Like many of the characters in author Alejandro Heredia’s debut novel, Loca, he migrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. Though he did so at a different age and time than the characters presented in the text, it’s the experiences of the lives of immigrants—his own and the people he knows—that he both excavates and explores to craft a capacious novel that unfolds over one year in 1999. Centered on best friends, Sal and Charo, the novel—moving between New York and the Dominican Republic, the Bronx and Santo Domingo—follows their lives, and the community they are both equally born into, and create, asking questions that investigate the tolls of immigration, the nuances of sexuality and gender, and the meaning of friendship.
Is it possible to be better to the people we love? Is it okay to need people? Is it necessary to reckon with the past to have a chance at a future? With an open heart, Loca provides a cross-cultural representation of characters weighed down by the prospect of possibility while also providing sharp snapshots—Latin dance parties, beach trips to Montauk, fire escape conversations—that enable them to survive.
As New York City quieted in the waning weeks of 2024, I spoke with Alejandro Heredia about Loca and the expansive ways it considers identity, loneliness, and atonement.
Jared Jackson: You were born in the Dominican Republic. How long did you live there before migrating to the United States?
Alejandro Heredia: I lived there until I was seven. I lived with my grandparents because my parents migrated to the United States, to New York, and to the Bronx, specifically, when I was eight or nine months old. I remember meeting my parents when I was seven, which was an interesting experience.
JJ: Do you remember your first impressions of the United States when you arrived in New York?
AH: I was disappointed when I got to the United States because when you’re in the Dominican Republic you see a lot of images of New York on Dominican television. There’s a machine, which probably still exists, though it might be different now, that sells New York to the Dominican population. In fact, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, there used to be commercials to entice people to migrate to New York. All I knew was the tall, beautiful buildings. Lots of shopping centers and stores and people walking around everywhere. When I got here, I was like, what is the Bronx? Why does it look like this? I thought I was going to be in a fancy tower somewhere.
One of the most important or impressionable things I remember about that time, outside of meeting my parents, was learning English. Seven is a particular age. I learned English fast. In eight months, I was speaking with my cousins in a mashed-up English, or what I could make of it. But I was speaking and listening and understanding it. Learning English was a form of survival because the Bronx in the early 2000s was a tough place to grow up in.
I remember the first thing I said in English was in my first week of school. My friends were hanging out and there was this other kid across the cafeteria who was looking at me. And my friends pointed to him and told me to say to him, “What are you looking at?” And so that’s what I yelled. I didn’t know what I was saying, but to me, that moment is telling because I keep asking myself that question. What was I looking at when I came to this country? I most remember paying attention to the way that people spoke. I grew up around a lot of bilingual kids. There were words I was trying to understand in translation. All to say that I had to pay a lot of attention to language to survive the environment that I arrived at in the United States.
JJ: I’m going to circle back to language. But I want to ask about the novel’s backdrop. It takes place over one year in 1999 and, as you write, “Everyone is existential.” It’s an interesting year. There’s the YSK scare, the premiere of the Sopranos, Nelson Mandela steps down as the first Black president of South Africa. Why did you decide to set the novel in this particular year?
AH: I had questions about my parents’ generation of Dominican immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-90s. I was also curious about what it was like to date then. To explore relationships before the cell phone was a popular item.
1999 was a turning point. People were thinking about the turn of the century and what the future might or might not look like. The characters in the novel have a particular relationship to the future. Sal is always looking toward the future without necessarily looking back. With these characters, I wanted to explore this tense relationship with the future in a moment where everyone is, as I say, feeling existential about what’s coming, what society might look like, and what our individual and collective lives might look like.
JJ: You mentioned imagining what it might have been like when your parents migrated to New York. Early in the novel, Sal thinks, “So much of a person’s life is dictated by when and where they’re born.” In many ways this is a transgenerational novel. There’s Sal’s mother, Teresa, and his roommate, Don Julio’s generation who came over from the Dominican Republic in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. There’s Sal and his best friend, Charo’s generation who arrive on the heels of their family in the early ‘90s. Then there’s Sal’s younger brother, Kiko, born in New York, but who uses Santo Domingo street slang, and Charo’s daughter, Carolina, also born in New York, and who Charo wonders where she’ll fall in the cultural divide. What did you want to explore in portraying three generations of characters who are equally, but differently, touched by the thumb print of migration?
AH: I was really invested in challenging this idea that all immigrants have this great relationship to their home country. A lot of these characters have no interest in going back to the Dominican Republic. Some of them have escaped terrible violence and injustice. Then there are some who are very invested in being connected to the Island, and it’s not the characters you expect, like Kiko, who has never been there. Who was born in the Bronx but is invested in connecting to Dominican culture from the Island. He’s a kid, but he’s picking up all this vernacular. I wanted to show the multiplicity of different generations’ relationship to wanting or not wanting to have a relationship to the Island.
Speaking of the accidents of birth, Don Julio was born at a particular moment. He fought in the Dominican Republic Civil War in 1965. He survived terrible things. His immigration story looks a little bit different from Sal and Charo’s because they’re not running from war. These characters are migrating for different reasons and because of that they develop different relationships to the country. To me, that felt like a more responsible way of writing about immigration than suggesting that all immigrants are pining to return home. That’s not the truth of my lived experience, or the immigrants from across the world whom I’ve met.
JJ: The novel is written in the present tense, including the sections that are set in the past. Why did you choose this structure? How did you hope to shape the reader’s experience?
AH: I find the present tense so challenging to write in, but I also feel very drawn to it because, to me, it’s the tense of images. This is why the novel begins with the way that it does. It begins with an image of this young man standing by the window washing dishes. It’s a very simple image, but I found when I was playing around with different tenses, this felt like the most visceral way to show or align the images I had in my brain.
The decision to write the past in the present tense came out of a desire to resist what Sal is doing with his life. Sal is wanting to forget the place and the people he comes from. And through this literary device I wanted to show the ways in which the past is constantly informing the present action of his life. It’s not in the past. It’s not something that happened a long time ago. It’s active. I wanted to have all the scenes in the same tense to show that as much as Sal is trying to outrun his past, he can’t.
JJ: Can we talk about having examples, role models? There’s a character, Renata, who takes Sal and his close friend, Yadiel, along with a group of other young queer Dominican adolescents, under her wing in the sections set in Santo Domingo. She protects them, offers guidance, validates their experience, and scolds them when needed. She’s a queer elder. How did she develop in your mind? In a novel that explores young queer people of color, did you always envision developing a character like her?
AH: Renata came out of questions I had about my own life. What if my life had been a little bit different in this way? Or a little bit different in that way? I didn’t have a queer adolescence in the Dominican Republic. I asked myself what it would have been like to have had a queer adolescence in the Dominican Republic and then, by extension, what would it have been like to have a queer elder to guide me, or people like me, through questions than one has about gender and sexuality?
Renata is one of those characters I wanted to exist as a role model, but I wanted her to have her own life too. I wanted her to have her shortcomings, and I didn’t want her to necessarily feel like a mother figure. I wanted her to feel like a friend, like an elder who’s a friend and who has her own fears. Who has dreams, too. Dreams about having a stable job and taking care of herself. Maybe buying some property. I wanted to humanize her because I think, sometimes, we look at mentors and we think that they have all the answers, and that’s not always true.
JJ: I mentioned Yadiel. I can’t get her out of my mind, and I think it’s because in a cast of characters who feel limited in their freedom—by fear, society, loved ones—she feels liberated, and dangerous because of it. She embodies a sentence that’s said later in the novel: “Some people would rather be destroyed than reduced.” Do you think there’s a cost to pursuing freedom?
AH: That’s my favorite sentence of the book. On the question of freedom, I think a lot about Toni Morrison. We sometimes confuse freedom for having no responsibilities and being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, regardless of who it hurts or destroys, including oneself. Morrison explains freedom as the ability to choose one’s responsibilities rather than having no responsibilities. I don’t think Yadiel feels like she has no responsibilities, but she does a lot of self-destructive things to live as freely as she can within the confines of a homophobic and transphobic society.
I also wanted to show that, unfortunately, there are real repercussions to living as freely as we want. We all want to express ourselves in ways that align with who we believe we are. But the reality is that the world sometimes does not want that. What do we do when the world does not want that? Do we shy away from it? Do we go against it? Do we pretend it’s not there? Do we say fuck you and do whatever we want? Which, I must say, is something I deeply admire in people. But I also recognize that freedom is not always survival, and sometimes we need to survive.
JJ: Let’s circle back to language. I used “she” when referring to Yadiel. In the book’s dialogue, it’s mentioned that Yadiel sometimes uses “she” and other times “he.” Sal says it’s complicated. There’s also the word maricon, which is used frequently throughout the novel. Often, it’s used with malice, but when used by, say, Sal or Yadiel, who are queer, to discuss or identify another queer person, the bite is taken out of it. Finally, there’s the title of the novel, Loca, which is how Sal and Yadiel refer to each other. Using the feminine. And which allows them, as Sal notes, to see each other better. How is identity influenced, or represented, by the novel’s use of language?
AH: It’s important for me to point to the fact that Dominican people, and Black people across the Diaspora, use languages that have been thrust or forced upon us. But also, everywhere across the Diaspora, whether it’s in the Caribbean, in the Americas, or elsewhere, we find ways to take that language—Spanish, English, French, etc.—and do wonderful things with it. We make it our own in creative ways.
Dominican people do incredible things with the Spanish language. There are jokes on social media and in the world about how no one can understand what Dominicans are saying because we speak fast and have a particular vernacular. But I take seriously the use of Spanish and colloquialisms and vernacular of people from the barrios, people from working class communities in Santo Domingo and the Dominican Republic at large. I draw from that in my writing. In my fiction, I draw from that instinct to take language that is formal, that was given to us, and play with it to get to the specificity of what I’m trying to say. It’s about the people, their interiority, and what goes on in their minds and their hearts. It’s about what drives them to make the choices they make.
This is a sort of diasporic novel, right? There’s Dominican people, but there are also Puerto Ricans. There are Black Americans. Sal’s in a relationship with a Black American man from New York. And so, there’s a lot of these conversations around how we relate to each other across the Diaspora. What language do we use? What is our relationship to language? When I was writing I had to be mindful of Black American vernacular. Of Dominican vernacular from the Island. Of queer Dominican vernacular from the Island. Of vernacular from the diaspora of Dominican, New York. All these different ways of speaking and talking that I put in different characters’ mouths. All these different pools of language meeting and crossing streams.
Yes, sometimes it’s great when people can connect across vernacular and differences. But sometimes it creates tension, too. For example, there are conversations that Sal and his partner, Vance, have because Sal has it in his head that immigrants have it worse than Black Americans. And Vance is like, why are you comparing oppressions? They’re having these conversations about their identities. The language in the novel, including the title, comes from that investment in drawing from the ways that these different people in different places speak.
JJ: Expectations, self-expectations, circle around the novel, perhaps with no one more than Charo, Sal’s best friend. She’s in her early 20s, has a young daughter, works at a grocery store, and, in many ways, is deeply unhappy. She views herself as having become the type of woman she’d never thought she’d be—tending to a man, dreams deferred. In a 2020 interview with No, Dear Magazine, you said that you “think a lot about mothers and who they are outside of their roles to serve and provide.” What questions did you have around desires, expectations, and the structures—economic, political, patriarchal, racial—that act as obstacles to achieving them?
What I wanted to ask was what would it have been like for my mother and her sisters if they had had a group of friends to support them through all these structural issues.
AH: When I was conceptualizing Charo’s storyline I wasn’t always thinking about the structural “isms,” although they exist. Charo is a dark-skinned Dominican woman who’s an immigrant arriving in the United States in the ‘90s. But I was more so thinking about loneliness. Charo is not my mother, but I was thinking about my mother and her siblings and cousins. Women who came to New York in the mid-90s. Whenever they talk about it, they seem to have lived lonely and isolated lives. What I wanted to ask was what would it have been like for my mother, her sisters, or women like my mother and her sisters, if they had had a group of friends to support them through all these structural issues. Whether it be xenophobia or racism, or just how difficult it is to start your life over in a new place where you don’t speak the language or you don’t know anyone. Loneliness was on my mind a lot.
I almost had to step away from the language of what I call social justice to ask myself who this woman is? Because these people are not thinking about their lives in this way. They’re thinking about their lives in terms of what do I do when I get up? Who do I relate to? Who do I like in my life? Who don’t I like? When do I feel suffocated? When do I feel free? What does Charo want if it’s not always this domestic life? Because I don’t think that she doesn’t want it at all. I think what she’s saying is that I don’t want it to be my whole life. To try to understand her I had to get inside her heart and mind.
JJ: Speaking about friends, at its core, the novel is about friendship, which, to me, is a rare focus in literature, particularly when considering other forms of relationships—familial, romantic. Can you talk more about centering friendship, and all that comes with it, in the novel?
AH: It’s a personal investment. I take my friendships seriously. My friends have shown up for me in life saving ways. My friends challenge me just as much as they validate me, and that’s important. I wanted to honor that through my work. To honor that mode of relating and being in the world with other people. The world can be a lonely place, and in my personal life I’ve found that friendship can be one of the best balms for that loneliness.
I also thought about some of my favorite books. Books that even inspired Loca, like Sula, and White Teeth, and other texts that are great examples of what happens when we take friendship seriously. Because when we take friendship seriously, we see all the potential for creativity. My intention was to fill Loca with friendships that are challenging. The friendship between Mauricio and Vance is challenging. The friendship between Sal and Charo is challenging. So is the one between Sal and Yadiel. All these characters love each other, and yet there is always tension because they really love and are invested in each other. Those kinds of friendships have been some of the most fruitful relationships in my life. I wanted to put that into literary fiction to say that those relationships are valuable.
JJ: Near the end of the novel, Charo says to Sal, “You don’t have to forget the past to survive it.” To me, this echoes as a thesis that permeates the novel. It’s also, simply, as a testament to remembrance, a generous sentence. In the spirit of generosity, what did you hope to offer—to yourself, to readers—while crafting Loca?
AH: I’ll start with this question about surviving the past. I wrote that sentence because I come from a people who don’t speak about traumatic things. They’ve found ways, either through alcohol or drugs or sex or a thousand other ways to suppress the past, to go on. To move forward. I wanted to offer this as a remedy to myself, just in a way of thinking about the world. To express or explore a belief that I have, which is that to move forward it is necessary to look back and reflect on the past, and to be able to live with it in the present. Even, and especially when, it reflects our own shortcomings.
I also grew up around a lot of people with a severe lack of accountability. Some of these characters are grappling with that, too. I asked questions such as how are we accountable to ourselves? How are we accountable to the people we love? To our community? How do we move on? And how do we move on when we’ve made mistakes? I wanted to explore all the ways of how one can live with oneself. Because life is hard. And people do great violence and terrible things to each other. I wanted to ask myself, and I continue to ask myself as I continue to write: Is it possible to go on despite how challenging life can be? How can we be accountable for our actions, and who we hurt? And is atonement a real thing we can achieve?
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