Breaking Free in Two Languages: Alejandro Heredia's Loca Maps the Queer Dominican Journey

Loca and author Alejandro Heredia. Novel available now at aleheredia.com.

Alejandro Heredia's debut novel Loca (2025) doesn't just tell a story—it creates a world where queer Dominican voices, long relegated to the margins of American literature, finally take center stage. Following Afro-Dominican protagonists Sal and Charo as they navigate the complexities of New York City while haunted by their pasts in Santo Domingo, Heredia crafts a narrative that refuses to simplify the immigrant experience or the queer journey. Instead, he offers something far more valuable: the messy, beautiful truth of lives lived between languages, cultures, and identities.

The novel's non-linear structure mirrors the fractured nature of diasporic memory. We meet Sal, a gay man in his mid-twenties, trapped in a dead-end job at an ice cream shop while processing trauma that slowly reveals itself through flashbacks. Charo, a young mother, struggles to define herself beyond the roles of girlfriend and parent. Their stories interweave across time and geography, with Santo Domingo's past bleeding into New York's present in ways that feel both inevitable and surprising.

"Lost, wandering, hoping to find some semblance of belonging. What if he were to leave his life, become one of the park people? Anchor himself to an addiction, a bad habit, or his own destructive pack."

Heredia's greatest achievement lies in creating characters who feel genuinely human—flawed, confused, sometimes selfish, but always recognizable. When Charo flees to Pennsylvania, leaving her boyfriend and child behind, she interrogates her own motivations with brutal honesty: "Was his betrayal as bad as I remember it, or is that a story I tell myself, to justify leaving?" These moments of self-examination elevate the novel beyond simple representation, offering instead a complex portrait of people trying to survive both external pressures and internal contradictions.

The supporting cast enriches this complexity, transforming what could have been a two-person drama into a kaleidoscope of interconnected lives. Each character—from Don Julio to Renata, from Yadiel to Ella—carries their own struggles and dreams, creating a collective portrait of marginalized communities that resist easy categorization. These aren't tokens or types but fully realized individuals whose presence challenges rigid notions of Latinx or LGBTQ identity.

Yadiel, appearing only in flashbacks, emerges as the novel's spiritual heart. Sal compares him to a moth "trying to outlast the night, somewhere between reality and the dream in his mind." Initially perceived as reckless, Yadiel's refusal to conform becomes something more profound: "Now Sal understands. Some people would rather be destroyed than be reduced." This revelation doesn't just advance plot; it fundamentally reshapes how Sal—and readers—understand resistance and authenticity.

"They've been doing this new thing where they refer to each other in feminine pronouns and it feels good. Simple. Like seeing each other better."

Language itself becomes a character in Heredia's hands. The fluid use of pronouns in scenes between Sal and Yadiel creates linguistic space for identities that refuse to be fixed. When Sal explains, "She. Sometimes, she. Sometimes, he. I don't think Yadiel ever arrived at one," he's not just describing a person but modeling a way of being that transcends binary thinking. This linguistic fluidity extends throughout the novel, with English and Spanish mixing naturally, creating a bilingual texture that honors the reality of Dominican American life.

The novel's exploration of belonging reaches its apex when a psychic confronts Sal with a deceptively simple question: "Who are your people? That's the thing to ask yourself." While Sal's mother preached that hard work would secure his place in America, the novel suggests something different—that home isn't built through individual achievement but through community and chosen family. For Sal and Charo, "their people" emerge not from blood or nationality alone but from the queer community that embraces their full complexity.

"What's worse than leaving your life, your world, to begin again in a place that wants your working hands but not your culture, language, history?"

Heredia doesn't shy away from the specific challenges of being Dominican in an America that often flattens Latinx experiences into a monolith. Sal must navigate not just being an immigrant but being specifically Dominican, distinct from Mexican or Central American narratives. He must reconcile being moreno in relation to both white Americans and Black Americans who don't share his Caribbean heritage. He must find space for "loving men the way he does" within communities that don't always welcome that love.

Charo's journey to suburban Pennsylvania illuminates another dimension of this complexity. In New York, her Afro-Dominican identity required no explanation; in Pennsylvania, she discovers that "her skin seems to embody and identify her completely. Most of them have never heard of her country." The shift from urban to suburban America reveals how geography shapes the experience of race and ethnicity, how the same person can be invisible in one place and hypervisible in another.

The novel's open ending feels deliberately unresolved, mirroring life's refusal to provide neat conclusions. Sal finds a measure of closure while Charo discovers new aspects of her identity, but their futures remain unwritten. This ambiguity isn't weakness but strength, acknowledging that identity formation is an ongoing process, not a destination.

"Some people would rather be destroyed than be reduced."

Heredia, himself a queer Afro-Dominican writer from the Bronx, brings an insider's knowledge to these stories while maintaining the artistic distance necessary for powerful fiction. His stated intention—to push readers "to think and feel something new about the world"—succeeds precisely because he doesn't preach or explain. Instead, he trusts readers to sit with complexity, to recognize themselves in unexpected places, to expand their understanding of what American literature can be.

The author's acknowledgment in Latino USA of "a real absence in the kinds of narratives that represented my own life and the experiences of people around me" speaks to a larger literary hunger. Loca doesn't just fill a gap; it reveals how impoverished our literary landscape has been without these voices. The novel joins a growing movement of writers who refuse to translate themselves for mainstream consumption, who write in multiple languages without apology, who center experiences that have been footnoted for too long.

"For our people, it's always been each other."

What makes Loca essential reading isn't just its representation of underserved communities but its artistic ambition. Heredia's prose moves between lyrical meditation and street-level immediacy, creating a style that feels both literary and accessible. The non-linear structure demands attention but rewards it with deeper understanding of how past and present, Santo Domingo and New York, Spanish and English, all exist simultaneously in the immigrant consciousness.

For Latinx readers, particularly those from the Caribbean diaspora, the novel offers the profound gift of recognition—seeing your specific experience rendered with nuance and respect. For non-Latinx readers, it provides a window into worlds that exist alongside but often invisible to mainstream America. But perhaps most importantly, for queer readers of all backgrounds, Loca insists that queerness isn't separate from cultural identity but interwoven with it in ways that complicate and enrich both.

In our current moment, when both immigrant and LGBTQ communities face renewed attacks, Loca feels urgent without being didactic. It doesn't argue for humanity; it simply presents it, in all its contradictory fullness. Heredia has crafted a novel that respects its readers enough to challenge them, that loves its characters enough to let them fail, that believes in literature's power to expand our capacity for understanding.

This debut announces Heredia as a vital new voice in American literature—one that speaks in multiple languages, that moves between worlds with ease, that refuses to choose between being Dominican or American, queer or Latinx, political or artistic. Loca reminds us that the most powerful stories often come from the intersections, from the places where categories break down and something new—something beautifully undefined—emerges.