New York-based writer Alejandro Heredia didn’t mean to write a critique of his hometown, but that’s kind of how it turned out. His debut novel Loca, coming out in February, follows two characters in The Bronx’s Dominican neighborhood through their search for acceptance, belonging, and ultimately a place to call home. Within the friends’ exploration of the vibrant LGBTQ scene of late-’90s New York, Heredia embeds a simultaneous study of community and identity — complicating the pigeonholes people are often assigned. Spending the 2024-25 academic year in Las Vegas as a UNLV Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow, the author talked with Desert Companion about his work.
This is your first time in Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert. Your writing suggests that you really have an eye for the deep magic of a new place. What are you finding here?
I am finding lots of quiet time to write, which is really incredible to find anywhere in any big city. But I'm also finding really amazing folks that know so much about food and art and performance and literature, and that's been really, really rewarding.
Neighborhood is an essential part of your work for your fellowship. You live in the Lucy, which is connected to the Beverly Theater in downtown Las Vegas. Have you explored some other neighborhoods in Las Vegas yet?
I've been in the Arts District, and that's been really nice. It kind of feels like home a little bit, with the different shops and businesses that are there. And that's been a lot of fun to just walk around, get some coffee, grab food, meet up with friends.
Your partner and family are still back home in New York. How has that experience been for you?
It's been challenging. I think that we romanticize what it's like to move somewhere new and kind of start over. So, it's been challenging in that way, because I've sort of had to build a new community here in Las Vegas. But it's also been incredibly rewarding. I tell people that being a writer is an incredibly boring job, because I just have to be home almost every single day, just reading and writing and making sure that I'm paying attention to my habits and my (writing) practice. And so because of the isolation, there are pros and cons. The con is that I miss my folks, I miss my partner, I miss my family. But the great pro is that I get to spend so much time in my mind. I get to spend so much time thinking creatively and critically about my work and the kinds of things that I want to create.
I find that it's funny. I did not mean to write such an anti-New York novel, but it's kind of what ended up happening. A lot of these characters feel very alone, even when they're surrounded by their supposed community, right? Charo is living in what I call, in my own work, ‘The Dominican Village.’ She's in the Bronx. She's surrounded by Dominican people. She's surrounded by some family, friends that she meets in the street at random times, but she still feels incredibly alone within the confines of her domestic life. And so part of what I was trying to explore is the ways in which we feel like we don't belong, even in the communities that are supposed to be the places where we belong ...
Besides neighborhood, another key aspect of your writing, at least in your novel Loca, is friendship. Where does this come from? How does friendship inform story for you?
I think in my own personal life, friendship has been the place that has offered me a home when identity groups or family or other sorts of communities have fallen short, and so I take friendship very seriously. I understand that in our contemporary culture — and I think for probably most of history and many cultures — we don't take friendship as seriously. We are meant to find a life partner. We're meant to start a family, and that is supposed to be the nucleus of our lives. And part of what I'm trying to insist on through this novel is that friendship is just as important as the family that is given to us when we're born and the family that we might even choose when we get married and find a partner and have children, etc. For the novel, friendship is a thing that ends up not only being a safe haven, but also challenging the characters in the ways that they need to be challenged to be better versions of themselves. I don't think that friendship is always about feeling comfortable or about going out and having fun. Although those are great things and great components of friendship, I think friendship can be the thing that pushes us to be our best selves.
You have a fascination with the 1990s and this story is set in 1999 — a truly auspicious year. You also bring up Y2K. Tell me about that preoccupation with the 90s.
The question around the 90s began because I was curious about my parents’ generation of immigrants. I sort of understood my own experience to a certain extent, but I was curious about what it might have been like to go to New York in the 90s, in a time before the cell phone, before FaceTime, before all the technological advances that have made it easier to have long distance relationships. For my mother to be able to call home in 1995 she would have had to buy a $2 or $5 calling card that sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. Or she would have to write a letter back home. Technology has made long distance relationships — all kinds of long distance relationships — a lot easier. And so I wanted to, just on a basic level, explore my parents’ generation of immigrants. But I also wanted to take the cell phone out of the novel and the conflict to try to explore how these folks are building community and building friendship at a time that is not now.
You research your stories in part by interviewing people. Did you do a lot of this for Loca, or were these characters that you kind of knew that were already in your head?
I think was a combination. I definitely interviewed: I interviewed my mother, my father, my stepmother, my stepfather, all of the people that were part of the generation that I'm writing about. I spoke to these folks and asked them questions about their experiences. That is a really critical component of my writing process, to talk to people who might have experienced the things that I'm writing about, or to read about the experiences of people who might have had those experiences.
But I do think that at a certain point I do need to take a step back from the research, because I am a fiction writer. I'm a novelist at the end of the day, and so I need to invent. And if I'm drawing the characters only from my research, only from my conversations, then they're too close to people who are alive, who I know, and I always want to be mindful and respectful of the people that I interview, the people who I speak to.
Your writing strikes a balance between being relatable, but also very complex and quite lyrical. Do you see your voice that way too?
I feel very strongly about writing fiction that feels accessible and that feels challenging at the same time. And actually, to me, on a craft level, that is the most difficult thing to do. I could write a novel with a very different vernacular, with a very different structure that alienates the reader more. But I wanted to write characters, and I wanted to write a structure that felt inviting, and at the same time, write a novel that is structured in a way that lends itself to multiple readings. I hope that when people pick up this novel and read it the first time, that they'll be curious about what it might feel like to read it again and understand how Sal is withholding or suppressing his own emotions, and how Charo is dealing with the life that she's left behind and the challenges that she's had to overcome.
The characters in this story experience an enormous amount of trauma. Is it too reductive to say that the journey that some of them are going on throughout the book, is really a way of processing or maybe healing from this trauma?
I don't think it's reductive. They are, in some ways, facing themselves and facing each other in order to heal some really terrible things that have happened to them. But funny enough, when I was writing it and as I was revising, I couldn't use the word trauma. And it's not because I was being evasive about the characters’ experiences. Sometimes I'm afraid of the language of psychology reducing the kinds of experiences that I'm talking about — I don't want (it) to reduce and minimize the experiences of the characters. I want them to feel and think as freely as I can, so I don't shy away from talking about the ways in in which these characters are responding to exploring and healing from their trauma. But from a creative standpoint, I needed to take all of that language of psychology out so that I could get as specific as possible.
There are people in this novel, for example, who today we might call trans or non-binary, and language in the late 90s, or even in the early 90s when some of the scenes are taking place in the novel, this language doesn't exist, especially in the Dominican Republic. It's a very different vernacular, and so I wanted to be as realistic and as honest and true to that as possible.
There are a number of scenes in the book where one character educates another about the subtleties of culture and identity. What was your intention with those?
Part of my intention was to show that language is very complex, and language is ever changing, and the words that we use now for some of our identities, are not some of the words that we're going to be using in five or 10 years. And so we should be really intentional about the language that we use, and at the same time, we should offer ourselves and each other grace, because language should be something that is malleable and that is changing, not something that is fixed. And I feel that same way about identity. Identity is something that, to me, is porous, something that is changing, something that is evolving as I grow and change and see the world. I don't believe in this idea that we arrive at an identity and then that is it. I think that is reductive of our own experiences in the world. And I'm in the business of liberation. I'm in the business of trying to liberate myself and trying to liberate others to think and feel as deeply as we can.
