Q&A: Donna Barba Higuera

This conversation has been edited for length. The full Q&A is available on LQ’s Instagram.

Last fall, author Donna Barba Higuera spoke with LQ team member, Yvonne Tapia, about Lupe Wong Won’t Dance. Featuring a vocal, strongly determined, and brave bicultural female protagonist, this one-of-a-kind middle grade novel will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned authority, appreciates a great baseball game, or just love to laugh.

YVONNE TAPIA: Who or what inspired you to write Lupe’s story?

DONNA BARBA HIGUERA: The story first came about [with] my daughter Sofia, who came home from school one day — she was 12 at the time, and she had found out that day at PE that she was going to have to square dance. It just kept getting worse — she didn’t want to square dance to begin with — and then she was going to have to, and she wanted to dance with her friend Gracie. Then she found out she was going to have to dance with a boy and say “yes” to him. It kept getting worse and worse. That’s kind of where it came from.

YT: I remember when I was younger, dancing was definitely not my thing. When I read Lupe’s story I thought, “Wow! This is so relatable.” It was the first [middle grade] book that I read that focuses on dancing, so thank you for that Donna.

DBH: Oh yeah, I think people have strong opinions on dancing, one way or the other. *laughs* They either love it or they hate it. I’m a fan of [baseball and dancing]. I’m good at one and horrible in another. I grew up playing basketball. I played up until college, and a little bit afterwards in a professional league. I do love to dance but I’m horrible at it. I’m that one person at the party where everyone goes, “Wow! what’s she doing?” *laughs*

YT: Among the most memorable scenes is Lupe’s very funny reaction to square dancing. Was humor the initial intent for your book?

DBH: The book kind of came out with me trying to give my daughter and other kids a voice, who maybe didn’t want to square dance or anything that they felt was unfair that they didn’t have a voice [in], and so this character, Lupe Wong, came to mind as kind of an advocate for those kids. But she was funny, and the situations were funny, and I don’t think I went into it intending for it to be a funny book; but every time these characters got together, it kind of laid out in my mind, like a movie. Even that initial gym scene I kind of imagined how Lupe envisioned it, and it was funny to me. It was hilarious, I think we all kind of felt that way in middle school or younger when we square danced.

YT: You wrote such a realistic young protagonist, because when you’re young, it can feel like the world revolves around you. [SPOILER ALERT] It’s a bittersweet scene to read when Lupe denies Gordon as her dance partner and ends up dancing by herself. Did you know from the beginning that Lupe would have to air dance in front of everyone?

DBH: I did. My daughter was shy and when she couldn’t dance with her friend Gracie, she made a proclamation at home, “I’m just not going to dance with anybody.” It’s a big proclamation when you’re amongst your family, but then when she got to school, the day came and it was a boy-ask-girl event, and she wasn’t asked. But at that point, with Lupe, she created some hurt with Gordon in denying him when he asked her outside of class. I felt like she needed to be humbled a little bit, I think that part of Lupe’s journey is her growth. There are parts where sometimes you go, “wow, she’s not the most likeable character.” But then you get that she’s learning and growing with all of this and some of those moments had to happen. So yeah. she had to dance alone to have a little humble pie on her plate so she could learn.

YT: What led you to choose “Cotton Eyed-Joe” as the featured song for Lupe’s square dancing curriculum? Was it the song’s history or a personal experience with it?

DBH: I didn’t know the history behind the song until I started writing the book. It was just the first song that I remember having to square dance to. The history behind it came during researching the book. I didn’t know much about it. This book was a huge learning experience for me in a lot of ways, actually. Since I’ve written this book, there have been a lot of articles regarding the history of square dancing and the lyrics of those songs. A lot of it just came through research.

YT: Given Lupe’s Mexican and Chinese heritage, it’s funny how Grandma Wong loves opera, Abuela Salgado loves rancheras, and Lupe loves neither.  What influenced the monthly dinner with Lupe’s two grandmothers, where we see how Lupe struggles between both of them?

DBH: Being of two cultures, Lupe has to try to navigate that, but ultimately you find the similarities in those cultures as well. There’s a huge emphasis on food for both grandmothers and they kind of have this competition for food and music. Ultimately, there’s a lot of love. You can see the commonalities of how families love one another even when they’re from two totally different cultures. The music, in fact, was based a little bit on an aunt that was into ranchera music when I was young. I never listened to it and I think Lupe doesn’t either. In the United States, there’s so many types of music, and we gravitate toward what we gravitate toward. My kids’ grandfather used to listen to Chinese opera when we had dinner — and my kids would say “oh my gosh.” So I was trying to bring in these different parts of my life and have them merge in this one dinner scene with Lupe.  

YT: Readers will not only get a nod to Día de Los Muertos, which is part of the Mexican culture of Lupe’s family; they will also learn more about Qingming. What is your favorite Mexican food? What is your favorite Chinese food?

DBH: Toward the end of the holidays, I love albondigas. As far as Chinese food, I like going to Dim sum. Dim sum is like Chinese brunch, you go at the end of the day. It normally ends around 1 or 2 pm and there are carts — these metal steam baskets — and inside these baskets are dumplings and all kinds of different foods, like pastries. My favorite is Ham Sui Gok, they’re like little pastries, almost like a Chinese empanada, with pork or beef and gravy inside. I love Chow Fun, it’s not normally a dim sum food, we all know Chow Mein. I think everyone needs to start shifting a little bit and try it. If you ever see it on the menu, try that, instead of Chow Mein.

YT: In what ways have you had to move between two cultures?

DBH: When I was younger, I grew up in Central California and I was one of the few minorities in a small town and so being biracial was difficult. [It] wasn’t a very racially diverse town. I knew I wasn’t supposed to speak Spanish in public, there were things that weren’t allowed and it was a different time. I moved to Washington State when I was in my early 20s after graduate school and my ex-husband’s family was Chinese, so I had this second part of my life within a diverse culture. My two parts of my family have never merged except for big events. It was always fun to watch because [while] there were language barriers, you could just see everybody was having fun because they just loved one another. They were open to each other’s cultures and ideas because it felt like a safe place, but I didn’t get to experience that on a day-to-day basis. So I took little snippets of my life where I got to see my families together, and that’s where I wrote certain scenes about how I had envisioned it could have been.

YT: What advice would you give to young readers who are navigating their bicultural identity?

DBH: To just embrace everything and to never be ashamed of your culture, identity, or who you are, and never hide those things because you’re afraid of how someone may see you. Just embrace all of those parts of who you are, every last piece of it, because you are all of those things, you’re not just one thing. Just be proud and share it with others, and maybe they’ll share things with you because you’re open with them.

YT: I’m sure many readers (myself included) were able to identify with Lupe when Abuela Salgado tells her to stand up straight because she should be proud of her chest and show she’s confident. Lupe also mentions how she believes periods are among life’s twists, and that there must be a way to stop it from happening. How did you [relate] to these topics from your own experiences?

DBH: Abuela Salgado is a direct quote from my aunt Ofelia, who used to put her hand on my back and tell me to be proud because I think I was hunched over and being shy. She was always encouraging us to be proud of who we are. The period conversation was a real conversation too, I took [my older daughter] to Children’s Hospital in Seattle. I thought, “I’m going to take her so she could hear so she can kind of hear physicians talk about her body, boys, lets rip the band-aid off so she knows it all.” So I took her to this talk and part-way we were sitting in the back and she got up and she marched out of the lecture hall, and I ran after her and I said, “What’s wrong?” and she said “This is not fair, I didn’t ask for any of this! No one asked me if I wanted this, etc.” I thought “omgosh we all kind of feel like that.” Once we accept it and we know that there’s nothing we could do about it, we just move on.

“When I was younger, I grew up in Central California and I was one of the few minorities in a small town and so being biracial was difficult. [It] wasn’t a very racially diverse town. I knew I wasn’t supposed to speak Spanish in public, there were things that weren’t allowed and it was a different time.”

YT: What do you hope readers will get out of reading Lupe’s fun, determined, and outspoken story?

DBH: Yeah, she has a bit of a growth curve, she’s very outspoken. I think that the Number One message that Lupe [learns], that I would want readers to learn as well, is that you don’t have to fight or conquer everything, and it’s something that her grandfather tells her. You don’t have to conquer it but you have to at least overcome things, and you can learn from things even if it’s something that you can’t change. In the long-run, there’s always something you can learn from those experiences, which is something that Lupe does with her [struggle] against square dancing. The other thing is just accepting one another, and I think Lupe and all of her friends in some way learn to accept themselves and accept one another for who they are.