Against Sameness: LOCA and the Art of Being Otherwise

Cover to Loca: A Novel by Alejandro Heredia

When I first learned about Alejandro Heredia's debut novel LOCA, I was excited for all the expected reasons a queer Boricua Dominicana would be. Meeting author Alejandro Heredia and seeing him interviewed by others gave me all the more reason to be excited.

Days after interviewing Alejandro Heredia, I attended a reading and conversation at Black Mountain Institute where he's a 2024-2025 Shearing Fellow. The event, moderated by local writer and critic Nicholas Russell, took place in the Majestic Theater—a venue that provided an unexpectedly fitting backdrop. Photos of Tobey Maguire lined the stage behind Heredia, and a twin bed with a bright pink comforter stood nearby. Though unintentional, this aesthetic perfectly complemented a novel set in 1999, transporting me back to the '90s and the uncertainty that defined that era.

During the conversation, Heredia spoke with ease about his creative process, from admitting his crush on Tobey Maguire to discussing his meticulous attention to sentence-level craft. Most notably, he emphasized that discernment is the most important quality a writer can develop.

Alejandro Heredia, live at the Majestic Theater.

I was delighted, a kid in a candy store, seeing so many chapters of my home blur at once: the homes I left behind, the place I decided to call home, and the home of the written word as a spiritual, intellectual and intuitive process. I had found someone who talked about writing in all the ways I had almost forgotten. And Heredia's accent, a nod to so many of the people I left behind, made me nostalgic for adolescent memories—writing poetry on napkins in my aunt's house, the way another aunt softened when she learned that I too was a poet.

At the end of the night, I learned that my former colleague and seasoned community advocate Andre Wade would be interviewing Heredia at Obodo Collective's annual "Our Mother's Gardens" event. I had already been planning to attend—to be in community with some of the Black women who had seen me, inspired me to stay, and reminded me why I loved teaching. There, amid locals I had known for years and people I was just beginning to know, Heredia sat with ease on stage in this different context. I was delighted that he would experience another corner of the Vegas valley that had inspired me to find home here.

In Our Mothers' Gardens Book Festival.

Without knowing about my past interviews, Heredia organically echoed the same thoughts on labels that Xochitl Xitlali had shared with me a year ago. His reflections on solidarity and kinship, along with his love for Lillie Allen, brought me back to why I had reviewed "Son de Mi Ser" months later. Humbled by the skill of Russell and Wade's approach to interviewing Heredia, this piece seeks to highlight his creative process while centering his essential question: who are we when we're not talking about racism?

The following is my first interview without collaborative context—everyone else here is someone I worked with or who worked with a friend. I found myself overwhelmed with how much and how little I knew.

Erika Abad: The first question relates to your Native Son interview about taking care of your mind and heart—something I've seen consumers of our literature take for granted. As someone who similarly retreats into darkness, what does retreating provide you?

Alejandro Heredia: The very first thing that comes to mind is that retreating allows me the space and time to think. I'm a slow processor, emotionally and intellectually. Being in the public eye—doing interviews, being on Instagram, being at literary events—I'm so grateful for all of it. It's exciting and fun. But I don't know that I'm tending to my mind as much as I would like when I'm doing all these things. So every now and then, I need to go into my intellectual and creative cave, literally or metaphorically, to have time to think and take care of myself.

We're all constantly being asked to move at the speed of capitalism. For me, it's really important to slow down. Sometimes slowing down doesn't mean I'm not doing work. It just means I'm not always in the public eye.

EA: In a moment where so much is expected from artists, especially artists from our categorical communities, what advice would you have for them?

AH: I always encourage all artists to just get their work done. We're being demanded so much from the present moment. It's important that we continue to show up for the people in our lives.

The only thing that's more important to me than my art is how I live my life. That means showing up for my partner, my friends, my family. But when I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities to the people I love, I have to get my work done. I have to sit down and write, which means saying no to a lot of things—parties, events, brunch, whatever it might be.

It's hard. I'm not advocating for closing yourself off from the world. But even in these moments, living through Trump's second presidency, our response is often to be on social media all the time. We feel that to be responsibly engaged, we have to follow the 24-hour news cycle. I actually think that's a great distraction from the work we need to do—not only artistic work but also work in our communities.

EA: My internal policy with social media is I'll go on until I'm paralyzed. I don't want to be distracted from the reasons I do my work, because the work still needs to be done—in the classroom, outside the classroom. We often don't get time to have those conversations. Now I've graduated as a seasoned activist to say: if we can't have coffee, if you don't trust me with rest, I'm not working with you. I refuse to be complicit in our exploitation. Part of the work is care.

I need to deviate from my list because when I started reading LOCA, I had to pause. As a Chicana who had to go to school to get my family history, I grew up with chaos. Not all my tías were Dominican, and yet—then I read your essay on white women. For me, the bridge is Chado wants freedom stateside, yet she wants to tie herself to her culture. Can you explain how you brought that tension to the page? I found it so relatable.

AH: Part of what I was trying to parse through Chado was how belonging to what I call the Dominican Village was incredibly important for Dominican immigrants of that generation in the 1990s. My parents immigrated to this country, went to the Bronx, and by that point there was already a Dominican community that helped bring them into the fold. There were supermarkets, stores, doctors—all these institutions. You could build almost your entire life in the Bronx. People sometimes go decades without learning English because they just don't need it in their daily lives.

I wanted to show how that sense of belonging is really useful for Dominican immigrants in that particular time period, but also how it forces Chado specifically to contend with her own vision for her life versus the vision her community has of how she should live. There's a scene where she's walking around the neighborhood and runs into friends of her parents. These elders are supposed to support her, but instead of feeling supported, Chado feels claustrophobia. She's like: I came to this country to do my own thing, figure out who I am, and everywhere I go, I'm encountering these reminders that I should be a mother in these ways, a woman in these ways, a person in these ways—rather than who I want to be. There's real tension between how great it feels to belong to a community and how that belonging sometimes pushes us to conform in ways we might not want to.

EA: When I was reading your essay on community, you were centering shared values versus categorical identities. I was reflecting on this moment and the call to do work—for some, the category is more important than the value. What I respect about Hydro, Sal, Chado, and Ella is you're centering value, not category.

AH: Frankly, that comes from my own beef with identity politics and how we do identity politics in our contemporary moment. Part of what I was trying to do with that "White Girls Were Not Us" essay was show how some of us grew up without quote-unquote representation, without seeing ourselves exactly on television or in books or film. The kinds of things we lost by having to understand ourselves through the lens of white women, but also the great benefit of understanding yourself through making a leap across difference. What that does is give you a more porous and expanded idea of who you are and who you're able to connect to just on the basis of being human.

Sometimes the way we look at ourselves in our contemporary moment is as if we can only align politically or personally along the lines of shared identity. That wasn't my reality growing up in the Bronx, around people from all over the world. It's not realistic, and it's also not strategic. To get anything done in our neighborhood, we needed to collaborate with people who were not us—Puerto Ricans, Black Americans, people from South Asia, West Africa, Mississippi.

I really take issue with this ideology that we can only connect with people who share our identities, that to see myself reflected in art, they have to be exactly aligned with my experiences. I wanted Chado, Sal, and Ella to feel entirely themselves on the page. If a Dominican person reads Chado's experiences and sees herself reflected, that's incredible—I've done something good. But if somebody who's not Dominican sees themselves reflected in Chado, that also means I've done my job because I've written about a human being with the texture and nuances that good literary fiction requires. I take that responsibility very seriously.

When I'm writing, I'm not thinking about representing an entire culture or place. I'm just thinking about representing the experiences of these particular people on the page.