Edward Dennis gets personal in children’s book series

Former President Donald Trump was running for office, and then teacher Edward Dennis found himself trying to answer some tough questions.

“When Trump was running for election, I had a lot of students come up to me, and they would hear things on the news that he was saying, or other people were saying,” said Dennis. “They would ask me questions about, ‘Is it true that we’re this? Is it true that we’re that?’

“I didn’t know how to respond to them. Someone like myself who is older than them and has experienced the same thing, I didn’t know what to tell them, I didn’t know what books to give them.

He began to research.

“I found out there’s not a lot of books out there that exist about topics like this; about immigration, about farm working, etc.,” said Dennis. “That’s when I took it upon myself.”

Dennis, 38, now an author / illustrator / animator, has written around seven elementary-level books, the first of which - The Boy from Mexico - published last year. He is currently preparing to release his second - The Boy from Mexico Becomes a Farm Worker - next month, which will continue the story that the last began.

“It’s about my great grandfather. My first book is about him crossing the border, what that took for him to do that,” said Dennis. “The second one is about him as a farm worker.

“I partnered with United Farmworkers on that book. I’m really excited about that. So, it’s pretty much a day in his life, or week I guess. Just telling kids, ‘Where does your food come from?’”

He said that he “felt just like” the kids he was trying to reach when he was younger.

“Especially with my last name being Dennis, a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, that’s not Mexican,’” said Dennis. “I felt a lot of confusion about where I come from, so I just wanted to clarify for them, ‘Hey, this is who we are, this is where we come from. If you have a story you want to tell, you can tell your own story too.’”

Dennis has a slew of other books down the pipeline, including yet another continuation of his great grandfather; this time about his becoming a United States Citizen.

Surprisingly, Dennis says that he only ever met his great grandfather once, and that even then he was too young to really remember much. His source material instead comes from a combination of hand-me-down stories and research.

He said that “you find the paper trail,” and “find out a lot of that stuff that you don’t know.”

“My family wouldn’t be who we are without him crossing the border and all the work he’s done,” said Dennis. “It’s a book I want kids to read and be able to celebrate their ancestors and the sacrifices they made for them to be here in America.”

Dennis will be moderating at the upcoming Revolucion Festival, taking place at the Embassy Suites from Sept. 20-22.

He commented on the inclusivity of events like the upcoming festival.

“When there’s events that are by the people, for the people like this one, I feel like there’s a better chance that children of Latin decent will go to these. Hispanic children, LatinX, Latino, whatever you want to call them, I feel like they’re going to go to it, and they’re going to be empowered, and they’re going to take something away from it more so if they just went to a regular event that was at a library or whatever.”