Jose Orlando Castaneda immigrated from Colombia to the United States just out of high school. He holds an MA from Columbia University and a JD from Pace University. Castaneda practices law in Port Chester, New York, and serves as a judge in Rye Town, Westchester County. This career transition is represented in his short story The Flower Parade.

The author's profession has allowed him to observe the effects of alienation in the immigrant community. "We live for the people we love and stayed, and we die for the people we love left," an elder from Ecuador warned him once. The stories that he heard throughout his career inspired him to write Watercolors and Tears, an engrossing novel written in the backdrop of immigration, a relentless phenomenon in separating families and disrupting love.