LOCA, debut found-family novel of New York's Dominican diaspora

LOCA
ALEJANDRO HEREDIA
Simon & Schuster
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Lambda Literary Award–winning author Alejandro Heredia comes a spellbinding debut about intersectionality, enduring friendship, and found family set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, following two Afro-Caribbean friends as they journey beyond the confined expectations of their home country in the Dominican Republic and begin new lives in New York City.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

With both friends feeling the same pressures in New York that forced them from their homes, a chance outing at a gay bar introduces Sal to Vance, an African American gay man whose romantic relationship with Sal challenges him to confront the trauma of his past. Through Vance, Charo befriends Ella, an African American trans woman, and Ella’s refusal to be who or what society dictates she should be inspires Charo to reckon with the role she’s grown comfortable in. Sal and Charo soon find themselves part of a queer intersectional community who disrupt the status quo of gender politics and conformity, allowing both to create the family and identities they’ve always longed for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "No matter where you go, there you are" meets "The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." Socrates and Buckaroo Banzai in one sentence has to be a new record of weirdness even for me. When I read a book with Spanish and English side by side, I'm inspired to make connections. In my daily life I'm surrounded by Spanish-speaking folk, I grew up a denizen of La Frontera, I was taught Spanish in school...read my first foreign-language novel in junior high Spanish class...I am, in short, at home.

That is how this novel felt to me, like a homecoming. I'm upset that many of y'all will avoid the read like it gots the cooties *because* there's another language in it. Some because there's transgender representation. Some because it doesn't center, or to the best of my recollection contain, any wypipo. (Look it up.) Adding to the reasons I liked the read, and others won't, is New York City. That great cultural lightning rod with its century-old antisemitic epithet, its much-maligned by flyover country denizens Harlemness, that haven and home for Others. How that's a bad thing, honestly, is beyond my scope of imagination. I see it like Sal and Charo do, a place not to be defined by others but a place to do one's own defining. How can that be bad?

Sal, who provides the bulk of the narrative, is coming of age in a place as little unlike his home as he can bear. The Latine diaspora in New York City has enough cultural similarity and still enough cover to hide from the ugliness of his past. He's been traumatized, as a queer boy I don't imagine I need to spell it out for you, and feels safer in New York. After all, it's harder to hate people when you don't know them, right? Disappearing into a crowd is safety?

Hmmm. Us oldsters are pretty sure that's fallacious already on first hearing but young people need to learn the hard way. Which explains in part why there are fewer old people than young ones.

1990s New York is the one I remember best. Things were changing and that's utterly ensorcelling to young people seeking personal change. The problem comes when the young person ignores the fact that change isn't a function of location, as Peter Weller memorably says in the clip linked above. Socrates (allegedly; at this distance in time, who really knows who formulated the thought?) elucidates the other issue Sal confronts in his desperate bid to change by escaping what he was told he was. It isn't until he meets a role model for his queerness who, like him, is a Black man but is also from the US, that he begins to *build* an identity not run from a label slapped on him.

Charo might have the harder task. She does NOT want to be a punching bag for some man, in sexual slavery to him and a breeding machine for babies. Guess what. Moving to New York City on the cusp of a new century, a new millennium, doesn't change her less-obvious struggle any more than it does Sal's. Luckily for her, this is a soulbrother she's found, this is a connection they won't break. Sal is a role model for moving forward into being, into crafting, a new self. I expect these kids did just fine for themselves, and that is a great feeling to end a read on.

So why not more stars? Because, even though I get that the chaotic timeline with flashbacks and PoV changes is very much the way we live our lives in reality—complete with intrusive ruminations—fiction needs more order than life to work as a story. This book was, from the get-go, going to be more than one story with more than one main character. What happened was what so often does: One of the characters has more to say to the author than the other. It comes down to page-time. Sal's is the dominant PoV but we're more acquainted with him than really close friends, as a single PoV novel allows us to feel.

The truth is that's not a flaw when it's by design as it is here...we're apparently meant to feel we're conversationally getting to know a person's history and life events...but that carries an inherent issue of diminished investment in that PoV. When we don't focus hard on something, due to different kinds of interruptions in narrative flow, we don't necessarily get the same level of reward for our attention.

It's a braided-stories novel, a set of vignettes with beginnings and middles, whose ends we mostly know from their being flashbacks. It's a valid storytelling technique simply not one I love with the kind of passion I had to invest in this very involving set-up taking place in a world I knew, and remember fondly. So three and three-quarters of a star subjectively awarded.

Objectively I laud this debut novel by an author with a resonant voice, and encourage you to encourage him and his publisher by reading his book.