Among the tragic heroes and comic villains who fill the pantheon of Mexican history, few command more solemn respect than Benito Juárez, who in the mid-19th century rose from destitute origins to become his country’s first Indigenous president. His place in the national imagination is not unlike the one a Black Abraham Lincoln might have occupied in America: a secular saint who overcame racist barriers to bring justice and reform to the motherland. His canonization may well be warranted, but as it happens with most victims of hagiography, it’s hard to think of Juárez without yawning.
And so it is a testament to Yuri Herrera’s virtuosic talents that his new novel, “Season of the Swamp,” manages to breathe new life into a character who had long become a wax figure. Instead of subjecting us to yet another retelling of Juárez’s more exalted moments, Herrera has chosen to focus on an unglamorous interlude in the future president’s biography: the 18 months of exile that Juárez spent in antebellum New Orleans.
By the time he arrived in the Crescent City, in 1853, Juárez had already served as governor of his native state, Oaxaca, but his liberal faction had just been defeated. In writing about the great reformer at a time of uncertainty, Herrera has produced a moving portrait of a man of ambition who has been made aware of the thin line between the few whom posterity remembers and the countless it forgets.
But the Juárez that Herrera conjures with his muscular prose — translated with bravura by Lisa Dillman, who has preserved enough traces of Spanish diction to remind Anglophone readers that this is a work of Mexican literature — is above all a pair of eyes and ears. He’s an observer alive to the world, endowed with the foreigner’s curiosity and the subaltern’s ironic skepticism.
We learn about his inner life not so much through what he says as through what he notices: the smell of filth, the taste of gumbo, the oppressiveness of summer, the packs of dogs, the din of commerce, the chaos of brawls, the ecstatic dances, the shallow graves — and the quotidian horror of a society that, unlike Mexico, still practices slavery.
The result is a novel whose protagonist is often not Juárez but New Orleans. The city we get to know through his eyes is so vividly rendered that we almost don’t notice that “Season of the Swamp” has little in the way of a plot. All manner of incidents happen — Herrera, who teaches at Tulane, appears to have lifted fires, murders and other such episodes from newspapers published in his adoptive city while Juárez was there — but the moments when the novel gestures toward a more substantial narrative turn out to be red herrings.
At one point Juárez begins to notice the same strange tattoo on people, but readers hoping for a Pynchonian thriller might be disappointed to learn that “Season of the Swamp” could be summarized in three clauses: Juárez arrives in New Orleans, has chance encounters and returns to Mexico.
But I, for one, don’t feel inclined to reproach the author for preferring an accumulation of detail to the concatenation of events. As we accompany Juárez in his walks around New Orleans, we watch the defeated exile become the reformer we know. The climax of this oblique psychological drama comes when a white American mistakes the Indigenous Juárez for one of “the captured” who are bought and sold in the land of the free. It was only after witnessing slavery, Herrera suggests, that Juárez understood that his task was to realize in Mexico the most American of propositions, that all human beings are created equal.
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