The Bronx as Literary Inspiration: Alejandro Heredia on their debut novel, LOCA

Longlisted for the Centre of Fiction First Novel Prize, LOCA is a novel set in New York in 1999. It follows two best friends, Sal and Charo who are desperately clinging to big dreams and trying not to let the city grind them down. Read on to hear more from the author!

A friend asked me recently, “how does it feel to write about a version of the city that doesn’t exist anymore?”

My novel, LOCA, takes place in The Bronx, 1999. With his question, said friend was alluding to how much New York has changed in the last three decades. At the very end of the 20th century, New York, and especially The Bronx, was recovering from steep economic neglect, violence, crime, the AIDS epidemic, but it was still a grimy, difficult city.

Like earlier decades, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you had to know which blocks in The Bronx to never cross at night, what time to avoid those endless stairs up to Highbridge, what bodega or pizza shop was a drug spot, what hospital emergency room would leave you for dead, which middle school would inevitably lead your kid to join a gang, or worse, to become the victim of a sordid tiguere’s initiation. Rent was cheap, but the quality of living reflected that. Our intercoms didn’t work, heat and hot water was regularly out, and rats, not mice, alongside various species of mold, ruled over our apartments.

Growing up, I felt deep shame about being from The Bronx. I internalized all the stereotypes about violence, poverty, and indolence usually associated with my hometown. It’s what made me a good student. It’s what made me ambitious. All throughout high school I thought to myself, “I’m better than my surroundings. I’m going to work really hard, get a scholarship, and make something of my life.”

It wasn’t until college, with the privilege of distance and in the face of deep racism (it’s a stereotype, but it’s true, someone actually asked me once: “oh you’re from The Bronx?

Have you ever been shot before?”) that the pendulum turned the other way: I started to question why I was so filled with shame, and started to focus instead on all my hometown had taught me about endurance, street smarts, about community living. I was defensive when I heard anyone try to denigrate The Bronx. I filled myself up with pride.

But it was more than pride which propelled me to write about Sal and Charo and all the locas who populate my novel. As Virginia Woolf writes of London in Mrs. Dalloway, and Claude McKay writes of Harlem in Home to Harlem, I wanted to write a version of my city with all its faults and beauties which might stand the test of time.

I believe it is worthwhile endeavor, to try to freeze one’s neighborhood in the amber of prose. If indeed there is a habitable earth, a literate society, in a hundred years, through my work I’d like to communicate to those survivors of apocalypse this sketch of the place I come from. I’d like to say:

This here is the Chinese food spot a dude pulled a gun up on me, there is the train station where I had my first kiss. A few corners away is where that lady sold arepa for over ten years, and down the street is where Sal happened upon two lovers at a diner. That’s the park where Charo played with snow the first time, those are the mighty stairs I climbed to visit my friend in Highbridge, and that over there is the bus I rode to school, where another friend, who is dead now, said to me as he swung from a pole, “You think too much, Alejandro. You gotta have more fun.”

I’d like to say, look at how my people and people like them made a living, look at all the life we made in those mean streets of The Bronx.