Book Review: Loca by Alejandro Heredia

Alejandro Heredia’s Loca is a novel of migration, memory, and self-determination. For someone to leave behind the only home they have ever known, they must believe that there is a possibility of a better life elsewhere. But once that better life is within reach, many feel guilt at having abandoned the people they knew—that any joy they experience is a selfish act. This struggle between hope and guilt is at the center of Loca.

The novel follows a pair of friends, Sal and Charo, as they struggle for the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. To show how the past limits their ability to pursue their dreamed of futures, the narrative rotates between New York in 1999 and the friends’ childhoods in the Dominican Republic. Early in the novel, Sal thinks: “Wasn’t that the point of leaving everything behind to come to this country? To live entirely unlike who they might have been on the island?”

Both characters make strides toward these possible lives. Sal starts publicly dating another man—something he couldn’t have even imagined in Santo Domingo—and he finds a job teaching at a community garden. Charo leaves her baby with a sitter while she goes out with her friends to party, equally unthinkable for a mother on the island. Yet the friends are haunted by the expectations of others. They question if what they want aligns with what they should want: Charo wonders why she feels unhappy when she has a loving partner who wants to support her so she can be a stay-at-home mother, and Sal sabotages his relationship and job prospects while thinking of friends who never had his opportunities.

In every moment, Sal finds memories of abandoned friends—other queer people who had no access to this new life, or who lost their lives in an attempt to reach what Sal now has. Survivor’s guilt becomes a mental block—a voice convincing him that he has no right for love or success. He mocks a queer ice cream shop owner who says the business is a memorial to her own dead friend; Sal states, “[T]hat’s what people do with the dead, turn them into symbols to serve the living.” He doesn’t want to transform his dead friend into a symbol, but that makes it impossible to grieve. Sal seems to believe that his guilt is a requirement to remember his dead friend, that to stop feeling guilty would require forgetting.

Just as Sal is haunted by the ghost of a lost friend, Charo is weighed down by familial obligations to her daughter and parents. She wants a life where she can be herself—Charo the woman who cares for her friends as deeply as she does her child—but she cannot find the balance between herself and supporting her family. Every step towards herself is met with a rebuke from her parents asking for money or her partner reminding her that she is a mother. From every direction, Charo is told that any other Dominican woman would be ecstatic to have her life. Charo begins to see motherhood as a limitation when it’s actually the weight of others’ expectations that stifle her.

Caught in limbo, Sal and Charo meander between their pasts and present, generating the novel’s wandering structure and allowing the readers to experience what it feels like to be anchored to the past. The novel’s dual perspectives and shifting time become a way to express the characters’ disorientation on the page. At the strongest emotional moments, the narrative collapses and gives way for memory to overtake the present. The reader moves through the novel not in a traditional linear narrative, but in one guided by grief, desire, and memory. All of this is conveyed through Heredia’s compassionate voice, which explores Sal and Charo’s shifting feelings without ever feeling melodramatic.

The novel presents a possible answer for how to move forward without forgetting through Don Julio, Sal’s older roommate. Don Julio first appears only to offer Sal a baked good. As the novel progresses, the man continues to show up, always tinkering with a recipe. Later in the novel we learn the root of Don Julio’s baking hobby: His first batch of cupcakes was an attempt at an apology to someone he hurt. That apology was rejected, but Don Julio kept baking. Each new cupcake or cookie or brownie was another attempt to be better than the man he was in his youth. Don Julio never forgot his guilt, but he learned to be better for himself.

Loca leads us to points where Sal and Charo must choose how to move forward—how they choose to remember and still move forward. The novel questions how we enact remembrance and continue to live. It follows three people burdened by guilt to show that there’s no universal answer—only the choices we make in the face of it.

------------

Marcos Damián León is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University and a managing editor at Iron Horse Literary Review. He is writing a novel about the exploitation of farm workers in Central California. His work has appeared in The Taco Bell Quarterly, the LA Review of books, and others.