors during a mourning period, basically sitting Shiva. But they were practicing Catholics, which is fascinating to me. The whole concept of being a Jew is an element that shows up in my stories. This whole concept that what people think you are and what you really are on the inside might be different does come up. I like to think that I try to address identity in a nuanced way that includes the complexity I see in everyday life.
DN: I didn’t think about it until you just said it, but there are a number of stories in here that look at the discovery of a person’s identity, the revealing or obscuring of their identity. Even your final story — “The Chicano In You”— does that. He’s hiding his special ability, but also the implication at the end is that he’ll be occupying someone else’s identity for a while. A significant one.
DO: Yes, and in that story, the main character has the ability to go to another person or animal and experience what they experience and have some control. He even keeps it from his wife. Because of his ability, he has become quite learned in many areas, from medicine to music to sheet metal manufacturing. His wife simply thinks he’s a savant. In truth, he’s been living a secret life.
DN: The last time we spoke was right in the middle of the Trump administration, and we talked about writing in that context. Most of this collection avoids politics directly, but the final two stories meet it head on. Talk to me about the choice to end the collection like that.
DO: The entire collection except the last two stories was written pre-Trump. I have always dealt on some level with issues of bigotry and racism. Also, I’ve viewed the centering of Chicano characters in my stories as being a political statement by itself. They are the main characters, and they are the heart and soul of my narratives. That is a political statement, even if those narratives don’t explicitly talk about a political issue like immigration or education.
During the Trump administration, I started to write a play which eventually got produced called Waiting for Godínez, which is inspired by Waiting for Godot and Trump’s virulently anti-immigrant policies. Then I wrote two stories. One is a dystopian future, written in 2019. In that story, Trump imposes martial law and suspends the 2020 election, blaming Democrats and the Chinese government for interfering with the election. And he has built his wall. He has also microchipped children of immigrants, in order to make sure they stay in this country, because the country desperately needs a young workforce. He’s deporting the parents. In that story, I’m dealing with the family separation policy of the Trump administration. “The Chicano in You” deals with the unbelievable shock many of us went through when the election results came through in 2016, and how some of us wished we had magical powers to somehow prevent the disaster that was coming. Just look at what he’s done to the U.S. Supreme Court. For those of us who are pro-choice, or support immigration, or are pro-science and believe climate change is real, there’s a panoply of issues that will be deeply affected by this court because of his appointments.
Yes, those two stories are blatantly political, but I hope they’re engaging, interesting stories. In the end, if I want to write a political speech, I’ll go write a political speech. Stand on a soap box and read it. But not a lot of people are going to listen to that. My goal is even if I’m being political in a story, the story is interesting, and the language is interesting, and I can engage people. I think humor is a very sharp weapon. It can sneak up on people.
DN: Your day job is as an attorney. Do you feel like the mindset and skill set of that career directly influences your writing process, or is writing more of an escape and a contrast from that?
DO: My creative writing is not an escape or a contrast. As a lawyer, the writing that I do is storytelling. In fact, I think I have become a better legal writer because of my creative writing. I love the editing process. I enjoy getting the story down, I enjoy writing a legal memo, shockingly, but the editing really brings me great joy. It’s the polishing, getting to the essential sentences and balancing the plot. The plot of the memo even. If I’m writing a memo to the attorney general, a case we’d love to bring, I essentially have to tell a story that’s engaging. A lot of lawyers I’ve met forget that readers of their briefs and memos are people, too. People get bored. The worst thing you can do in a brief you’ve filed with the court is to bore the judge. You might have the most important case in the world, but if you write a boring brief, you’re sabotaging yourself. That judge has to read hundreds or thousands of briefs, so yours should be a jewel. It should be the best thing that judge has read all month. I approach that kind of writing very much how I approach my fiction writing. I want that story to be the best story I can create. If I feel like a story I’m writing is boring me, then I know it’s going to bore the reader.
DN: Tell me a little more about the title story.
DO: “How to Date a Flying Mexican” was originally a short story, then eventually became a chapter in a novel titled The Book of Want, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2011. What I decided to do with this collection was to begin it with that story and set the tone for the book. When University of Nevada Press read it and sent it for peer review, the comments were very supportive of that being the title story. One of the things they asked me to do was give them ideas for the cover, so I sent them a few paintings by Chicano artists. They ended up developing in-house this wonderfully whimsical cover that almost has a Marc Chagall feel to it. I think the cover captures the spirit of the book.
DN: The title and the cover, as you said, give it that touch of whimsy and humor.
DO: True. There are some difficult stories. I included one about a woman who very bravely fights against her abuser. It’s called “Driving to Ventura.” Women who have read that story appreciated it, some because of what they experienced in their lives. This whole concept of a knight in shining armor isn’t usually true in real life. Sometimes we have to be the heroes of our lives. In that story, the protagonist is the hero in her own life. Sometimes it takes a while to realize that you’re the hero of your narrative. Some people never discover it. I’ve known people who were in that situation who very bravely got out of that, and in some ways that’s probably the most natural thing of all, to find the strength in yourself to make your own life safe and to forge your own path in such a way that you can fulfill yourself as a person.
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The Chicano In You
The first time Javier Zambrano experienced it, he was four years old. JFK had been assassinated the week before, and the country was still in the throes of mourning, Roman Catholics like Javier’s family suffering this violent loss more than others.
Javier stood still, silently watching a stray calico cat carefully make a path through the succulents that lined the fence in his abuelita’s backyard. The Los Angeles sky was clear save for a few fainthearted clouds, the midday temperature already hitting eighty degrees even with the sun sitting low in the sky, the same sun that warmed the boy’s back through his favorite faded green T-shirt. The calico, suddenly sensing Javier’s presence, stopped its progress, its left forepaw frozen above a level patch of grass, and set its eyes on the boy. Javier smiled, wondering what it would be like to creep through his abuelita’s plants with such perfect control, one paw at a time.
And then it happened.
Javier blinked, the low-hanging sun, now in his line of sight, making the long shadow of a figure jut toward him. Who was that? A boy, like him. Wearing the same faded green T-shirt he wore. Javier blinked again, realizing that he was much closer to the ground than before. He looked down and saw one white and orange paw firmly on the ground, the other lifted before him, frozen in mid-step. Javier looked up and recognized the boy as himself. A wet foam of fear covered him, and he closed his eyes as tightly as he could. When Javier opened them a few moments later, his line of sight had returned to where it had been, sun at his back, and he was watching the calico.
Over the years Javier gradually learned to exert some control over his ability, but that control was far from perfect. First, he learned that he could not enter a person — or animal — he knew too well. Too much connection seemed to block his ability, although he certainly had tried — especially when his father beat him. Second, Javier could use his ability no more than once a year, and even then only if everything fell into place perfectly. Third, while in another person or animal, he retained some measure of control while enjoying the particular skill, knowledge, and experience of his host. And perhaps most important, Javier discovered that he could remain in another being for months at a time while the real Javier went about his life as he would normally.
As the decades passed, Javier grew more cautious with the targets he chose, honing his ability as if in preparation for a great goal, a history-altering finale. For he’d learned while in college that he could use his ability not only on people he met or saw from afar, but also on those he encountered solely through television, radio, magazines. Another lesson Javier learned: never could he aim his ability at a target with intent to cause harm, gain a selfish advantage over others, or fulfill carnal desires. That’s not to say he didn’t try; Javier was no more perfect than you or I. But once he knew the restrictions of his ability, he aimed to stay within those constraints, feeling a bit chastened and quite embarrassed by his failings as a person.
So, over the decades Javier went to college, married and divorced quickly before the age of twenty-five, then twenty years later married Celia Norte, who had sole custody of two teenage boys from a previous marriage. Javier worked several jobs until settling on a comfortable career with the city’s building permit department which, combined with Celia’s salary as a paralegal for a large law firm, allowed them to purchase a lovely 1923 Craftsman house northeast of downtown that kept their commute within the realm of reasonable as the boys attended Loyola High School.
But he kept his ability a secret from his beloved Celia — and everyone else, for that matter. Throughout the years, before and after he had married, Javier had experienced many remarkable things: flying through the Los Angeles skies on feathered wings and in the cockpit of a Cessna Skycatcher; lecturing two class sessions of a course titled “The Oceanic Imaginaries: Postcolonial Literatures” to graduate students at UCLA — despite majoring in economics while in college; conducting Mahler’s Adagio Symphony No. 10 at Walt Disney Concert Hall; fabricating thin sheet metal products that eventually became rain gutters, outdoor signs, and ducts for heating and air-conditioning; delivering three babies in one day.
His wife never suspected that he possessed this special ability — of course, how could she? — but Celia was particularly impressed by Javier’s rather eclectic and precise knowledge of airplanes, music, literature, sheet metal, and medicine, to name a few of the many interesting subjects Javier could opine on. She had married a savant, a kindhearted, sometimes distracted savant.
And Javier grew accustomed to his ability, figuring it would be something he would utilize until his death. But one night he realized his ability had a purpose beyond self-improvement and experiential diversity.
Javier and Celia lay in bed as talking heads on television gesticulated in an almost disoriented manner. When the stunned commentators called Pennsylvania, Celia could watch no longer; she had fallen asleep weeping, her face partially buried in her pillow. Javier still stared at the screen. Celia had predicted that this could happen — she could see the momentum — but until this moment Javier had optimistically believed that America would never, ever reward such a man with its highest prize. After all, this was a man who had based his candidacy on a promise to build a great wall to keep Mexicans — criminals and rapists, to use his words — out of the United States. People like Javier’s long-dead abuelita, one of the kindest souls he had ever known. No! Not in Javier’s lifetime. Never, ever.
And when the networks called Wisconsin — giving that man enough Electoral College votes to become the forty-fifth president — Javier knew the identity of his next target. This would be the greatest test of his special ability. It would require control, will power, a resigned acceptance that he would be away from his family for four or even eight years. But Javier had to do it. He had no choice. It would be Javier’s one heroic chance to make America great again.
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From How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2022). First published in Roanoke Review (2020). © 2020 by Daniel A. Olivas. Reprinted by permission of the author.