Her sons David and Michael Leneman confirmed her death but did not give a cause.

Ms. Pineda grew up in New York as the daughter of a Swiss mother and a Mexican father. Her father, she said, arrived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant in 1910, went to Harvard University, and became a philologist and linguist. He encouraged his daughter’s interest in literature and art but revealed little about his life before coming to the United States, Ms. Pineda told the online magazine Hippocampus, leaving them “an orphan in the sense that I never knew from whom or where I came from.”

Ms. Pineda has grappled with the often-tense notion of identity, among other subjects, in fiction, non-fiction, and drama spanning more than half a century. Establishing herself first as a theater director in San Francisco, she founded the city’s experimental Theater of Man in 1969 and began her literary career after the company closed in 1981.

She has described herself as interested in everything – from insects to people to politics – and based her first book on a newspaper article about a man reconstructing his own face after an accident. In her fictional portrayal, the man was a poor, almost illiterate Brazilian barber, Helio Cara, who, while hurrying on foot to his dying mother’s bedside, slips off a rain-soaked cliff and crushes his face. Unable to afford plastic surgery, he wears a rubber mask before finally using his manual hairdressing skills to redesign his face – and himself.

“I was so touched by his trials and amazed at the idea of ​​actually making a face,” Ms. Pineda told the Associated Press in 1985, referring to the subject of the newspaper article that inspired her novel. “Finding someone who makes a face, not a mask but a face, what does that mean and what does that mean in our time?”

She continued, “Aren’t we all disfigured in one way or another? Try being a divorced woman and you will find out how to lose face. …Try to be someone who just doesn’t look good because he or she can’t afford the money to buy a coat or dress. This book is a metaphor for that.”

“Face” was a finalist for the 1985 National Book Award for first novel. In an introduction to a later edition of the book, South African-born writer JM Coetzee described it as “an extraordinary achievement, all the more extraordinary as it is a first novel.”

“With exemplary freshness it asks us: what is this thing, this assemblage of skin and bone and gristle and muscle that we are condemned to carry about with us everywhere?” he wrote. “And why is everyone seeing it and not me? Or – the questions turned upside down: who is this me that dares to think hidden behind his face …?

Ms. Pineda’s other best-known novels include Frieze (1986), a story of a stonemason set in ancient India and Java, and The Love Queen of the Amazon (1992). The latter book, selected by the New York Times as “New and Remarkable” Volume of the Year, was about a former convent student who becomes a madam in Peru. Novelist Richard Martins, writing for the Chicago Tribune, described the protagonist as “one of the few great Latin heroines not created by the male imagination”.

“Ana Magdalena’s amorous story offers the American-born Pineda a unique vehicle to look at the manners, manners and literature of all America with a satirical feminine perspective,” he wrote, “of which Love Queen is a remarkable complement.” ”

Ms. Pineda has written a total of 10 books, many of which reflect her commitment to the anti-nuclear movement, environmental protection, and activism for immigrants and other marginalized groups.

Her non-fiction book “Tango des Teufels”, published in 2012, dealt with the nuclear accident in the previous year at the power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World (2015) was a literary exploration of environmental degradation and its consequences for nature and humanity. In Entry Without Inspection: A Writer’s Life in El Norte (2020), Ms. Pineda related her family’s immigration experience in the context of a broader study of immigration to the United States.

“My novels attempt to ask questions like: Does the world have to be virtually wiped out by a nuclear accident before human nature can begin the long journey back to a healing society?” she once told an interviewer. “Does history inevitably repeat itself? Is mankind’s short-sighted history the result of bad memory, faulty or limited genetic development?”

Marthe-Alice Cecilia Pineda was born on September 24, 1932 in Harlem. Her mother, a draftsman and illustrator, came from francophone Switzerland and the family spoke French at home. Referring to her father’s odyssey, she wrote in Entry Without Inspection that her family was “cut long ago and their culture abandoned at the US-Mexico border” when he “entered the United States under an assumed name, a extralegal immigration, referred to by ICE as “entry without inspection.” ”

Ms. Pineda grew up in a highly intellectual environment, absorbing literature ranging from the Bible to the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She was particularly influenced by a series of biographies of notable women in the arts, she once told the San Antonio Express-News.

Ms. Pineda received a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College in New York in 1954. In 1961, after marrying French-born doctor Felix Leneman, she settled in San Francisco and received a degree in Theater Arts from San Francisco State University.

At the Theater of Man, Ms. Pineda has directed productions based primarily on sound and movement. According to her publisher, Wings Press, the works often dealt with themes such as “totalitarianism and expectation of gender roles”. She told the online publication Literary Hub that the theater group is her opportunity “to leave the housewives behind.”

Ms. Pineda’s marriage ended in divorce. Her sons, both from Los Angeles, are her only immediate survivors.

Ms. Pineda has taught creative writing at institutions such as the California College of the Arts, Mills College in Oakland, California, and the California State University System. Her books have included the fictional memoir Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood (2001), the novels Bardo99 (2002) and Redoubt (2004), and a meditation on literature Three Tides: Writing at the Edge of Sein. (2016). Living in Oakland Hills and then Berkeley for many years, she worked in an office teeming with artwork from her travels around the world.

“Latina letters will be with us for a very long time, as long as there are people who reject cultural homogenization, who celebrate their diversity,” she told the Express-News.

“Hooray for that! People will keep writing,” she continued. “The best of them may even offer new insights into how best to live our lives during devastating times.”