There is no shortage of New Orleans cultural treasures dazzling the public in plain view, but the city also likes to keep a few under wraps. The world-renowned Mexican writer Yuri Herrera is one such ace up her sleeve. The first time I picked up his award-winning Signs Preceding the End of the World, it didn’t take more than a paragraph to recognize it as rare, top-shelf literary gold. Herrera achieves more in fewer pages than almost anyone writing today. His novels are short, electric, and written with the kind of control that comes only with a lifetime devotion to mastering the craft. Most authors that good are long dead, but imagine my delight upon realizing that lo and behold, this one was alive and writing. Upon further discovering that he was doing so in New Orleans, mere blocks from me no less, I offered my gratitude to the quiet hand of fate.
Though his work primarily takes place in Mexico, Herrera’s forthcoming new novel Season of the Swamp is written from the crossroads where the destinies of his home and his homeland meet. Set in mid-19th century New Orleans, the novel imagines the two years spent here by former president Benito Juárez, one of Mexico’s most powerful statesmen, an adventure about which little is known. It is painstakingly researched and unencumbered by modern historical projections, but so alive that within its pages 1853 may as well be now. Moving between the high concept and the sensual, its narrative nimbly slips in and out of hidden French Quarter courtyards, high stakes political intrigue, and wild yellow fever dreams, all while offering a thoughtful contribution to a centuries-old Panamerican literary tradition with which Northern North Americans, sadly, are so rarely acquainted. After hungrily devouring the book and reveling in its every detail, I strolled with a spring in my step through the summer heat over to his writer’s lair, ready to pester him on behalf of ANTIGRAVITY with my endless questions and unbridled enthusiasm.
I want to start by saying how much I loved Season of the Swamp, for many reasons, but what first struck me is how you immediately make this monumental historical figure so human, almost fragile—the way everyone feels when they’re in a new place. So start us off by saying how you got inspired to write about Benito Juárez in New Orleans.
Benito Juárez is such a presence in Mexico that you can’t escape it. The main square in Pachuca, my hometown, is called La Plaza Juárez. When I lived on the border, I lived in between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, and pretty much in every town that you go in Mexico you will find a street, an avenue, a square, a park called Juárez. And more than that, he’s a parallel of what happened in the U.S. with Lincoln. In Mexico, Juárez is someone who, against all odds, can win—a little bit like a civic saint, you know? Because he was so pure in his intentions, he created a certain idea of Mexico.
What idea was that?
Between independence [from Spain] and his tenure [as president], Mexico was in chaos for different reasons. It was a very big country with a small population. Most of its wealth was in the hands of the Catholic Church, with different factions fighting each other for decades, and meanwhile, the United States was stealing land. With him comes something important—though it’s not just him, it’s a whole group of liberals—the separation between church and state. And once it’s achieved, they then have to face the European invasion. There are a lot of national myths that come with that. It’s an important part of our national identity, defeating two of the most important states that have existed in history: The Vatican and then France. So he’s an unavoidable point of reference when you talk about Mexican identity.
When I got [to New Orleans], a friend who I met in El Paso many years ago had been living here, and he told me the very first time that I saw him, “I haven’t found the house of Juárez.” And then I realized that his [New Orleans] episode is mentioned in every single biography of Juárez. And in every single one of them, it’s mentioned as something important because after being here, he came back to Mexico and became this super minister that started the separation of church and state, and afterwards he becomes president, and afterwards he faces the French, and afterwards he re-establishes the republic. And all that happened because of this parentheses. So the thing is, it’s mentioned in every biography but it’s never explained. And it’s never explained because people really don’t know what happened. The same two or three anecdotes are repeated again and again and again: that he was really poor, that he got sick and almost died, that he worked rolling tobacco.
Just a few clues.
Right, that is what we have—a few things but nothing really concrete. And for me, this was the opportunity, because I learned [about his New Orleans period] when I got here and then it took me around nine years, while I was doing other things, to think about it. And in that way, it’s a little bit a way of thinking about my own relation with the city. I share, I think, something that must have been a lot more extreme when he came here, which is this feeling of being in between, of being unclassifiable, in the sense that even though this is an extremely diverse and plural and complex city, it’s still seen as divided just between Black and white. I can see that he was totally misplaced and misunderstood the way he had been his whole life, because he was this really tiny Indigenous guy that people didn’t expect much from. Before becoming a lawyer he was studying to become a priest.
Which is interesting considering how strongly he reacted against the church.
Well, when you read his autobiographical notes, he said that he felt repugnance towards the priests, not towards Christianity. He never stopped being, in that sense, a Christian person. But [his repugnance was] towards the institution and the way it kept people in the dark, the way it promoted ignorance.
So liberalism to him was a way of shining a light?
Liberalism was a way of embracing reason, a way of embracing freedom in different ways. When he comes to New Orleans, a society in which the Catholic Church has absolutely no power, and where you find this economic freedom that you don’t see in Mexico, you know, this impressed [his circle of exiled liberals] a lot. This makes a big impact on them. But at the same time—and this is not elaborated in any biography but this is one of the main ideas for me—they realized that all this economic freedom includes the freedom to enslave other people. And that slavery is not just a mistake or an exception or something marginal in this system, but at the core of it. And what I’m thinking is that this created a sort of a paradox in him that helped him create his own political philosophy. On one hand, we need to create a republic of individuals, a republic of economic freedom, but also we have to really reject any form of dominance. So it started becoming important for me in terms of understanding certain historical ideas about Mexico.
But as much as you point out these building blocks of his political philosophy, I also see you interpreting the city for him as somewhere he can temporarily set the ideological struggle down, and weave himself into this frightening and beautiful new place as an anonymous part of the crowd. When you were talking about his Indigenous identity just now, I was thinking of the part where he’s remembering the time before he learned Spanish, in institutions that required his breaking away from his native language. And now he’s in New Orleans and once again, he has to enter a society he’s outside of through language, which helps him to connect to that previous self.
I think you are seeing really clearly things that were important to me, and some of them that I realized afterwards that I didn’t plan. I have never told it to myself the way you said it, that his childhood and this moment here, they are in that sense similar because he is out of the lingua franca. He’s out of the institutions, out of the spaces of respectability. In that sense, he is taking a page from his childhood to survive here. And I think that—and again, this has not been told or theorized or explained in any biography, but this is one of my ideas—his encounter with the Black culture of New Orleans and the clash of this culture with the mainstream white culture must have done something to the way in which he was seeing the world, the way in which he understood order, the way in which he understood what political imagination could be.
It’s true that the cultural encounters are some of the most vivid in the book, from the Afro-Creole dance he stumbles upon and is swept up in, or the Gottschalk performance that is far more cutting edge than we normally give the 19th century credit for.
[Gottschalk] was in touch with the avant-garde, but it’s an avant-garde that is not in books, that is not in the universities. It’s an avant-garde that is in a filthy place. The avant-garde is in all the vegetation outside, literally outside of the box that was the French Quarter.
I love thinking about New Orleans creativity influencing Mexican statecraft.
What I think is that this place gave him a series of doors, and a series of intellectual and emotional tools that were not there before, you know? And I would say a certain attitude in the face of chaos, because this was and still is a chaotic city.
Incredibly.
But it’s a city that is always finding its path, and always creating a new path based on being different.
Constant chaos forces you to be present and attentive to the task of navigating choppy waters—it’s all about time and timing. There’s this part of the book where you talk about his assimilation to the pattern of New Orleans time by describing how the weeks turn into days and minutes and then the minutes turn into days. It so perfectly captures the sensation of time in the city, and how it gives our experience of living here its shape.
I’m glad that you read it with so much attention because I think many people will kind of get uneasy that it’s not plot-driven, this book.
I mean, the book has a strong, dramatic plot, but you don’t notice all the seeds of story which have been planted until the moment it’s all unfolding, which is another thing that feels very New Orleans to me. You think you’re just living your life, but the whole time someone is weaving this tapestry above you and around you and with you, and then the tapestry reveals itself in certain moments—moments of revelation where everything has meaning. The book’s storyline did exactly the same thing.
I tried not to impose a plot, but I tried to follow the rhythm of the city, to follow the conditions that the city itself is imposing on its inhabitants, you know? Maybe it’s gonna be a slow process for the book to find its readers, but I’m OK with that. Books have their own pace, books have their own life. And we’ll see. We’ll see how it’s read both in Mexico and here.
It’s satisfying to see you making the maps of Mexico and New Orleans overlap. It’s a bigger picture that rarely gets painted—risky perhaps for broader readership but well worth it in my mind. What was your research process like?
The research I did was, on one hand, historical books about the city, about the music in the city, about slavery, about the Indigenous people here. But the other thing that I did was, I read the Picayune, which is online, from the very first day until the last day that he was here.
Wow.
I wanted to know exactly what happened every single day, but I didn’t read the whole newspaper. I would focus on the crime section, so every day I would read the crime section. Because there’s many other things happening that maybe you don’t see but if you live in a city with so much crime, sooner or later, as you know (or any people that live in New Orleans know), you are going to have to hear about it, or see it, or experience it. And the crime section is talking about not the notables but about just the street life, you know?
Right.
The newspaper was sometimes really terrible to see, because the amount of violence that existed, I would say, was very similar to the amount of violence we have now.
Just different weapons.
Yeah, sometimes similar weapons. A lot more stabbing, I would say. The other thing that I would say that is interesting when reading the newspapers is the normalcy of brutality. And of course I’m talking about slavery, but not only that. So I’m playing not only with what is possible and what is proved, but with what is plausible.
From the very beginning that enlightenment attraction to order has been set against the chaos of New Orleans, which is funny, to go back to Benito Juárez, because so much of the liberal ethos is about order vs. chaos.
Yeah, that’s why it’s spiritual what you were saying before, that in a way is relativization if not an abandonment of reason. I think more than abandoning reason is rethinking reason as their only guiding principle. That is what I would say is one of the few things that I thought, truly, before writing it, that that was the message. One of the dreams in which he has all these mathematical equations that are suddenly kind of devouring the world and devouring him instead.
The yellow fever dreams!
Yeah, not only was he a lawyer but he knew math, he knew physics, he knew reason and here he is in a place where the truth of the place is not expressed in the way the reasonable French philosophers did but in a different way that had to do with how your body interacts with the world.
I think you did a good job of demonstrating how in the psychedelia of sickness, order and reason break apart.
Yeah.
And there is this psychedelic language that you can get in touch with then, when you’re very weak and overwhelmed and close to death. And then of course the second fever dream takes a sharp turn, in your parody of the vampire genre. What inspired you to write such a risky but satisfying interlude?
It’s several things at the same time. It’s a little bit of a homage to this kind of genre, the genre of vampires—Anne Rice and many other writers and filmmakers that have worked with that—and it’s playing with one of those clichés in New Orleans, instead of running away from the cliché, just turning towards it and using it without falling in it.
Definitely.
And also, it’s a way of emphasizing something that is what fantasy and also science fiction do very often, which is that you create these monsters to give body to something that is so evil that it’s difficult to understand sometimes. What we had in American history in general, but specifically in the chapters regarding slavery, is a certain respectable evil. When we talk about the horrors of the world, sometimes we can become anesthetized. And I think of one of the virtues, one of the rights and characteristics of art is to emphasize something that is there for us to see that maybe we see way too often, and precisely because of that we don’t have a way to feel touched by it. So, that chapter is at the same time homage and it’s a joke, but also it’s an allegory about what we now call old money and back then was just money, you know? Money made from slavery, from the plantations.
Yeah, if that’s not vampirism, what is?
Yeah, of course, that is vampirism. That is literally what you’re doing: You are just sucking life from people without giving anything in return.
And the socialist twist is so great too, because it’s fun and you capture a little something of the best of leftism, which is this desire to vanquish evil in this simple sort of way. The chapter really scratches that itch.
Well also, they were idealists. Melchor Ocampo, who is supposed to have had the biggest influence on Juárez, he was what is called in history a utopian socialist. This is a term that Marx invented to sort of discredit all the socialists that came before him, because it’s like, I am a scientific socialist, these guys were just making up funny dreams and utopias. So anyway, Ocampo is really interesting in that he’s a liberal in the classic sense but also he’s a sort of socialist, and so I thought that yeah, he was exactly what you were saying, a good candidate to present this idealism. Someone who’s just fighting evil.
At the same time, you never seem to indulge any desire to make Benito Juárez into a hero on a pedestal.
No, I hope not. And I think one of the ideas is also that history is not made out of just the few ingredients that we have been told, you know? History is made out of great speeches and great battles and these moments of honor. But history is also made out of sin and made out of flesh. This is one of the other things that was important to me when I was writing it, which is that in New Orleans they were learning from something that you are not supposed to learn if you are going to become a founding father. If you are going to become a founding father, like Lincoln, you just build your cabin with your own hands and you are just a saint. And maybe they are saints, but in the way that you are first a true sinner before becoming a saint.
Well it’s hard to live in New Orleans without a little sin.
No, no, if you don’t sin here then it’s as if you have been in a non-place.
There’s the point too that he’s not yet Benito Juárez, he’s an immigrant cigar roller. Simón Bolívar, by comparison, was a planter, and so he was a very rich revolutionary wherever he went—when he was in exile he was rich and when he was at war he was rich. With Juárez I think what’s so special is, how many great leaders had an experience like that? What a humbling experience to have to be poor and one of the people—how could he help but learn from them?
Yeah maybe in that sense, it’s also an investigation of what happens to ego in a place that overwhelms you in such a way, no? The nature overwhelms you, the violence, the history, the ignorance.
Does it relate to your own relationship to ego and self living in New Orleans?
That’s a really complex question because on one hand, this is an extremely hedonistic city, which, isn’t that in a way an explosion of ego? It’s all about my pleasure, it’s all about my feeling good. And at the same time, it’s a place that never allows you to forget about the difficult parts of life, you know? That we might not have slavery anymore but we have private prisons and we have an ungodly amount of kids dying by bullets.
And the poverty.
And the poverty, the structural racism, and the destruction of the environment, and these things feed on each other, somehow. I think, in personal terms, I have enjoyed being a marginal character in the literary scene and in general, in every scene in this city. I also have enjoyed a lot of what the city has to offer in terms of hedonism. So I’m not sure but I would think that maybe that combination of seeing that there is a lot of suffering that is much more serious than yours, and that there is a lot more pleasure than what you have experienced, maybe have had a good effect.
Before we close, I’m curious how you see this book illuminating the Latin American connections that run so deep in the city, but seem so poorly understood.
Well, there is a long, long, common history between Mexico and New Orleans. You know that this year marks the 200th year of the Mexican consulate in New Orleans. It was the first consulate here in the United States. And there is an economic history, there is a political history, there’s an artistic history, as we now know. Now, many people recognize the role of the Mexican musicians in the decades previous or the creation or the emergence of jazz. So we can spend a long time talking about why there should be more visible or recognized links between, not only Mexico and New Orleans but New Orleans and other places in Latin America, especially Cuba. What I would say that intervenes there is the idea of the imagined communities. It doesn’t matter that there were, and there are, real communities at work. At some point, the imagined community that is a nation state imposes itself over reality and imposes its laws, its prohibitions, its second-class citizenry on it and its second-class history on top of reality. So, yes, I guess this is a way of also addressing that: That New Orleans is key for Mexican history even if people don’t know why, and that Latin American people have been crucial in the development of this city. I don’t know if my novel is going to change perceptions, but it’s a child of this unrecognized union.
Season of the Swamp (published by Graywolf Press and translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman) will be released on October 1. For more info, check out graywolfpress.org.
photos by Tammie Quintana
