Leo Politi

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Leo Politi (1908–1996) was a U.S. artist and author who wrote and illustrated some 20 children's books. His works often celebrated cultural diversity, and many were published in both English and Spanish.

Leo Politi’s life was the stuff that picture books are made of. Born into an Italian family in Fresno in 1908, he was transported to Italy at the age of seven — in an “Indian Chief suit,” via transcontinental railroad and ocean liner — and grew up, constantly drawing, in his mother’s native village near Milan.

After art school, and some designing and illustrating, he returned to the States — via the Panama Canal, with its Latino color — and settled on Los Angeles’s quaintly Mexican Olvera Street, where he sketched tourists and sold drawings alongside potters, weavers, and other artisans-in-residence. Whatever the authenticity of Olvera Street, Politi’s affection for the Mexican-Americans and their folkways was genuine; an affinity. Most especially, as a devout Catholic at home with Italian saints, he responded to Mexican ritual. Children — natural, spontaneous children — he loved without reserve or distinction. Drawing Mexican children, for magazines and books, gave him an American career and a professional identity.

In 1980, a branch of the Fresno Public Library was named for him, and in 1991, the Leo Politi Elementary School in Los Angeles was dedicated.