With the publication of his literary debut in February 2025, Alejandro Heredia has established himself as a compelling new voice in contemporary U.S. literature. Heredia’s work brings together rigorous political inquiry with a profound investment in the emotional and spiritual lives of Black, Latinx, and queer communities. His first novel, Loca, is set at the turn of the twenty-first century between Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the Bronx, New York. It centers on Sal, a young queer Afro-Dominican man grappling with the brutal loss of his best friend, the weight of family silence, and the complexities of desire, survival, and memory. In this interview, conducted on April 16, 2025, Aitor Bouso-Gavín, Lecturer of Latinx Studies at Harvard University, speaks with Heredia about the critical and creative choices that shaped Loca.
Aitor Bouso Gavín: Alejandro, I’d love to hear more about your journey as a writer and your debut novel, Loca. Who is Alejandro Heredia, and what should readers expect to find in your first novel?
Alejandro Heredia: I am a writer from the Bronx. I think those two things are probably the most important parts of my identity. I take very seriously being someone from the Bronx who is interested in asking myself rigorous questions about that place, and that’s what I explore throughout the novel, in addition to many other things. And then, I’m a novelist. Everything that I do in my day-to-day life is informed by being a writer. It informs the way that I spend time with people. It informs the way that I spend my own time.
ABG: The title of your novel, Loca, resonates with the history of the term as both an insult and a tool of queer self-naming. What can you tell us about this provocative title?
AH: My editor actually gave me that title. It comes from a particular scene within the novel in which Sal and Yadiel, two best friends, are getting ready to go out to their first queer party, and at that point they call each other “loca.” Then they say that using feminine pronouns is like seeing each other better. I was trying to highlight all the different vernaculars that the characters are speaking through, moving through, and listening to in their spaces: Dominican vernacular, queer Dominican vernacular, Black American vernacular, Bronx vernacular. There are so many characters who are speaking English and Spanish, but they’re all speaking their own versions. I wanted to throw all of that into the book. And then, of course, a lot of the novel focuses on the ways in which queer and trans people within the Dominican context and beyond are able to play with language in order to empower themselves through the very language that is supposed to reduce and destroy their lives. To me, it’s one of the best examples we have of queer agency.
ABG: Sal, the protagonist of Loca, seems to echo aspects of your own lived experiences as a queer Afro-Latinx writer. Autobiography and life-writing have long been central to the Latinx literary tradition. Can you imagine yourself ever publishing your own memoir?
AH: Oh, God! I don’t think I could ever write a memoir. I’ve written essays about my own life and experiences, but I’m not interested in making myself the subject of my work. I’m rather interested in being in the world and asking questions about other people. Even with Sal, who is very similar to me because we share a lot of identities, I made sure that I made him very unlike me in some really important ways. Just last week, someone interviewing me asked how my biographical information aligns with Sal or people in the book. To me, it feels like a reductive question, because the assumption is that as queer people, as people of color, as Black folks, as Latinos, we don’t have the capacity to imagine or create worlds and characters. We’re always only ever writing about ourselves, even when we’re writing fiction. And I resent that. I reserve the right to make art that has some things to do with me, but also that has nothing to do with me. That’s what I’m trying to do on the page.
ABG: In some ways Loca revolves around the “queercide” and violent loss of Sal’s best friend, Yadiel, which you describe as a deep wound. Could you share more about how writing this novel has helped you—or might help readers—process, confront, or heal from internalized and collective wounds?
AH: I’m often asked why there’s so much sadness or loss in the novel. But, for me, it was really important to show the reality of queer Dominican life as I saw it. I included moments of joy, connection, and community, but also some of the conditions queer Dominican people on the island and in the diaspora face. The Dominican Republic has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, including violence toward queer people and trans women. I wanted to depict that reality on the page; it felt like the responsible thing to do. I wanted to explore the way some of us try to heal our losses by pretending the past never happened. Sal spends much of the novel trying to forget Yadiel, to forget what he’s survived. If readers get anything from this book, I hope it’s that even in moments of incredible duress, deep loss, and oppression, we still have agency. We still have a responsibility to one another. In fact, we have the most responsibility in those moments. That feels like a more rigorous way of dealing with pain than pretending it never happened. I come from a culture, and a family, that didn’t speak about pain. Instead, it was drowned out through substance abuse, depression, and other means. Anything but actually naming the thing that had happened to them.
ABG: Building on that, your novel also addresses Sal’s sexual assault as a child, a deeply taboo subject. Could you speak about your decision to include this difficult topic, and how you approached it?
AH: Similar to other forms of violence, it felt to me that sexual violence, especially against children, is kind of like air in the Dominican Republic. I imagine it exists elsewhere too, but that’s the context I know. It’s so rarely talked about. What drives me to include difficult topics is a sense of responsibility to tell the truth. The novel doesn’t dwell on it; Sal brings it up early on, and it doesn’t come up again. I wanted to show how even that moment of violence has been normalized, and how he carries it with him, even if he’s not thinking about it all the time.
ABG: My next question is about Charo. Beyond being Sal’s best friend, her story foregrounds the experiences of Black Dominican women and Afro-Latinas more broadly. Could you address the influence of Black (and) Latina feminist writing in your work?
AH: Julia, of course. Reading Julia Álvarez was the first time I saw complex, nuanced Dominican women written on the page with rigor and intelligence, so her work is definitely foundational. Toni Morrison has also been incredibly foundational. Sula is one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s a novel about friendship and Black womanhood, and it’s my blueprint for writing complex friendships. In college, I took a few courses on Black feminism and read the works of Audre Lorde, but the person who really changed my mind and my life was June Jordan. Jordan held different ideological beliefs from some of her contemporaries. She wasn’t married to the idea of building community only with people who looked like her or shared her identities. That showed me a politic grounded in future-building and vision, not just shared identity or shared oppression. Jordan believed in building communities around shared visions of the future. I believe that deeply, and I bring that politic to the novel. The characters—many of them Dominican, many of them Black, from different parts of the diaspora—are different.
ABG: Your novel tells the stories of those who surround you—queer, Black, and Brown folks. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the concept of Latinidad, which has come under critical scrutiny by Afro-Latinx activists, scholars, and writers such as Tanya Katerí Hernández and Alan Pelaez López. Pelaez López, an Afro-Zapotec writer and multidisciplinary artist, argues that Latinidad betrays queer, trans, undocumented, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous peoples because it’s founded on a myth of Latino racial homogeneity. Does your work engage with that critique?
AH: In a lot of ways, Loca was informed by that critique of Latinidad. That’s why the novel, to me, feels like a Black diasporic novel. You have Black folks from different corners of the diaspora—from the DR, Puerto Rico, Black America, all of them being in community together. I did that intentionally. It was also informed by my understanding of Dominican history and the lengths the Dominican state has gone to separate the people from their African ancestry. It was important to me that my first novel made my allegiances clear. It was also a reflection of the world I grew up in, the Bronx. In my personal life, Latinidad is something I hold at arm’s length. I align with the critiques of Latinidad, especially how it erases Black Caribbean folks. I’m also careful about this language of “canceling” an identity. We might have radical ideas as writers or intellectuals, but many people still use this term as an important identity marker. Who am I to go to my cousin in the Bronx and say, “Hey, you shouldn’t identify as Latino because of all these issues”? I support the critique, but I also believe we need to be intentional and respectful. If an identity has helped someone see themselves in the world, we shouldn’t invalidate that. It’s like talking to a Black Dominican person who doesn’t identify with Blackness—there are historical reasons for that. That didn’t happen by accident. There’s 500 years of imperial power behind it. Helping people build more complex relationships with history and identity should be done with care and patience.
ABG: Loca has been described as “quintessentially American.” It is a novel that engages with queerness, Blackness, and Latinidad in very complex and layered ways. Those nuances can sometimes get lost or misinterpreted under the pretenses of identity politics. How do you navigate the pressures and realities of tokenization and co-optation that so often impact queer and intersectionally racialized writers and artists?
AH: That’s already happening. Almost every single review I got mentioned that it was a book about intersectionality, as if I’m a sociologist or an academic writing about intersectionality, like it’s the subject of my work, rather than people or imagined people. It’s incredibly reductive and frankly disrespectful to talk about a novelist’s work that way. To me, that’s the product of racism. Often, when it’s a White writer, their work gets to be about love, or longing, or community, or existentialism. When it’s us, it has to be about identity politics. And I do resent that. It made me very frustrated seeing my work reduced that way. I had to think about it for a while. I remembered Toni Morrison’s words, which are “racism is a distraction.” I have a vision. I’m trying to make rigorous work about human beings. And I will not be moved from that.
ABG: I would like to discuss the role of queer intimacy in your work. For instance, the sex scenes between Sal and Vance, are tender and full of joy. How did you approach writing those moments? Could you talk more about queer influences in the novel, and how you approached queer relationality and intimacy in Loca?
AH: That’s a good question. All I was trying to do was depict a realistic unfolding of a romantic relationship that’s central to the book. People have sex—and I thought it would just be the responsible thing to do to depict that in a way that felt realistic, with as much nuance in the language as I could find. There are also moments of touch throughout the novel. There’s a moment where Sal puts his head on Renata’s shoulder, and that becomes a moment when she can let her guard down. I want to explore this more in future work—how queer people touch each other in intimate spaces, without it always being overly sexual. That’s probably coming from my own experience. My cousins always made fun of me growing up because I wasn’t a hugger, I didn’t want to be touched. And now, as an adult, I’m so physically affectionate. It’s how I communicate with my partner. It’s how I express love.
ABG: Finally, why should people read your novel?
AH: Loca centers stories I wasn’t seeing in the world. One of the biggest compliments I’ve gotten, especially from Dominican readers, is that it doesn’t feel like I’m performing, tap-dancing or explaining my culture. The characters are just themselves. They’re just moving through their lives naturally. I’m not interested in writing within or through the White gaze, or the American gaze. I don’t want to explain myself. I want to be free. That’s my investment. It’s a story about queerness, Latinidad, about Black queer Latino people—but ultimately, my investment is in people’s humanity. So often our people aren’t given the privilege of humanity on the page. If there’s anything I want to accomplish with my work, it’s to say: we are human beings. We have the right to existential crises. We have the right to love, to lose, to long.
ABG: That is such a wonderful way to wrap up our conversation—highlighting the humanity we all share, and the humanity that has always been present in literature. Thank you for those words and for being in conversation with us today, Alejandro. I know your novel has already found a lot of success, and I wish you more and more to come.
AH: Thank you.