The Mexican Novelist Who Found Himself in New Orleans

There’s an argument to be made that New Orleans is as much a part of Yuri Herrera as the cities in Mexico that raised him. He’s lived here for 13 years. It’s where he met his wife and adopted two dogs; where he gained a deeper understanding of the codes and contradictions of being Black, white and brown in America; where he lost a good friend to violence; and where he earned, if not quite enemies, something like them.

“Where you live, there should be someone who hates your guts,” he said, laughing. “That’s how you know you’re not a tourist.”

In other words, New Orleans — the good and bad of it — has changed him. For a writer who revels in experimentation and sees “risk in feeling too much in control,” perhaps it is the city’s ability to disrupt and unsettle that has made him stay so long.

“This is a city that transforms the way you understand freedom, the way you understand work, the way you relate to the elements,” Herrera said. “This is not a comfortable city. It is a challenging, movable one.”

New Orleans, or Herrera’s version of it, shifts and vibrates across every page of his latest novel, “Season of the Swamp.” Set in the 1850s against the exile of the Mexican politician and eventual president Benito Juárez, the book sees Herrera return to many of the preoccupations that have long given his writing a sense of urgency: the dynamics of power, the politics of identity, migration (forced and otherwise), violence and the plasticity of language.

Much of Herrera’s previous work has been infused with the atmospheres and ideas that animate social realities in Mexico. Now, in imagining a brief interlude in the life of one of his country’s most revered public figures, Herrera aims to capture essential truths of a uniquely American city.