There’s an argument to be made that New Orleans is as much a part of Yuri Herrera as the cities in Mexico that raised him. He’s lived here for 13 years. It’s where he met his wife and adopted two dogs; where he gained a deeper understanding of the codes and contradictions of being Black, white and brown in America; where he lost a good friend to violence; and where he earned, if not quite enemies, something like them.
“Where you live, there should be someone who hates your guts,” he said, laughing. “That’s how you know you’re not a tourist.”
In other words, New Orleans — the good and bad of it — has changed him. For a writer who revels in experimentation and sees “risk in feeling too much in control,” perhaps it is the city’s ability to disrupt and unsettle that has made him stay so long.
“This is a city that transforms the way you understand freedom, the way you understand work, the way you relate to the elements,” Herrera said. “This is not a comfortable city. It is a challenging, movable one.”
New Orleans, or Herrera’s version of it, shifts and vibrates across every page of his latest novel, “Season of the Swamp.” Set in the 1850s against the exile of the Mexican politician and eventual president Benito Juárez, the book sees Herrera return to many of the preoccupations that have long given his writing a sense of urgency: the dynamics of power, the politics of identity, migration (forced and otherwise), violence and the plasticity of language.
Much of Herrera’s previous work has been infused with the atmospheres and ideas that animate social realities in Mexico. Now, in imagining a brief interlude in the life of one of his country’s most revered public figures, Herrera aims to capture essential truths of a uniquely American city.
“This is my second home, and this is my way of reclaiming it,” he said.
“Season of the Swamp” begins with Juárez’s arrival in New Orleans in 1853 and ends with his departure 18 months later. Juárez’s arrest and exile are recognized as significant moments in Mexican history, but little is known of his time in the city.
To fill in this gap in the historical record, Herrera examined everything that surrounded it. He read a digitized version of the Daily Picayune newspaper (later The Times-Picayune) from every day Juárez was there, dug into the Historic New Orleans Collection archives and walked the streets of Marigny, Bywater and the French Quarter with a researcher’s eye.
The life he constructs for Juárez may be a work of fiction, but it is “made of pieces of truth,” Herrera said.
“I didn’t have Juárez, but I had everything around him,” he said.
What emerges is not so much a portrait of the man, but of how this particular place and time could, plausibly, have helped shape what he became: a liberal reformer and a democrat, an enthusiast for commerce, a politician who at times resisted power and at others wielded it to his advantage.
It is easy to see how the city Juárez encountered could have upset his assumptions of what society could and should be. New Orleans was bustling, vibrant and full of culture — but also a place of extreme violence, most significantly as the largest center for the traffic of enslaved Black people in the United States. Herrera depicts the city as literally and figuratively on fire. Insurance schemes led to hundreds of arson cases each year, and yellow fever swept through the city at regular intervals.
In “Season of the Swamp,” Juárez and his fellow exiles exchange revolutionary ideas, but seem unsure whether they are part of efforts to topple Santa Anna, the dictator back home, or are simply, as Herrera writes, “a conspiracy of extras.” Herrera believes the tumult of the city itself played a role as Juárez and his compatriots, such as Melchor Ocampo and Ponciano Arriaga, went on to become key figures in Mexico’s 19th-century struggle for liberal reform.
“They lived on this other planet, and that is something that changes your body, changes your ideas,” Herrera said. “Ideas don’t come from the ether.”
Despite Herrera’s attention to detail, this is not a conventional work of historical fiction, said Lisa Dillman, his longtime English translator. Herrera’s style can be hard to pin down, blending elements from different genres and forms and “exploding” the stylistic characteristics that define his writing from one book to the next, she said.
“The one commonality is that he’s always pushing the boundaries of language, of what words can do, of how you can signify,” Dillman said. “The way that he does that is always, to my reading, really deeply rooted in affection and love and respect for his characters.”
Herrera’s testing of language began at a young age. Growing up in Pachuca, in central Mexico, he recalls seeing an elementary school teacher writing on a chalk board and becoming fixated on the idea of creating words from nothing. His mother was a doctor and his father a lawyer-turned-historian — sometimes upper middle class, sometimes lower, he said, but “there were always books” in the house. He grew up reading Mexican literature and “less fashionable” things like noir and science fiction, given to him by an uncle.
Herrera was also raised in a decidedly political and staunchly leftist home — he is named after the Soviet hero and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. To his mother, Mexico’s Communist Party was “pretty much right-wing,” he said.
Those influences remained with Herrera later in life. He studied political science at university in Mexico City, and though he says he is glad he didn’t pursue it as a career (he calls it “a very conservative discipline”) nearly all his work engages fluently with sociopolitical issues.
“Reading political theory is a sort of fiction also. It’s a sort of creation of worlds,” he said.
After college — and between periods of “slacking and hanging out with friends” — Herrera spent time teaching Spanish in Orléans, France, and then studying as a graduate student in El Paso, Texas and in Berkeley, California, where he earned his Ph.D. He arrived as a fellow and later professor at Tulane University in 2011 and has lived in New Orleans ever since, though he still spends as much time as he can in Mexico. “It is still the place from which I write,” he said.
Though not always explicit, discernibly Mexican landscapes are central to his three previous novels. “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” the first of Herrera’s books to be published in English, uses Mexica mythology as a guide to a story about migration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It won the Best Translated Book Award, given by the University of Rochester, in 2016, and was included in The Guardian’s 2019 list of the best books of the 21st century.
Brenda Navarro, a friend and novelist, said “Season of the Swamp” is geared toward a more universal audience than those previous works. Still, Herrera always looks for a way to connect to his roots. His stature as one of Latin America’s foremost literary figures reflects both the originality of his work and the role he has played in breaking down expectations of what it means to be writing from the region, she said.
“He has made younger generations dare to be more playful with language, to not be afraid of words, or grammar, or sounds, or the idea that someone might put a footnote on our work in Spain or explanations of what it means in other languages,” Navarro said.
Herrera’s own daring with the written word is as creative as it is precise. On his computer, a file called “palabras” lists dozens of words and phrases that, at one time or another, he wanted to include (or exclude) in “Season of the Swamp.” One of the most important, he said, was canaille — a word used in 19th-century New Orleans to describe the outcast and misfit masses of which Juárez, in exile, finds himself a part.
Whether in Mexico, the United States or elsewhere, the canaille are those who appear to most capture Herrera’s interest and evoke his sense of solidarity. As a character in his novel says, “Could there be any place more interesting than the one where all the chaff gets tossed?” No wonder Herrera has made New Orleans his home.
“It makes me think of the limits of domesticity and what the powers that be decide is the way you have to live,” Herrera said. “It’s difficult to go some other places, once you have lived here.”
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