Daniel A. Olivas Books in Order

Inspired loosely by the author’s grandparents, this novella follows cook Beto and waitress María through courtship, marriage and family life. Their migration from Mexico to Los Angeles provides the setting for an intimate account of partnership and building a home in a new country.

Eighteen stories explore varied Latino lives in Southern California, from media ambition and family expectations to prejudice and private grief. Characters confront circumstances that resist easy stereotypes, revealing how identity, relationships and moral choices intersect in everyday communities.

After winning a schoolyard game, Benjamín is wounded by a friend’s racist insult. Waiting for his father, he struggles to understand the word and its consequences in a bilingual story about prejudice, identity, forgiveness and the difficult work of repairing friendship.

Twenty-six stories explore wrongdoing and temptation through Chicano and Mexican cultural settings. Supernatural visions, failed crimes and ordinary human weaknesses mix humor with unease, tracing the ways people confront corruption while struggling to understand their own desires and responsibilities.

Contemporary stories and ghost tales follow Latino characters searching for a place in a shifting world. Beneath apparently ordinary lives, secrets about race, gender, sexuality and belonging reveal the anxieties and vulnerabilities that connect people across different communities.

A Los Angeles family struggles with desire, secrecy and expectations under the watchful presence of its deceased matriarch. Two sisters and the next generation pursue conflicting versions of fulfillment in a story blending everyday moral dilemmas with unexpected supernatural interventions.

Personal essays and interviews examine contemporary Latino literature and the work behind it. Olivas considers Chicano identity, cultural memory and everyday politics while fellow writers discuss family responsibilities, prejudice, creative difficulty and the challenges of navigating the publishing world.

Narrative poems explore the borders separating race, culture, language, religion and privilege. Drawing on personal experience and other people’s stories, Olivas examines how crossing those divisions can reveal shared vulnerability while preserving the distinct histories that shape individual lives.

These Los Angeles stories follow dreamers, lawyers, gang members and supernatural visitors through a city that inspires and frustrates them. Realism, fantasy and brief fictional sketches reveal private grief, unlikely encounters and the contradictions shaping its many overlapping communities.

New and previously published stories draw on Chicano and Mexican culture to examine justice, morality and self-determination. Magical realism, fables and dystopian settings place familiar human dilemmas alongside border politics and the consequences of exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants.

An unnamed paralegal restored to life navigates a society that depends on reanimated workers while treating them with hostility. Falling for lawyer Faustina draws him toward community and a search for the first-life history erased by the process that revived him.

Five new stories join selected earlier tales about people seeking love and appreciation. Magical hearts, uncertain companions and unexplained absences reveal the humor, loneliness and occasional darkness of relationships shaped by Chicano and Mexican culture, memory and longing.

In this absurdist play, Mexican friends Jesús and Isabel wait in a city park for the mysterious Godínez. Nightly detention and repeated escape interrupt their vigil, exposing the insecurity and dehumanization surrounding undocumented lives under United States immigration enforcement.