On friendship, pride and belonging with Alejandro Heredia
By hola | Published | No Comments
It has been one year since Alejandro Heredia introduced the world to “Loca.” This spellbinding debut about intersectionality, enduring friendship and found family set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, was shortlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It follows two Afro-Caribbean friends, Sal and Charo, as they journey beyond the confined expectations of their home country in the Dominican Republic and begin new lives in New York City.
Born out of personal grief and a desire to write about the “Dominican village” of his New York City childhood, Heredia’s work challenges the traditional immigrant narrative by weaving together queer identity and the nuanced tensions of the African diaspora. “Loca” offers an honest look at the disillusionment of the “American Dream” and the resilience of the queer community.
To celebrate the first anniversary of its release, we sat down with Alejandro to discuss his novel, his creative process and the lessons he learned from writing “Loca.”
What’s the origin story of Loca? How did this novel come about?
There’s quite a few reasons why I started writing the book. One of them was that I had a personal loss in my life, and I was going through a very difficult period of depression and grief. There was a sort of urgency burning within me to capture with language the world that I came from, particularly the story of the queer, Dominican, and Bronx bubbles in which I grew up. I really wanted to capture that and put it into a novel because I had never seen literary fiction or much storytelling focusing on queer Dominican people. I think many of us write for that reason. And then on the other side of that, I also really wanted to write about my parents’ generation of immigrants, people who came to the Bronx in the 1990s from the Dominican Republic, faced a lot of challenges being new immigrants, but also made what I call now the “Dominican village,” which is this enclave of Dominican people uptown in Washington Heights and in the Bronx in New York City.
Friendship is a central theme throughout Loca. Why was it important for you to explore belonging through queer, Afro-Caribbean community?
I wanted to write about the Bronx as authentically and as clearly as possible. And to do that, it was important for me to write this Black, diasporic narrative in which I’m writing about folks from the different corners of the diaspora, sharing space — parks, classrooms, apartment buildings — and the kinds of beautiful but also complicated things that come from that.
There’s a conversation between Sal and his partner, Vance, who is Black American. Sal has sort of told himself for a long time that as an immigrant, he has it worse off, because when he immigrated, he had to start over. Vance is pushing back and saying, “You can’t really compare, or it’s not fair to compare Black people’s experiences from different places. We all have it rough in different ways, and it’s important to understand those differences.” I wanted to highlight some of the existing diasporic tensions that I grew up hearing about and participating in with friends and family members.
I started this novel so long ago. I was 24 years old, which is very young to be writing a novel. And I think my ideas of community have evolved and changed through writing the book and beyond. At some point while writing the book, it became really important to me to make sure that I was writing rigorously about friendship because I had this chip on my shoulder that I didn’t think that friendship was taken very seriously in the wider culture.
But it was the truth of my own life and the truth of many people that I knew, especially queer people, that friendship is a thing that has sustained so many of us, and it is friendship that we go to when we want a sense of belonging in the world, when we want to feel a sense of home.
Throughout the novel, we get some pretty deeply moving backstory chapters that shape how we understand each character. Why did you choose to structure the book this way?
Creatively, for me, structure is always the most difficult thing to try to capture. I always knew the story was not going to be linear, which is to say that at the beginning, you don’t really know what’s going on. You don’t know what it is that’s plaguing Sal and stopping him from living the kind of life he wants.
The novel opens with Sal getting ready to go to an interview for his dream job. And on the very first page, he freezes, and he doesn’t go. Instead, he visits Charo, his best friend, and they’re having a conversation where both characters are talking around something that is unclear to the reader. I wanted the reader to feel that tension and sense that something important is being avoided without knowing exactly what it is, because I knew that Sal was looking away from himself and trying to build a life while ignoring his past.
It was really important for me to allow Sal to be opaque while giving the reader more information slowly throughout the story, as Sal is sort of pushed throughout the book to contend with what he has left behind in Santo Domingo and what he has lost. It was really challenging to write within that structure, and I know from reader responses it can be challenging to go back and forth between the timelines, but I found it to be quite fruitful, because that is often how many of us live our lives, especially people who are traumatized and who are trying to build a life on top of rubble, on top of loss, on top of pain.
New York City feels like a character in the book, but not a good one. What were you hoping to show readers about the city and the “American Dream” experience there?
New York was supposed to be the promised land for my parents’ generation of immigrants in the 80s and 90s in the Dominican Republic. There were commercials on TV that would literally sell New York and talk about all the jobs that there were in the city, all the opportunities. And so entire generations of Dominicans left their homes, left good jobs, left families behind to go to New York for better opportunities, and they did not find that when they got here. And for a lot of the people that I know, especially from my parents’ generation, New York City has not been a city of promise. It has been a city of disillusionment. I just had to write that truth against the narrative that New York City is the best city in the world. As much as I love the city that I grew up in and where I’m from, it has crushed a lot of dreams, and it has crushed a lot of souls. I saw a lot of those folks growing up doing their best and still not being able to succeed, because the jobs weren’t there, or because of racism, or because it’s really cold outside, and nobody wants to be in the freezing cold for seven months out of the year.
(photo by Alejandro Heredia)
As a writer, I’m always trying to figure out how to challenge myself and how to unearth deep-seated prejudices. One deep-seated prejudice that I had when I first started writing this book was that life in the Dominican Republic for queer people was terrible, and life for queer people in New York was amazing. And I think that is a narrative a lot of queer immigrants latch onto. This isn’t to suggest that queer life in the DR is a walk in the park, but I do not think it is an objective truth that New York is better for queer people than Santo Domingo.
I’ve been to Santo Domingo as an adult and have seen the beautiful things that queer Dominicans are creating on the island, in terms of community, art, opportunity and its astounding work in resistance to a lot of disenfranchisement. So I wanted to challenge this narrative that New York is a queer safe haven for everybody, and that it’s better than the places that we come from without hating on New York too much. I do think it’s a New York novel, and I’m very proud of being from the Bronx. So much of this project was about showing my city in a complex way and writing about it truthfully.
This is your debut novel, and it has been a year since it has been published. What did this book teach you?
It took me seven years from the beginning to the end to write this book, and it taught me so much about writing fiction: how to develop a character, how to write a setting, and how to hold an entire world in your mind. That’s often the most challenging part about being a novelist. I learned that not only do I have the capacity for that, but that’s kind of how my brain works. I love the imaginative process of writing. People are often asking, “Who are you in the book?” And I tell people that none of these characters are me. Part of the joy I get from writing is imagining people who are not me. Being in the mind of the other and trying to push myself to feel and think and understand the world as they do, especially when it is different from my own way of thinking.
The paperback version of Loca is set to release on February 10.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
– Written by Adrian Gaston Garcia
– Copy edited by Kami Waller
Adrian Gaston Garcia is a queer Latine storyteller whose mission is to share narratives that build community. His work is a love letter to his younger self and a shout-out to all the queer brown boys who choose joy as their form of resistance. He co-hosts Los Bookis Podcast and is the founder of Tintas DC.
Recent Stories
