By Amaris Castillo
Alejandro Heredia’s debut novel, LOCA, sparks up with a decision. Sal’s résumé is in his bag, but he can’t seem to leave his apartment. He chooses not to go through with a job interview – “his little American dream folded into an envelope.” Even though he could see himself working at a museum, there’s something holding him back. Something that perhaps he doesn’t have the language for, or is afraid to speak about.
So instead, Sal calls his best friend, Charo, and heads over to her apartment. There he finds evidence everywhere of domesticity – folded pants on the couch and the scent of Clorox coming from the bathroom. “A younger Charo would scoff at what Sal sees now,” Heredia writes. “I’m never gonna be like those viejas locked up at home tending to a man, she said to him once.”
Both Charo and Sal feel held back in myriad ways. Charo is a mother in her mid-20s, with a controlling partner. And Sal, a science nerd obsessed with the planets and stars, is haunted by memories from his past life in Santo Domingo. It’s the year 1999, and both are grasping at a new reality for themselves that is different from its current shape.
With both grace and unflinching honesty, Heredia tells an indelible story of young Dominican lives and the ways they intertwine and mesh through time. The author takes us from Santo Domingo to The Bronx and back, and brings readers themes and questions around community, queer spaces, motherhood, and the pain and power of true, unvarnished friendship. Weeks after finishing LOCA, I still think of Sal and Charo and hope for the best for them – a marker of a talented writer who has breathed life into their stories.
LOCA will be published on Feb. 11 from Simon & Schuster. Ahead of the book’s release, Heredia spoke with the Dominican Writers Association about the inspiration behind his debut novel, depicting friendship on the page, and much more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Congratulations on LOCA. How do you feel about it being tangible soon, for readers to hold?
It feels great. I spent a lot of time working on this book in between lunch breaks at work, in the morning, at night, in the weekends. When I started writing this book, I was writing it for me. I didn’t really have a vision of it being in the world. That process happened over time. So it feels really good. It also feels really validating to hear from early readers that they’re connecting to the characters and that they feel invested in them.
In your note to readers, you write about your older cousin, Junior, who died by suicide in 2018. You write that he was like a brother to you. Can you tell us more about him?
I grew up in the Dominican Republic until I was seven. My parents were here in the US for the first seven years of my life, and Junior’s parents were also here in the US. The reason why I say that Junior was more of my brother than my cousin is because we grew up with our grandparents. We lived in the same house. He was my brother. He was there for all the foundational moments. We used to play baseball outside in the barrio with the other kids. He taught me how to ride a bike. He was there for the fist fights with other boys. He was there when we watched our favorite first movies. He was foundational to my life in so many tangible ways.
When we grew up and I came to the US, he was there (in DR) for a couple years longer before he also came to the US. We used to talk on the phone all the time. We used to talk about Sex in the City, and all the dreams that we had about the people we would become when we were queer and free and older out in New York. I love him very, very much. He was an Aries which means that he was very direct, but also had a really warm heart. It always felt to me like he was somebody that I could go to for comfort. When I wanted to let my guard down, when I wanted to just be myself without having to explain myself to anybody, he was one of the people that I could go to.
You mentioned that this sudden loss created an urgency within you to capture the worlds from which you and Junior came. I’ve heard other writers talk about this kind of urgency. Was it difficult to begin writing LOCA?
No, not really. I actually wrote the first draft of the novel in less than a year. I think it might have been like seven months. So it came relatively quickly. But the rest of the five years is the work that begins after you have a draft, which is the revision process. But the beginning of it was not difficult because I was drawing from a world that I knew intimately.
In the novel I’m writing about the 1990s, which is not a world that I lived through. Because I was born in the 1990s, but was not a conscious person. But it was a world of my parents, The Bronx in the 1990s. I grew up hearing so many stories about what it was like for my mom and my dad and my aunts and uncles to be in this new country, in this new place in the 1990s. And so I put into the novel all the information and data that I carried with me for a very long time. As I say in that letter, none of the people in the novel are me or Junior or any of my loved ones. The characters had to be their own people on the page. But the texture of the world – Santo Domingo, The Bronx, the streets, the noise, the food, etc. – all of that comes from the world that I know.
The book is set in 1999, which was such a momentous year. I think the end of any decade always feels bigger in our minds. But I do remember being a kid, and I remember the high anxiety about a potential computer glitch known as the Y2K bug. What made you want to set your novel around this year?
I think it was a few things. The first is that these characters, Sal and Charo, have a very complex relationship to the future. They’re trying to build this future and this life for themselves. And part of what life is asking them to do, and what the novel explores, is the ways in which they have to actually contend with their past in order to move on and build the future that they want for themselves. There’s a lot of anxiety about the future for these characters. And I thought, What better year to blow up the drama of that anxiety about the future than 1999, when people are thinking about the new millennia? First of all, are we going to survive the new millennia because of the Y2K scare?
The biggest part of it was that I was really invested in putting the Dominican world of The Bronx in the 1990s into a novel, because that was the generation that had the experience of my parents. More than my own experience, I wanted to put some of their experiences on the page – to honor that and to give some of it language on the page.
Your main characters are Sal and Charo, best friends who are trying to find their way in New York City. Sal is a science nerd who is obsessed with all things stars and space. Charo is working a supermarket job and is a mother at twenty-five. As you were creating these characters and building their dynamic, how did you first envision Sal and Charo’s relationship, and did it transform by the time you finished writing the book?
From the beginning I knew that I wanted to write a novel about friendship in a way that felt nuanced and complicated, and that resisted some of the tropes that we see sometimes. When we see friendship represented on a screen or in a book, it’s supposed to be this perfect thing. Everybody’s supposed to get along all the time. Friends don’t challenge each other or question each other, etc.
But from the beginning, I wanted Sal and Charo to be people who knew each other so intimately, that they could call each other out on their BS when that needed to happen. They could push each other and challenge each other. From the very first chapter, we see how much they appreciate each other and lean on each other, but also some of the tension that lives between them – because they are people who are invested in each other’s well being. And sometimes tension comes out of that when we really care about people. Charo, especially, is somebody who is always pushing the people that she loves to do better, or to live the life that they want to live.
One thing I loved about LOCA is how you place your characters between the Dominican Republic and New York. The chapters in DR were some of my favorite chapters because of the ways in which you rendered the queer spaces that Sal and his friend, Yadiel, enter into. What was your hope in bringing these spaces to life?
I grew up reading a lot of immigrant stories from a lot of different immigrant writers that I really admire: Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, to name a few. That was always really important, for me to see the ways in which people on the page were maybe split between two countries. But I had never seen a queer representation of that.
So I wanted to ask myself, from the beginning of the novel, What kinds of conditions and what forces push queer people specifically to leave their homes behind, to go somewhere new? To do that, I felt that I needed to be responsible and show the ways in which some queer people live in the Dominican Republic, and Santo Domingo specifically. I really wanted to show that queer people in Santo Domingo now – and before – do have a sense of community. That folks are connected, that folks are showing up for each other, and that there are spaces like Parque Duarte where queer people gather in spite of violence that they might be surrounded by, or the oppression that they might experience on a day-to-day.
Your writing about Dominicans and our culture is so unflinchingly honest. There were many times where your characters encountered homophobia or other prejudices. As a writer, why was it important for you to lay these on the page?
The most important thing for me to do is to remember that I’m writing about human beings, and that means that I have to tell the truth as truthfully as I can tell it. Sometimes there is what is often called intra-communal violence, or people think that because you’re part of a group, that there’s no conflict between or amongst or within that group. And so, if we’re all Dominican, then that means that we all have to get along and we all love each other. That’s not reality. That is a story that is, I think, in response to the white gaze. I am very invested in removing the white gaze from my work, so that I’m writing about my people with rigor and with intention, and giving them the privilege of humanity – which means that they’re flawed, they fuck up, they hurt the people that they love. That, to me, feels more real than pretending that we’re this cultural group where we all get along and we’re all dancing and Kumbaya-ing.
In your book you touch on motherhood. As I read your novel, I felt so many questions spring up. They include what makes a good mother, and whether mothers all have a longing to leave, embedded deep inside of them. What message were you hoping to send with these questions about motherhood specifically?
Obviously I’m not a mother, so I’m writing across difference. But that question in Charo’s story, in that regard, came out of questions that I had about the women in my life – my mother, my aunts, friends, etc., who really, I think, struggled with motherhood but didn’t have the language for that struggle. From the outside, it seemed to me that maybe they felt like they couldn’t complain about how difficult motherhood was because that’s “just what they were supposed to do.” That was just their responsibility, and so there was no questioning. You’re kind of just going on automatic.
When I was growing up, I remember my mom sometimes saying que se quería degaritar. She just wanted to leave. She wanted to grab her shit and just go sometimes, because she felt so overwhelmed. Hearing that from her and from other people around me made me curious about this tension that exists for a lot of the mothers between wanting to be responsible and present for your children, for your partner, for the people in your life, versus also wanting to be seen as a human being, as a person who has needs, who has desires, who has dreams, who maybe wants to go out and feel free every once in a while. Or not feel like they’re entirely defined by their domestic responsibilities.
Another thing that struck me is how you write about loneliness. Charo, for example, lives in The Bronx in what can be described as a Dominican village, but still feels alone. It could be that she feels restricted by motherhood and her domestic life. Can you talk to us about your approach to this theme of feeling isolated even among people who hail from the same country as you?
Thank you so much for that question, because that is one of the things that was most exciting for me to write; the ways in which the communities that we are supposed to belong to sometimes make us feel unseen, or make us feel alone, or make us feel like we’re not enough.
When my parents and their generation arrived in The Bronx, there was already a community of Dominicans around. So you could go to a Dominican restaurant, a supermarket, etc., etc. There was the idea – and it’s a beautiful idea – of going from one country to the next and arriving in a community that will receive you in open arms. That is an incredible resource to have, right? And I try to depict that in the novel.
At the same time, I wanted to show the ways in which the same expectations from the old country, when carried out into the new community in diaspora, can make a person feel estranged from their own desires. Pretty early on in the novel, Charo is walking around her neighborhood and she constantly has to encounter people who are her parents’ friends from DR. They’re asking her, ‘How’s the baby? How’s this? How’s that?’ They are reaffirming and reestablishing this model of how to be an immigrant young woman in this context. And what Charo wants most of all is to be her own person. She wants to be her own self outside of these expectations that are designated for her. I wanted to show the ways in which a Dominican village is affirming and a place of safety, but also a place to complicate that. There are drawbacks to being in community with people who are like you.
Right. It’s like DR 2.0, where she was living.
Yes. Exactly. And for somebody who is leaving their country and being like, ‘I want to go somewhere else so I can leave my mom behind, so I can leave and live entirely unlike I thought I would be,’ to then going to a place and being met with the exact same expectations can feel very suffocating.
What do you hope readers take away from LOCA?
First and foremost, I want to push people to think and feel more rigorously about friendship. I want to push people to think about the kinds of responsibilities that we have for and to each other. Sometimes when we talk about the conditions of our lives as people of color, as queer people, etc., I think we forfeit some of our own agency. I want to impart what Don Julio tells Sal towards the end of the novel, which is that you can always – no matter what’s happening, no matter what societal whatever you are experiencing – you can always be better to the people that you love. You can always show up better. You can always show up differently in spite of the challenges that you are facing in your life.
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Visit our BookShop to preorder a copy of LOCA.
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About the Author: Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. LOCA is his debut novel.
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Amaris Castillo is a journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Lowell Sun, the Bradenton Herald, Remezcla, Latina Magazine, Parents Latina Magazine, and elsewhere. Her creative writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms be Like..., and most recently in Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, "El Don," was a finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. Amaris lives in Florida with her family. You can follow her work at amariscastillo.com.
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