Learning from Decadence

Jason Christian interviews Yuri Herrera about “Season of the Swamp,” New Orleans, and Benito Juárez.

By Jason ChristianOctober 24, 2024

• Fiction

YURI HERRERA’S LATEST novel, Season of the Swamp (2024), is in some ways a departure from his previous books. This one is set not in the present but in the distant past—1850s New Orleans, to be specific—and not in Mexico, but in his adopted home: New Orleans. The story revolves around an overlooked footnote in history, when the Mexican politician Benito Juárez was exiled, along with other reform-minded associates, to New Orleans, where he lived for a year and a half.

Herrera paints an impressionistic picture of those fateful months from his imagination, depicting a curious, sometimes hapless Juárez, as he wanders from house to house, bar to bar, and job to job, absorbing the rhythms of the city, its freedoms and contradictions, experiences that would inform the man who was soon to become the first Indigenous president of Mexico.

Readers of Herrera’s work will find the prose in Season of the Swamp just as lush as any he ever committed to print. And, as in his other work, we find a familiar interrogation—sometimes directly, but often at a slant—of the ugly side of wealth and power.

In late September, I caught up with Herrera on a video call, an overdue visit since I moved away from New Orleans more than a year ago. He and I picked up where we left off on our literary and political chats, discussing his approach to writing; his brilliant translator, Lisa Dillman; the costs of borders and imperialism; the cultural wonders of New Orleans; and, above all, the value of history.

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JASON CHRISTIAN: Let’s begin by talking about the voice in the book. It’s subtly very funny. Benito Juárez is floating through this new environment in New Orleans, confused, curious, but intrigued. It’s almost like a Huck Finn approach: the innocent outsider who is constantly surprised by the horrors that he sees. How did you land on that approach?

YURI HERRERA: Usually, what I do is I do several proofs. I try different voices, different approaches, before the moment in which I know that I already have a clear project that I’m going to start writing like that. I knew that this was going to happen through [Juárez’s] eyes, but I didn’t want to do a first-person novel. It’s his sensibility, his subjectivity, but I wanted for this voice  also to look at him from the outside. If you do a first-person [perspective], it’s not that possible, because you are always distracted by your ego. So, yes, I think you’re right. This is one of the things that was important for me, that he is, in a way, like a kid. He somehow is coming back to the moment in his childhood when he came to Oaxaca City from his small town, and he didn’t speak Spanish, and he was just a little bit out of place, but at the same time sure that he would survive. And he is surviving [in New Orleans]. He is starting to learn how to thrive in a hostile environment. It’s both things. It’s a hostile environment, but at the same time, it’s a very rich and generous environment. So I think those are some of the main ideas that inform this kind of voice.

Why were you drawn to Juárez as a literary subject? Tell me about Juárez and his legacy and why you were so compelled by his story.

Juárez is the name of a street in every town in the country [Mexico]. It’s the name of many city squares. It’s the name of a city. It’s the name of many things. It’s a statue. It’s something that is in the center of our public life for good reasons, symbolic and very concrete reasons. Juárez was the creator of the first modern state after the independence that separated church and state. I mean, I’m saying he—it was a group of people, but he, at some point—became the head of this group. And then, he’s the president who defeated the French after the French were here, and he’s the guy who decided to not pardon the Austrian aristocrat that had become emperor in Mexico. Mexico is one of the few countries in the world that has executed a European king, and I think that is a note of pride.

Also, in symbolic terms, he is the first Indigenous president in Mexico. And there are certain conflicts with this, because at the same time that he showed what the new republic could be, the way in which he separated church and state meant that the Indigenous communities that had survived through the colonial years were now no longer communities. They were like groups of individuals, and that changed the relation among these communities, and with the state. So he’s a problematic figure, and he’s an example of honesty and integrity, and that’s how he exists in our imaginary.

When I came to New Orleans, I realized he had lived here. I mean, it’s not that it’s a secret, but it’s something that nobody really pays attention to in Mexico. It’s only a couple of lines in the history books, even though everybody recognizes that this period was really important [for Juárez]. Because there is before and [there is] after New Orleans. Before New Orleans, he was already important, but not the most important liberal in Mexico. After New Orleans, he became the head of this group of liberals that started the reform of the state. So, everybody knew that something happened here.

What I thought was that it’s not what changed him as a person. It’s discussing not just what he has been discussing for years, but also what a place can do to you. And this is a city, as you know, that really speaks to your body. So this was the idea, to try to understand this historical character from a different perspective, and while doing it, also, using my own experience. Because it doesn’t matter what we’re writing about: we are always writing about ourselves and about our surroundings. So even though I researched a lot, I was also talking about my own experience as a person away from Mexico, and as a person in this city.

It must have been fun and also challenging to write about New Orleans, because it’s hard to avoid the tropes and yet be honest and accurate about the city. I thought you handled that well. I mean, there’s a moment when [Juárez is] sort of delirious. He’s trapped in the delirium of Mardi Gras and loses track of time. He’s just floating.

Well, that comes from lived experience. [Laughs.]

Totally. And the yellow fever part is really fascinating. I assume there was an epidemic at that time.

Yes, that is all documented. The big one was in 1853, but it came back in 1854, not as strong as the previous year, but still. And he got sick.

There’s a note in the beginning of the book that says that he hadn’t written anything about his time in New Orleans, but I assume other people had written about him in New Orleans a little bit.

Not a lot. There’s just one source, and it’s the same source that everybody repeats. And this source has no documents. That was at the same time a problem and an opportunity. That’s why it was so appealing to me.

In your nonfiction book, A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire (2018), you write, “Silence is not the absence of history, it’s a history hidden beneath shapes that must be deciphered.” Elsewhere in the book, you talk about how the people who have power end up shaping and writing history in the form of articles, letters, and books, and that gets recorded as official history. In Season of the Swamp, Juárez is constantly reading the newspapers, trying to understand what’s going on in Mexico, but also what’s happening in the city that he’s found himself in, New Orleans. There are snippets, little facts: a fire in this building, people getting arrested, an earthquake back in Oaxaca. And there’s so much beneath that one line of description. There’s a whole story, or dozens of stories, just like with A Silent Fury. You have a few official documents, but then there are actual people’s lives, and it made me think that that’s a really ripe way to imagine fiction or to intervene in history.

Well, in A Silent Fury, the silence is not just a void but also a very concrete, even physical, thing: the expression of power. It’s part of the crime that was committed there. The silence there is part of that tragedy—that is not an accident, but a tragedy—produced, codified, structured by these very rich and powerful people. Whereas in this book, the silence is a question but also, in a way, a hypothesis. Because it’s obvious in Juárez’s notes that the silence is voluntary. When I was writing the book, I had this Post-it in front of me saying, “Why is New Orleans not communicable?” Why couldn’t he talk about it? And so one of the things that I was thinking—well, it’s several things—is that it’s an overwhelming thing that couldn’t be put in simple terms, especially for all these guys that were already looking at themselves in the future as sort of founding fathers. It’s easier to explain yourself in terms of ingesting ideological terms, or in terms of education, or in terms of political plans, than to explain yourself in terms of other very intimate things that have changed your mind: fear, desire, pleasure, being not a completely straight person, in the sense that this city is a city that is always appealing to decadence, you know. And to learn from decadence is something that is very, very important in this city. And I think that is something that a founding father cannot confess, cannot explain: “I have become this person thanks to this decadent place.” And I thought that that was really interesting, because that allows you to dwell in the soul of your character and the soul of the city.

I love that idea of decadence as a teaching opportunity. He was 46 or 47 when he was here, so not a child, but he’s going through a second adolescence. He’s relearning what humanity is, or could be, and it sounds like there were some people in Mexico accusing him of being indoctrinated by the Enlightenment …

He had been a professor of different things, of humanities, and also physics, but he was pretty much into the French philosophers, yes.

But philosophy of the street is a different thing, and that’s what’s wonderful about New Orleans.

And that is at the center of how I was trying to think, History with a capital H, and this character and the city.

Whenever you write about New Orleans, it feels fresh and current, but it doesn’t feel anachronistic. New Orleans is like a living history, more than any city in the United States that I can think of.

It’s pretty similar right now to what it was back then in terms of the architecture, but also in terms of the racial tensions, the creativity of the city, and the street life, from what I learned reading about the city. I read the newspaper from the day Juárez arrived until the day he departed, every single day, mainly the crime section, which is talking about the street life. If you were living here, you would actually get in touch with that, or be a witness. So, New Orleans is interesting in the sense that, at the same time, it has very old buildings, and it has a very solid tradition that comes from way back then, but it’s a city that is constantly moving. This is something that I tried to convey: that it is built on top of a swamp that is always moving under your feet. It’s a place with a very strong identity that is always kind of reinventing itself within a certain tradition, and that it’s always receiving different kinds of people, I think, more than any other place; we’re beyond national identities, very different people with different morals, with different ways of looking at life.

It’s a land of contradictions. There’s a line where a character, the Cuban revolutionary exile, I’m forgetting his name …

Pedro Santacilia, who is also a historical character. He actually was here, and he eventually married, years later, Juárez’s daughter.

And moved to Mexico?

Yes, yes. And he kept fighting for Cuban independence from Mexico, while at the same time he was one of Juárez’s advisers.

There’s a line where Santacilia says that he’d been in exile in “Seville, Gibraltar, New York—all of them rich, but none like this, where you could so clearly see the blood on the gold.” It occurred to me when I read this that this is what is interesting about New Orleans. Everything is in your face, and all the contradictions are front and center.

I never tried to adapt the story to a set of concepts. It’s more that a certain way of looking critically at society informs what you are emphasizing, what you are shedding light on. And yes, what you said is really true. This is a city that does not whitewash wealth. It’s a city that embraces its history, its contradictions, but it’s not a hypocritical city in the sense that—well, if you go to Switzerland, they would say, “We have been neutral all our lives, we are not the baddies,” but at the same time, there is a whole history of violence in those bank vaults and they just whitewashed it, which is something that the Europeans and the United States have done all their history, to create a myth about the merits that brought this wealth. Whereas in New Orleans, it’s really clear—and it was even more clear back then with the slave markets—that behind all that wealth was a number of crimes, and not only crimes in the past, but also ongoing crimes. And that is something that is part of the fascination that Juárez and his friends had with the city, and at the same time—and this is my hypothesis—is what pushes them to try to imagine something different. Because they are seeing the advantages of this system, and its horrors too.

A lot of the scenes that expose these contradictions are humorous, but they veer into the horrifying pretty quickly. One of those scenes is when Juárez goes to that slave market and watches the auctions, and there’s this poor white man who is desperate to buy an adolescent Black girl. He’s speaking out loud that this is his “one shot” at making money, and so we’re invited to realize there is upward mobility for poor whites at the direct expense of these enslaved people. It’s a brilliant exposure of what the United States is all about and built on.

All that is documented. All those slave markets and even some of the words are there in the [archives]. And Juárez was coming from a country that had been in chaos for decades, that had a lot of problems, where the wealth was in the hands of the Catholic Church—but the one thing that Mexico had to its merit was that slavery was no longer a thing since independence. Mexico already had had a Black president [in 1829]. People don’t think about it because he has been whitewashed by history, but Vicente Guerrero was Black, and then he was murdered by the conservative people. But it was a country that was already in many ways in the avant-garde, [and] in other ways was really behind, especially the way economic life was happening in Mexico, because half of the wealth was, as I was saying, in the hands of the Catholic Church. What [Juárez et al.] see is, on one hand, this economic freedom that brings all that wealth to [New Orleans]. But then they see that part of that economic freedom is the horror of slavery, that selling human beings is part of that system. To me, this enthusiasm and skepticism somehow might have created that mature political mind that he became.

One thing that interests me about this book is that, like all of your novels, it’s very compressed. There are a lot of ideas and scenarios in these pages, but they appear briefly, and it’s like you have a sense that you’re floating through time and space. That partly is probably because in New Orleans you can live that way, kind of floating around from the tavern to the opera to the coffee shop to whatever. How did you manage to get so much in, in such a compressed way? Was the original draft four times as long, and you whittled it?

I used to say that I always think my next book is going to be my War and Peace, and I’m never able to do that because I start writing, and actually my last draft is very similar to the first draft. The thing is that I write slowly because I start becoming worried or neurotic about every single connotation—not every single one, but many of the connotations that you are introducing there with each phrase. On one hand, that is part of the joy of writing, to me, that you are always saying more than what you’re saying, and sometimes you’re in control of that, but sometimes it’s just a suggestion, and you’re just offering this thing with different entrances so that the reader can do whatever they want with it.

For me, the way in which that can be achieved—if it’s true that I have been able to achieve it—is to go through two different but intertwined processes of research. One is, in this case, that the research is specific, that it has to do with the archives, with certain history books, with the newspapers. But the other part of research is linguistic research, or a linguistic investigation. It’s not only to have the information, hard data, but also to have the language with which to express that information. So, I write down a lot of words, expressions, and vocabulary from that time, specialized vocabulary from certain activities. And yes, words that I like that somehow are going to allow me to convey this. Then there’s the other moment when you are actually writing, because this is a moment that is not just transcribing. It’s not just putting something down on paper or on the screen, but it’s an active way of thinking about all that you have done before. So something that should be, and that is, very simple—just describing someone walking down the street—has to be infused with that moment that is, in itself, a sort of investigation. It has to be infused with the previous investigations, the investigations that gave you the certain information and the investigations that made you not write in an innocent way, because literature is never innocent. It always has the weight of history, class, gender, and genre, and once you are aware of that, you explore more the different connotations of what you’re saying.

Were you reading about this history before you started writing? Or were you writing as you were reading?

Both things. I would say maybe it was a couple of years. I read a lot about the city and I read the newspapers and I read different biographies of Juárez, but also it was when I was writing my two previous books that pretty much were happening at the same time, A Silent Fury and Ten Planets (2019). They are two very different books. One is based in history, and it’s constrained by what can be proven, and the other one is an exercise in imagination. Those two books, in some way, prepared me to do this one. Because, in that sense, it’s a combination that I was going to write based on an investigation. But also, I would have the space, the opportunity, to imagine within that frame, the frame of the history.

Lisa Dillman’s translation is fantastic. She did an incredible job. What is it like working with her?

We have been working together for a while now. I think we enjoy each other’s work. We are good friends. We have a common language. We understand the craft in similar ways, and she is very interested in getting all the details right. I never put pressure on translators. I always assume that translators know a lot more than me about the language in which they are rewriting, recreating, and I respect that. I respect that it is an artistic process. Translation is a very complex process. But when translators want my input, I always give it to them. Lisa is always trying to get input, to get all the nuances, and then she does the next thing, which is to come up with solutions. And she’s very imaginative, while at the same time understanding the aesthetic premises of each book.

There’s this moment where Juárez is talking to a stockbroker from New York and a feather lands on his shoulder, and the rich man calls the waiter over to remove the feather. You write, “What a monstrous thing, comfort.” Just before that, you ask the question, “[W]hat have we lost when you can’t shake off your own jacket or wash a single dish, when comfort is your only concern”? That makes me think of our current time. I mean, just about the ruling class, if you want to use that term, how removed they are from the harms that they are doing. This feels like a symptom of modernity.

It’s easier to let the world burn than to change our ways of living. It’s easier to just destroy the planet, to destroy the environment, and to destroy other people’s lives than to reconsider the ways in which we have organized our consumption, our consumerism, this kind of poisonous comfort.

In that way, the novel feels anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, because the nature of imperialism is that comfort comes to you at the expense of the colonies. It has that thread or theme.

Well, if anything, Juárez was anti-imperialist. He defeated the [Mexican] Empire. It’s one of those rare moments in which the most powerful empire was defeated, by this guy who was really short, really shy, with all his flaws, with all his complexity, with all his defects. That’s what still makes him such a towering figure. You know, yes, I think that is a good way of defining it. It’s an anti-imperialist story.

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Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of three novels, including Season of the Swamp (2024) and Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009). His short story collection Ten Planets (2019) was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

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Featured image: Photo of Yuri Herrera by Jacky Muniello.