Alejandro Heredia’s Poetics of Reclamation

Loca, the début novel by Alejandro Heredia, is not only a deeply satisfying read but a timely book, one that affords its queer and immigrant characters the widest range of possibilities at every turn in a scintillating plot.

Heredia was born in Santo Domingo and later raised in the Bronx, so it is no surprise that both locales are central to this story. We feel less that the novel is laboring across space and time than that such disparate settings—island life in the Dominican Republic; city hustle in New York; childhood and adulthood—are all stitched to the same fabric. Set during the 1990s, Loca does not shy away from the worst of the Bronx of that era: “Dangerous, with its history of violence, its rampant fires and addiction epidemics” (310). But, too, women meet at hair salons to gossip; late-night chats on the fire escape meet “the golden sunrise” (20); and for characters inclined to be the flâneur, there’s the simple pleasure of churros bought on evening walks. Neither is Santo Domingo, with its streets of historied architecture, any one thing. Musicians own their corner of the city. Queer kids seek out rich gringos. Terror lurks in the pitch dark of power outages. 

Queer writers attuned to the current political discourse are telling stories responsive to the demand that fiction depict more diversity. Consequently, Loca presents us with a rich cast of characters, rendered with texture and variance. There is a bisexual transplant from California; a gay community organizer trying to balance the demands of his job with caring for a sickly aunt; and a trans woman from small-town Pennsylvania who desperately wants to sing jazz. But it is the friendship of Salvador and his best friend Charo that anchors this novel. With this archetype—that of the straight woman who befriends a gay man—it is not uncommon to sniff out the cheapening effect of tokenism. What Heredia presents us with, however, is genuine. Of friendship that outlasts childhood, he describes it as “keeping to a shared script, sticking to one tone” (107). 

These two characters are after the same thing: freedom. For Salvador, freedom to move on from the past, darkened by loss and abandonment. For Charo, a refusal to be constrained by the expectations of womanhood. Sal is nerdy, obsessed with astronomy. There are moments in the novel when he is maddeningly passive, moving from one dead-end job to the next, so it takes him a while to get his life together. Meanwhile, Charo struggles in her long-term relationship and as a new mother. Among Sal’s cohort of queer friends, she begins to experience a newfound sense of freedom. As youths back in the Dominican Republic, Sal and Charo are part of a trio; the missing piece is their eccentric classmate Yadiel, who—brash, full of daring—speaks his dreams to the air and fights off a group of kids who threaten and bully Sal. He casually recites lines of poetry and chases after an American diplomat who can give “extravagant gifts, a chauffeur, and a car that smells clean with power” (89). 

Of the many poets that Yadiel frequently reads, his favorite is Aída Cartagena Portalatín, the most prominent woman to figure in La Poesía Sorprendida, a literary movement with an especially prolific output under the Rafael Trujillo regime. Cartagena Portalatín, like her peers, knew that writing in a coded language was necessary to evade censorship under the regime. The sorprendistas, as they were called, also believed that poems with a certain surprising quality served as a means of nurturing the nation’s collective imagination. 

So often, out of necessity, queer life is spoken of in the stiff language of theoretical defense. In Loca, that siphoned poetry is restored to great effect. We breeze through Heredia’s sentences, shimmering with clarity and care. Written in present tense, there’s an immediacy to Heredia’s lucid prose. We are right there with them in Sal’s bedroom, getting ready for gay parties at La Zona Colonial. We smell the joyous rebellion of Yadiel trying on dresses and sapphire earrings. Other times, we can taste Sal’s excitement, after his face is made-up and transformed, now “round with youth” (28). Meanwhile, Charo is “thrilled that she’s been given permission to be a proper spectator” (86).

After they graduate high school, Yadiel is the one left behind as Sal and Charo make their way to New York. Some readers might assume that Sal’s expectations of New York City are mostly shaped by a longing to be in spaces such as Greenwich Village, which, during the period that the novel is set in, is so central to the city’s image as a haven for queerness. But Sal’s New York is not the New York of Greenwich Village. In A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, the late Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel describes feeling out of place at Stonewall Inn during his 1989 visit to New York City for Pride because the majority of the gay men gathered there are White; nevertheless, he writes, “New York City has other nooks and crannies where you won’t feel strange—other, more contaminated places, where the Latina soul salsas its territorial song.”¹  

Like Lemebel, the characters in Loca feel they do not belong in spaces dominated by Whiteness. They, too, find refuge in “contaminated places,” one of which is the Shade Room, a gay club hosting monthly parties, where Sal meets and begins to fall in love with Vance, an African American. Sal is mesmerized by the monosyllable of Vance’s name: “Its smooth, velvety start. Then the sizzle at its end, like the quiet hiss of fire” (24). And their romance is laced with taunting humor. The very next day, after Vance gets schooled for referring to Latinos as “Spanish,” Vance answers Sal’s call: “‘Ah yes! The I’m-not-Spanish-I’m-Dominican guy’” (23). The richly detailed account of their relationship is purposeful. Many of these scenes, occurring in the Shade Room, allow Heredia to convey the significance of spaces where minorities can shed self-censorship and invisibility, necessarily adopted to navigate the prejudiced maze of wider society. At the heart of this budding romance is the openness, freedom, and rich sense of play that a setting like the Shade Room makes possible. These designated safe spaces, however, are not devoid of discomfort, such as when one character discusses the prevalence of molestation in the childhoods of queer people, how it shapes both personal identity and society’s collective understanding of queer sexuality. In the hands of a less skilled writer, the dialogue would be preachy, but Heredia makes room for friction, allowing a nuanced scene to play out: the instigating character is called out, some share personal accounts, yet others voice opinions that express varying degrees of agreement and dismay.

In their teens back in the D.R., Sal and Yadiel “refer to each other in feminine pronouns, and it feels good. Simple. Like seeing each other” (28). As is common in the works of queer writers from Latin America, including Lemebel’s, the novel’s title is an attempt to diffuse what is derogatory by turning pejorative language into poetry, harnessing its power for other aims. Loca might as well be titled Maricón. Pájaro. Any slur directed at queer people will do. 

Later in the novel, Charo spends some time in Pennsylvania, where she tries to realize a vision for her life beyond motherhood and domesticity. There she works alongside some Mexican cooks who refuse to speak to her in Spanish; they are confounded by her, that she can claim being both Black and Latina. These Mexicans are mostly undocumented workers, and they complain that the White manager wants to stiff them on pay for extra labor: “[He] conceals his threats in jokes to remind them how lucky they are, how generous he is. I’ve got la migra on speed dial, he says, in his best attempt at Spanish” (235). What about this moment is so illuminating, if not refreshing? The scene is charged with surprise and contradiction. For one, such blatant prejudice, which can easily slip into cliché, is delivered here in an unexpected tenor. Besides, xenophobia couched in humor is as common in real life as it is rare in fiction. The Mexican workers, on the other hand, do not cease to possess agency simply because they are on the receiving end of abuse; victims, too, are capable of cruelty. And what of Charo’s indifference? Here the novel foregrounds the difficulty of having an identity so prone to shifting, locating what makes Charo, in her quest for freedom, so interesting to follow. Confrontations with White characters, who are almost always racist or homophobic or both, are plentiful in the novel, but few possess the power of this scene. Most instances with White characters are less revealing, and although accompanied by overt political commentary, which is at times brilliant, such scenes do not employ the clever maneuvers that reveal the complex inner lives of the novel’s central characters.

Loca soars when both queer and immigrant life are seen on their own terms, rather than strictly in opposition to social forces. When he trains his eye on straight-queer friendship, so much deeper and nuanced than the performance of mere allyship, Heredia effortlessly mines the emotion of a scene, lifting the reader to a higher plane of empathy. The novel is excellent at depicting the crowded warmth so familiar to immigrant communities, and it skillfully infuses much needed levity in the most difficult storylines. Loca ends with quiet surprises for these wayward souls—sorprendistas of sorts—and they each remind us that, as one character puts it, “you don’t have to forget the past to survive it” (106). 

Zeus Sumra is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hollins University. In 2025 he was awarded an Eccles Fellowship at the British Library. His work has appeared in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Lampblack, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a novel. 

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[1] Pedro Lemebel, “New York Chronicles (Stonewall Inn),” in A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin Books, 2024), 18.