REVIEW: Season of the Swamp / Yuri Herrera
Season of the Swamp
Yuri Herrera
Trans. by Lisa Dillman
Graywolf
Review by Spencer Tierney
A man from Oaxaca, Mexico, arrives in New Orleans in 1853. The border bureaucrat asks him his profession. Abogado, lawyer. The bureaucrat gazes blankly at him and writes down Merchant. The official asks for the man’s age. 47. The official pauses and writes down 21. And the man’s name? The reader won’t know for a while.
In his latest novel Season of the Swamp (Graywolf Press, 2024), award-winning author Yuri Herrera – teaming up again with translator Lisa Dillman – focuses on Benito Juárez, a Mexican president who led the country’s progressive reforms in the late 1800s. In a recent interview with Antigravity Magazine, Herrera explains that Juárez is to Mexico what Lincoln is to the U.S. But the novel focuses not on this man’s power or influence but his identity before all that legacy.
Herrera prefaces the book with a note about Benito Juárez. He was a former governor of Oaxaca who went into political exile in New Orleans for nearly 18 months before returning to Mexico. But that period is mostly blank in historical documents. Herrera’s short novel, brimming with well-researched nuance about New Orleans in 1853, begins where the history books end to tell this unwritten chapter of Juárez’s life.
The novel is as much about a man as it is about New Orleans. Jazz hasn’t been invented yet, but the city already sings, mostly in operas and experimental piano concerts. But where revelry appears, so do police officers—called “badges,” a signature Herrera-Dillman literary technique across books to defamiliarize the reader with a recurring word filled with a new potent meaning. Regardless of the badges’ presence, the city is full of fights, fires, and disease, leading sometimes to bodies in the streets. But more often than not, there are parties.
The start of chapter two showcases Herrera’s stylistic flair and playfulness as the third-person narration grapples with describing how life in New Orleans is going:
The most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the drumming; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the dances; no…the concerts…no…what happened in the weeks that followed was that they stopped feeling like weeks…because the city…stopped being a city of cons and wheeling and dealing and became a living creature, an animal that initially began to wriggle…and then as if nothing in the world mattered more than dancing.
Like a musical prelude, this long yet punchy two-sentence paragraph captures the pleasant chaos of Juárez’s adjustment to New Orleans. The more he hears the city drumming like a heartbeat, the more time—this “season” of his life, as the title suggests—moves differently. More than that, if the city is an animal, then its habitat is literally the swamp that New Orleans is built on.
The title’s “swamp” also relates to the politically loaded phrase “drain the swamp”: Corruption and bad influences exist in New Orleans but not how authorities in the 1850s would interpret things. Faced with language barriers, Juárez deciphers only snatches of news from English-speaking newspapers, which often serve as reminders of America’s dark past: Ads for finding runaway enslaved people, a woman arrested for wearing men’s clothes. Later, he will briefly witness a horrific marketplace where people sell people and a commodities trader who describes trafficked humans as simply “hands.” The biggest evils in New Orleans at the time were embedded in the legal and policed norms, not the drunken festivities.
The novel does not dwell in despair, though, but rather focuses on the protagonist’s journey of rebuilding his life, however temporarily, in America. Juárez spends his time meeting with other political exiles from Mexico, working various jobs, and learning of New Orleans from coffee shop patrons—that is, before the yellow fever epidemic of 1853 throws his plans to return home into jeopardy. Through it all, the reader gets Juárez’s inspiring portrait of New Orleans: “What a place, forever renewing itself as though the swamp made no matter.”
Poetic vibrancy and myth are intrinsic to much of Herrera’s writing. His award-winning novella Signs Preceding the End of the World layered a minimalist U.S.-Mexico migration story with chapter titles taken from the nine phases of death in the Aztec Mictlān mythology. Season of the Swamp takes on a specific slice of history and fuses it with travelogue, fever-laden dreams, and the mystery of a recurring tattoo.
The plot meanders more than it escalates, especially in the season of sickness, and knowing the main character more as “he” than by name takes some adjusting. Some characters stride into the story without introduction, which can be confusing at first. But there’s a richness in this novel that makes up for the disorienting parts. Seeing a man learn how policy and power leave behind so many people remains a timeless kind of story.
And, yes, it’s also a story about a swamp. There’s the literal: Juárez gets to arguably the heart of New Orleans in a swamp where a man of the Houma tribe captures a gator with a machete. When asked where he’s from, the man says Bulbancha, one of the original names for New Orleans. And there’s the figurative swamp: America not as a melting pot – a brutal image of assimilation – but as a swamp, full of diverse lives co-existing. Dancing, fighting, dreaming.
