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.

Charo 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. 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 Heredia joins us today to discuss. He has an upcoming release event with poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo next Thursday, March 6th from 7:00 to 8:00 PM at the Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center at 530 West 166th Street. Alejandro, welcome to the studio.

Alejandro Heredia: 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 Heredia: Yes, that's right.

Alison Stewart: What do you remember?

Alejandro Heredia: God, I remember learning English and how fun and challenging that was, and I remember just experiencing a whole new country at seven years old.

Alison Stewart: What aspects of your own family story helped inspire this novel?

Alejandro Heredia: 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. I weaved some of those stories into the novel.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to have Sal and Charo experience that maybe your family experienced?

Alejandro Heredia: Some of the challenges of what it's like to leave a home behind to start your life over.

Alison Stewart: Why did Sal and Charo move to New York in the first place?

Alejandro Heredia: 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. Charo is almost like the breadwinner of her family, and her family propels her to leave the Dominican Republic for economic opportunity.

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

Alejandro Heredia: I think Charo especially came to New York with so many dreams and so many desires about being a woman of the world. Instead, where she finds herself five years into being in the US, she finds herself as a young mother being partnered with a controlling man. She feels a little bit stuck in the domestic world.

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

Alejandro Heredia: That's right.

Alison Stewart: That was a big part of it. He said, "Oh, I got you," and then he didn't. [laughs] Were they able to find a community when they got here, Sal and Charo?

Alejandro Heredia: 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 Heredia. His new novel is called Loca. It's a novel that's in search of two friends that follows two friends, Sal and Charo, 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 Heredia: Yes. 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. He goes on to think about what it means to be an immigrant in the US.

"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 Heredia 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 Heredia: 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 this space and not have to really leave for any. There were supermarkets and restaurants and the post office. Everywhere you went, there was a Dominican person working or to interact with.

Alison Stewart: 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 Heredia: I think that they are so stuck trying to live the lives that they think that they should be living. I find that so many of us are 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. This break for them, going out to dance, just expands their world and pushes them to reconsider and recontextualize whether they're living the lives that they want to live.

Alison Stewart: Because they're both immigrants from the Dominican Republic, what is their relationship to their former home?

Alejandro Heredia: 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. I think Charo maybe has a little bit more longing for home, but she's confused about where she fits in in the Bronx.

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

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

Alison Stewart: What's an example of, if you know, you know in the book?

Alejandro Heredia: I grew up hearing this phrase from my mother. When she would get really, really tired, she would say, [Spanish language] which means, I'm going to hit the streets. I'm out of here. I'm tired. I think some of the characters 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.

Alison Stewart: I think it's great that the Spanish isn't italicized in the book. Tell us about that decision.

Alejandro Heredia: Spanish and Spanglish both are a part of the world of these characters. 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.

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

Alejandro Heredia: 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. What he ends up finding is that homophobia and transphobia exist everywhere in very different ways. 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 Heredia: 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. His partner is there to say, hey, 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 is also his partner.

Alejandro Heredia: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Her partner Robert, he can be a little homophobic.

Alejandro Heredia: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did you put that in the book? How did you make that tension work in the book?

Alejandro Heredia: Part of what I was trying to show is that homophobia 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. 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: Loca is your debut novel, how long did it take you to complete it?

Alejandro Heredia: Seven years.

Alison Stewart: Seven years. What was the original story?

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

Alison Stewart: Obviously, this area has gentrified in the past.

Alejandro Heredia: Yes.

Alison Stewart: 10 years, 2 years. Who knows? [laughs] When you think about gentrification and the Bronx, what are you thinking about?

Alejandro Heredia: 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. 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.

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

Alejandro Heredia: It's all about endurance.

Alison Stewart: Endurance.

Alejandro Heredia: 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.

Alison Stewart: Do you plan to write another novel?

Alejandro Heredia: Oh yes, 100%.

Alison Stewart: Already.

Alejandro Heredia: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right. We look forward to that. My guest has been Alejandro Heredia. The name of his novel is Loca. Thank you so much for joining us.

Alejandro Heredia: Thank you for having me.