President-to-Be as Flâneur, New Orleans as Bolt-hole, Novelist as History’s Gap Filler
Reviews
By J. R. Ramakrishnan
On the New Orleans neutral ground where Conti crosses Basin Street stands a statue of the Mexican president Benito Juárez. The bronze monument, a gift of the Mexican government, bears the inscription “Peace is based on the respect of the right of others” (“El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz”), from Juárez’s manifesto declared upon defeating the Second Mexican Empire in 1867. Thirteen years before, in 1854, Juárez walked the very streets where his likeness would go up some hundred years later. Despite his prolific writings, Juárez noted nothing about his eighteen months in New Orleans.
Into this curious gap roams Yuri Herrera with Season of the Swamp. For the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World, which heralded Herrera’s entry into the literary firmament (example fan: Patti Smith), Juárez’s lost expatriation in New Orleans must have long been an alluring cipher. Here was another Mexican, over 150 years earlier, engaged in Mexican politics from afar in the swamp. While Juárez plotted Mexico’s regime change, Herrera is a commentator on Mexico as a professor at Tulane University.
To take on a Mexican hero, still the only indigenous leader the country has had, and a highly beloved, protected, and contested American city as an outsider in one swoop in this slim novel is a courageous act. A period novel of New Orleans written originally in Spanish by a contemporary Mexican writer feels like an especially radiant form of dimension-skipping, a Herrera speciality per his previous works. With such transnational sacredness as material, Yuri begins with Juárez, fresh off the boat from Cuba, in the midst of an episode of police brutality on the gangplank. Juárez, a Zapotec orphan from Oaxaca’s Sierra Madre foothills, had served as that state’s governor. Imprisoned by Antonio López de Santa Anna, he fled to Havana and then to New Orleans. In the novel, Juárez and his brother-in-law land at the sketchy Hotel Cincinnati. They have lost track of the rest of their group. They are poor—even ordering a coffee is a precarious affair. The lawyer, ex-governor, and future president will soon work in a print shop and then as a cigar roller.
Of Juárez’s arrival, Herrera writes, “His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things.” Zapotec speaker Juárez, who did not speak Spanish until he arrived in Oaxaca City at age twelve, reads French well enough, but has no English. He figures it out, using many “universal signs” of welcome, goodbye, tomorrow, and so forth, to get by.
On his second day in New Orleans, Juárez acquires a newspaper, through which Herrera exercises his pointed powers of wry parenthesis and summation. Translator Lisa Dillman reworks what Juárez notes with agility in English:
He was able to decipher ships’ schedules and cargos. . . news of a woman—“a lover of the arts,” the article called her—who had stolen a statue from someone’s house; a story about a Spanish ballerina, “Señorita Soto,” who’d performed several numbers never before seen outside of Spain; the arrest of a man accused of obtaining money under false pretenses (how elegant it sounded); several carriage drivers detained for furious driving (so beautifully put); a woman who had stabbed her husband; an article about Sonora, noting that it was a very rich state and that soon an expedition from California would set out to quash the Apaches (to steal Sonora, more like it, though that’s not what it said); cures for gonorrhea; rewards for runaway slaves; and an advertisement that destroyed him, for a Slave Warehouse.
Throughout the novel, newspapers continue their world-building of New Orleans (a bigamist “called to account” during Mardi Gras), the United States (“the captured had the law branded on their skin”), and to a lesser extent, Mexico (an earthquake in Oaxaca and the plots against Santa Anna).
Found-in-translation sonic jokes abound when Juárez meets fellow Mexican Rafael Cabañas, whose tour of the city begins: “‘This is the vegetable market,’ Cabañas veed iberically.” Later, when Juárez and Pepe reunite with their group (Melchor Ocampo, Ponciano Arriaga, and José María Mata, all future Mexican street names), Herrera digs at their “uppercase” meeting, where they would be “speaking as if Andrés Bello’s Indications on the Benefit of Simplifying and Normalizing Orthography in America had been implanted into their mouths or as if they’d been seized by the spirit of Simón Rodríguez.”
The exiles’ conversations reveal the basics of the history they are about to make. Although Herrera has Juárez pondering mediocrity—the group were “not heroes: they were pariahs, freeloaders”—he does not delve into the political machinations. This lack of biography was commented upon after the novel’s Mexican release in 2022. Literary critic Rafael Lemus wrote in the cultural magazine Gatopardo that the book “perhaps shines brighter on the shelf of a small New Orleans bookstore than in a Mexican library.”
Book-shelving aesthetics aside, Herrera appears to have wanted to write a New Orleans novel, or perhaps a novel of New Orleans-as-presidential-influencer. And so we have Juárez as a flâneur, absorbing the city as witness—a passive and mostly mute one—beginning with the Cabañas tour that takes them into the French Quarter. At the coffee stand of a free woman of color, they meet Thisbee, who is “very beautiful, her blackness a shade he’d never before seen, curls piled high like a tower on her head and her dress layered in color.” She speaks something “like French, but kind of bettered somehow, as if it had been unhitched from the dictionary and gone out for a stroll.” Juárez is captivated, clearly.
Juárez’s understanding of the city—and its foreground, race—takes shape. In Cabañas’s print shop, upon seeing a poster offering a reward for a fugitive slave, Juárez quizzes Cabañas, who obliges with a “tutorial” about slavery, freedmen of color, the Byzantine hierarchy of Creoles, and a comparison with “our criollos.” Later, in the bayou gator-hunting, Juárez meets a group of Houma, one of whom points out that he is not white. When he offers Oaxaca as his provenance and enquires about the man’s origins, the man says Bulbancha, the indigenous name for New Orleans, meaning “place of many tongues.” In a brilliant nod to New Orleans’s layers, Herrera writes: “A name tells many things. If one of the things it tells is the name of a destruction, then that’s what it says, on top of everything it was already saying.”
At the time, the Thirteenth Amendment was still eleven years away in the United States, while Mexico had abolished slavery in 1837. Herrera has Juárez touring a slave market with Cuban exile Pedro Santacilia. An affective, wretched scene of a young girl (“ready to reproduce”) being auctioned off to a man desperate for his “fair shake” is followed by an upmarket auction with dolled-up people for sale in a hotel rotunda. Juárez is disorientated: “Why, why, why on earth did he bring me to these places. But then immediately he wondered: How did I not see it myself.” The sliver of plot delivered toward the novel’s end centers on the imagined Juárez’s response to these realities.
Aside from this exception, plot is largely forsaken by Herrera. Juárez arrives, experiences, and leaves. Nothing happens but New Orleans, and that is a lot. Absinthe, opera, Mardi Gras, a vampire, yellow fever, a day at the races, music and more music, and multiple forms of criminality—all of which Herrera, who clearly painstakingly combed the archives and kept his observant eyes open (and presumably, sober) during the city’s parades, delivers with luminous sensuality.
New Orleans is messy, we see in the picaresque events Juárez witnesses. Outsider literary figures such as Tennessee Williams certainly laid down its unbearable sultriness on the page. The sticky frolics of another novel of mid-1800s exile, Yellow Jack by Jack Russell, and a later Storyville-era ride, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, also come to mind. To be in the city, at any time but particularly that time, without getting seduced into the mess seems unlikely. In Season, however, Juárez is not, to use my favorite of Black New Orleans parlance, “pressed,” despite a hinted spark with Thisbee. There is a further ignition at a final gathering but Benito demures. To his wife, Margarita Maza, a revered character herself, he returns faithfully.
Considering the volume of Juárez’s correspondence, it is impossible to imagine that he did not consider a telling of the city.
It struck him that if one day he was dropped there without anyone telling him where he was, he’d know it was New Orleans even with his eyes closed. He couldn’t explain it. It was just that in his bones he’d be able to feel the shifting ground beneath the cobbles, resisting. And that he didn’t actually have his story straight; that there was no simple, coherent, communicable tale to tell; that there were too many betrayals, small ones or secret ones but betrayals nonetheless; and that he had a right to keep them to himself, in all the tongues he now knew.
The words “no simple, coherent, communicable tale to tell” hit on the impossibility of narrating New Orleans, especially for a sojourning character. Juárez might have gotten overwhelmed by the details, or he was hiding the real tea. What happened in New Orleans can only be speculated. In lieu of one tale, Herrera chooses mood: one that is sharp, floating, and refracted through time, space, and Mexican expat eyes.
J. R. Ramakrishnan’s work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. For close to a decade, she was curator of literary programs for New Orleans’s Tennessee Williams Festival. She lives in Mexico City.
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