Chasing Dreams and Friendship in 'Loca' (Debut Day)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Chasing Dreams and Friendship in 'Loca' (Debut Day)

Podcast Title: All Of It
Host: Alison Stewart
Episode Title: Chasing Dreams and Friendship in 'Loca' (Debut Day)
Release Date: February 27, 2025
Guest: Alejandro Herrera, Author of Loca

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Introduction

In the debut episode of All Of It, hosted by Alison Stewart, Alejandro Herrera dives deep into his new novel, Loca. This episode explores the intricate lives of two friends navigating their new lives in the Bronx after emigrating from the Dominican Republic in 1999. Through a candid conversation, Herrera shares insights into his characters, the cultural backdrop of the novel, and his personal inspirations.

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Overview of Loca

Loca follows Sal and Charo, two Dominican friends striving to achieve their American dreams amidst the challenges of immigrant life and societal marginalization in the Bronx.

• Sal: A passionate science enthusiast aiming for a job at a museum while grappling with his identity as a gay man of color.
• Charo: A new mother trapped in a controlling relationship, yearning for autonomy beyond motherhood and domestic responsibilities.

The novel captures the tension, love, and confusion inherent in their transnational experiences, enriching the narrative with authentic cultural context.

Notable Quote:
"Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong..." – Cristina De Rossi, quoted by the host.

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Author’s Background and Inspiration

Alejandro Herrera reflects on his personal journey as an immigrant, arriving in the United States at seven years old. His mother's stories about life in the Bronx during the 90s heavily influenced the novel’s setting and characters.

Quotes:

• Alejandro Herrera [02:08]: "God, I remember learning English and how fun and challenging that was. And I remember just experiencing a whole new country at 7 years old."
• Alejandro Herrera [02:25]: "I grew up hearing stories from my mother about what it was like to come to the United States, to the Bronx, specifically in the 90s."

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Character Experiences and Immigrant Challenges

Herrera delves into the distinct motivations behind Sal and Charo’s move to New York. Sal's departure is driven by personal trauma within his queer community in the Dominican Republic, while Charo seeks economic opportunities to support her family.

Key Discussions:

• Unmet Expectations in New York:
  Charo arrives with dreams of empowerment but finds herself constrained in a controlling relationship.
  Alejandro Herrera [03:43]: "Chado especially came to New York with so many dreams and so many desires about being a woman of the world... she feels a little bit stuck in the domestic world."

• Community and Belonging:
  Both characters strive to find their place within the LGBTQ and immigrant communities, highlighting the importance of friendship and support systems.
  Alejandro Herrera [04:21]: "She finds a sense of belonging in a group of LGBTQ friends in New York... that propels her to think critically about the things she enjoys and those that feel limiting."

Notable Quote:
"It's all about endurance. It takes a long time, but so much of writing is just about showing up on the page every day or as often as you need to." – Alejandro Herrera [13:18]

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Cultural Representation and Language

Herrera emphasizes the pervasive presence of Dominican culture in Loca, striving to authentically represent the community's influence on New York City. The deliberate choice to present Spanish and Spanglish without italics underscores their integral role in the characters' lives.

Highlights:

• Dominican Community in the 90s Bronx:
  An established Dominican village provides a cultural haven, yet characters still face societal challenges.

• Language as Identity:
  Spanish is portrayed as a natural and central component of the characters' identities.
  Alejandro Herrera [09:31]: "I didn't want to italicize that because it's not peripheral and it's not a marginal thing for these characters. It's how they speak and how they move around the world."

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Themes of Homophobia and Safe Havens

Loca explores the complexities of finding safe spaces for LGBTQ individuals within immigrant communities. Sal’s journey reflects the dual struggle of embracing his identity while contending with pervasive homophobia.

Discussion Points:

• Sal’s Search for Safety:
  Believing New York would be a haven, Sal discovers that homophobia exists in varied forms, complicating his sense of security.
  Alejandro Herrera [10:01]: "I think Sal came to New York thinking that it would be a gay safe haven... but what he ends up finding is that homophobia and transphobia exist everywhere in very different ways."

• Interpersonal Tensions:
  Relationships reveal underlying prejudices, as seen in Charo’s evolving understanding of Sal’s identity and Robert’s inadvertent homophobia.
  Alejandro Herrera [11:24]: "Robert is a perfect example of that [unintentional homophobia]."

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Impact of Gentrification

Herrera expresses concern over the changing landscape of the Bronx, aiming to capture a snapshot of a community facing economic pressures and cultural shifts.

Key Insight:
"With the novel, I wanted to just show that once upon a time, these folks were here and they were thriving, and there were moments of difficulty and there were moments of beauty." – Alejandro Herrera [12:34]

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Writing Process and Future Works

Alejandro Herrera discusses the seven-year journey to complete Loca, highlighting the iterative process of developing characters and narrative depth. He offers encouragement to aspiring novelists, emphasizing persistence.

Quotes:

• On Writing Duration:
  Alejandro Herrera [11:59]: "Seven years."

• Advice to New Novelists:
  Alejandro Herrera [13:18]: "It's all about endurance."

He confirms plans to continue writing, indicating future literary projects.

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Upcoming Events

Alejandro Herrera is set to participate in a release event with poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo on March 6th at the Alessandro Dominicana Cultural Center, celebrating the launch of Loca.

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Conclusion

In this insightful episode, Alejandro Herrera offers a profound exploration of immigrant life, cultural identity, and personal aspirations through his debut novel Loca. Alison Stewart skillfully navigates the conversation, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the novel's themes and the cultural tapestry of the Bronx in the 1990s.

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Notable Contributors:

• Alison Stewart: Host
• Alejandro Herrera: Author of Loca
• Cristina De Rossi: Anthropologist, quoted in the podcast
• Ira Flatow: Mentioned in the closing segment

Timestamps Referenced:

• [00:36] Introduction to Loca
• [02:00] Author’s background
• [02:08] Childhood memories
• [03:43] Charo’s experiences
• [04:21] Community and belonging
• [09:31] Language decisions
• [10:01] Homophobia in New York
• [11:18] Relationship tensions
• [12:34] Gentrification concerns
• [13:18] Writing advice

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Loca is available now, offering a rich narrative that intertwines personal and cultural struggles, making it a significant addition to contemporary literary fiction.

Transcript

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[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're continuing our debut day conversations with a new novel about two friends, Sal and Charo, who are searching for their version of the American dream after leaving the Dominican Republic. It's titled Loca. The novel is set in 1999 in the Bronx. Sal is passionate about science and hopes to secure a job at a museum while also navigating the city as a gay 20 something year old man of color. Char was a new mother in a controlling relationship looking for a life outside of taking care of her daughter and managing her husband's emotions. And in the backdrop is the life they left behind in Santo Domingo and their new home in the Bronx, where members of both the immigrant and the LGBTQ community are forced to live life on the margins of society while facing violent threats against them. A review in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette states the tension, love, curiosity and sometimes downright confusion within Loca reads as real and gives a pulsing, vibing, transnational, transcultural setting. Loca is out now. Author Alejandro Herrera joins us today to discuss. He has an upcoming release event with poet and author Elizabeth acevedo next Thursday, March 6th from 7 to 8pm at the Alessandro Dominicana Cultural center at 530 W. 166th St. Alejandro, welcome to the studio.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Thank you for having me.

[Alison Stewart]

You, your family came to the United States when you were just seven years old, is that right?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yes, that's right.

[Alison Stewart]

What do you remember?

[Alejandro Herrera]

God, I remember learning English and how fun and challenging that was. And I remember just experiencing a whole new country at 7 years old.

[Alison Stewart]

What aspects of your own family's story helped inspire this novel?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah, I mean, I grew up hearing stories from my mother about what it was like to come to the United States, to the Bronx, specifically in the 90s. All the apartment buildings that she lived in, all the supermarkets that she worked at. And I weaved some of those stories into the novel.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah. What did you want to have Sal.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

And Charo experience that maybe your family.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Experienced some of the challenges of what it's like to leave a home behind to start your life over.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Yeah. Why did Sal and Chara move to New York in the first place.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. So they move for different reasons. Sal is running away from some trauma that he experiences in the Dominican Republic. He grows up around a queer group of friends, and something happens that I won't spoil that pushes him to leave. And Charo is almost like the breadwinner of her family, and her family propels her to leave the Dominican Republic for economic opportunity.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

What did they experience versus what did they expect to experience in New York?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. I think Chado especially came to New York with so many dreams and so many desires about being a woman of the world. And instead, when she finds herself five years into being in the U.S. she finds herself as a young mother being partnered with a controlling man. She feels a little bit stuck in the domestic world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

She wasn't even so sure that she wanted to be a mom.

[Alejandro Herrera]

That's right. That's right.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

That was a big part of it. And he said, oh, I got you, and then he didn't. Yeah. Were they able to find a community when they got here?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yes. I think throughout the novel, part of the process that they're going through is opening themselves up to the idea of friendship, especially Charo. She finds a sense of belonging in a group of LGBTQ friends in New York, and that is the thing that propels her to think critically about the things about her domestic life that she enjoys and the parts that feel very limiting.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm speaking with Alejandro Herrera. His new novel is called Loca. It's a novel that's in search of two friends that follows two friends, Sal and Char, searching for their version of the American dream. You're going to read a section of the novel for us. Can you set it up for us?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yes. So all you need to know about this section is that Sal is talking to his partner Vance, about who has it harder, whether it's this group or that group. And so he goes on to think about what it means to be an immigrant in the U.S. sal wants it to be simple, like it was for a long time. This story he's told himself about his struggling immigrant life. 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. Then living in this new place, feeling torn in half of two places, but somehow from neither at once? Being an immigrant in this country is hard enough, but being a gay immigrant, he never gave that much thought until he got fired from his last job. Now all the stories are confused in his head. It's not enough to consider himself an immigrant. Sal also has to think about the specificity of being Dominican and how his story is different from that of Mexicans and Central Americans, of being Moreno, and how that affects his relationship to Vance and other black Americans, of coming from an island of loving men the way he does. The stories get denser, more complicated. Nothing makes sense like it was promised to him by his mother, who always repeated the same simple story over and over again. All you have to do is work hard, and you'll find your place.

[Alison Stewart]

That was Alejandro Herrera reading from his book loca. This was the 1990s, and that was a very specific time for people coming to this country from places like the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, even Cuba. Would you explain to folks why that was such a special time?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. I mean, at that point in the 1990s, when my parents came to this country, there was already what I call the Dominican village in the Bronx. It was an established community so that one could enter space and not have to really leave for any reason. There were supermarkets and restaurants and the post office. Everywhere you went, there was a Dominican person working or to interact with.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

So in the novel, you set a scene at a nightclub that Sal and Charo could visit called the shade room. They played Latin music once a month. Why was one night out so important to these two?

[Alejandro Herrera]

I think that they are so stuck trying to live the lives that they think that they should be living. And I find that so many of us are sort of on that treadmill of just going and going and going, Working our jobs and not really thinking about making a lot of sense of our lives. But this break for them going out to dance just expands their world and pushes them to reconsider and recontextualize whether they're living the kind of lives that they want to live because they're both.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Immigrants from the Dominican Republic. What is their relationship to their former home?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. Yeah. I think for them, it's a little bit different for each one. Sal doesn't want to think about the Dominican Republic. He's left it behind, and he doesn't want to look back. And I think Chado maybe has a little bit more longing for home, but she's confused about where she fits in in the Bronx.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Where does New York Dominican culture show up in the book?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Oh, God, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And, you know, it's such a large part of New York City culture, and it's not often one that's represented in literary fiction. And so I wanted to center these communities and these waves of migration that have been here in the city for a long time now.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

What's an example of if. You know. You know in the book?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. So I grew up hearing this phrase from my mother. When she would get really, really tired, she would say, me void carita, which means, I'm gonna hit the streets. I'm out of here. I'm tired. And I think some of the characters feel that. Say that and feel that in the novel that they're so overwhelmed by the expectations of their daily lives that they just want to run away.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

I noticed, and I think it's great that. That the Spanish isn't italicized in the book. Tell us about that decision.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. I mean, Spanish and Spanglish both are a part of the world of these characters. And I didn't want to italicize that because it's not peripheral and it's not a marginal thing for these characters. It's how they speak and how they move around the world.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Sal is a gay man in the 90s in New York. I was here. How much freedom does he feel?

[Alejandro Herrera]

I think Sal came to New York thinking that it would be a gay safe haven because he has very difficult experiences in the Caribbean. But what he ends up finding is that homophobia and transphobia exist everywhere in very different ways. And so a lot of what this. What I'm trying to do in this novel is that I'm trying to show the ways in which New York and the Bronx specifically, is a safe haven, but how it's also incredibly alienating sometimes for these characters that have so many dreams that the Bronx and New York might never actually meet.

[Alison Stewart]

He does have a boyfriend, Vance, though. Tell us about Vance.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Vance is great. Vance is incredibly supportive and always pushing Sal to take action in his life. I think Sal sometimes has a hard time. At the beginning of the novel, he's about to go to an interview, and he freezes. He doesn't go. And so his partner is sort of there to say, hey, like, I think you can apply to this thing, or you can go to this job, or you can follow through.

[Alison Stewart]

It's interesting, though, because Charo's also his partner.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yes.

[Alison Stewart]

And her partner Robert. You know, he can be a little homophobic.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yes.

[Alison Stewart]

What are. How did you put that in the book? How did you make that tension work in the book?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Yeah. I mean, part of what I was trying to show is that homophobia is. Sometimes it's like it's in the air. People don't really think about being homophobic or are even being intentionally homophobic. They're just receiving this language from the larger culture and enacting it when they're frustrated or when they're angry. Robert is a perfect example of that. But also even Charo, when she first meets Sal, she has all these ideas about what gay men are like and are not like, and she has to grow and learn.

[Alison Stewart]

Locus, your debut novel, how long did.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

It take you to complete it?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Seven years.

[Alison Stewart]

Seven years.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

What was the original story?

[Alejandro Herrera]

I think a lot of the first draft made it onto what this novel is now, but there was a lot of chatto that wasn't in the novel at the beginning, and I had to sort of flesh out her character and give her more breadth on the page.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Obviously, this area has gentrified in the past. Yes, ten years, two years. Who knows? When you think about gentrification and the Bronx, what are you thinking about?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Part of what I was trying to do with this book was to freeze in amber or in language, this community. It makes me sad to see the ways in which the Bronx is changing. For so long, it's been a safe haven for working class communities, for immigrant communities, and increasingly, people are being priced out of these spaces. So with the novel, I wanted to just show that once upon a time, these folks were here and they were thriving, and there were moments of difficulty and there were moments of beauty.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

What advice would you give to a new novelist, somebody who's got a novel in them?

[Alejandro Herrera]

It's all about endurance.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Endurance.

[Alejandro Herrera]

It's all about endurance. It takes a long time, but so much of writing is just about showing up on the page every day or as often as you need to.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Do you plan to write another novel?

[Alejandro Herrera]

Oh, yeah. 100%.

[Unnamed Interviewer]

Already, yes. All right, we look forward to that. My guest has been Alejandro Jerere. The name of his novel is Loga. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Alejandro Herrera]

Thank you for having me.

[Ira Flatow]

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.