Brownsville native Vanesa Salinas-Diaz has published the first book in her Palomita’s Cravings, or “Los Antojitos de Palomita,” series of bilingual children’s books, which centers around her young daughter Palomita and her abuelita cooking traditional recipes often found in Mexican households.
(Courtesy Photo)
The first book, “Buñuelos,” finds Palomita, 6, and her grandmother together in the kitchen making, of course. Buñuelos, a holiday treat made of fried dough and found in Mexico and other places with historical connections to Spain. Antojitos means “little cravings” in Spanish.
Salinas said she tries to include the Mexican culture common to Brownsville in Palomita’s upbringing, but it’s hard with her growing up in North Texas, which led to the book.
“With my upbringing and Palomita’s it’s very different. Growing up here it’s culture everywhere. … Every Sunday, every Christmas, we’d cross the border and visit my grandmother in Matamoros, and you have your posadas, you have your tamales, you have your buñuelos, champurrado and you have the Mexican music. … My upbringing is very different from Palomita’s. We’re raising her in North Texas and we don’t have a border there. … I’m not saying there’s no culture in North Texas, but it’s different from ours, so what I’ve been trying to do ever since she was born is give her that experience as much as I can.”
Salinas said it was difficult to find bilingual children’s books for Palomita in North Texas.
“I’m not saying that there aren’t any, it’s just that you have to go look for them,” she said. “There’s very few books that are bilingual and authentic to our culture and traditions, our language, in my opinion.”
One thing led to another and one night at the end of a difficult day, Salinas found herself wanting to write, a passion of hers. One sentence led to one paragraph and before long the beginnings of Palomita’s Cravings had spilled out onto her laptop.
“And I thought, OK, I’m getting somewhere, and that wasn’t even my intent, to say I’m writing this. It was just a bad day and I started typing and by the time you knew it, you had something going with this story and that’s how this series started, and I thought to myself, this is perfect, we do get in the kitchen, even with my mother.
Salinas said she has lots of ideas for future books in the series. The second book is already written and edited. It’s about “pan de muerto.”
She said she is self-publishing the series, rather than taking it to a publisher as a project, a more expensive option. She was able to find an illustrator online in Venezuela and had to do all the legwork to obtain an ISBN number, get the book formatted electronically, get the barcode and secure the copyright.
“I’m glad I’m doing this because I feel like I have more control. It’s a learning process, but for the second book I already know the process and the timing and how things will work out,” she said.
“It’s something I want to do for my daughter and for our kids so they can see themselves in the books, something they can talk about with other kids and that kids from other countries can read about and learn.”
The book is on Amazon.
Salinas started her career in the late 1990s at The Brownsville Herald as an intern. She moved on to work for the Valley Morning Star in 2001, after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. She then moved to North Texas and worked for Al Día, the Spanish publication of the Dallas Morning News. Salinas currently works as a specialist in the Bilingual Department at a Dallas-Fort Worth school district.
