Author Night at Hubbell Library: Yuri Herrera

Season of the Swamp

In 1853, young Mexican exile Benito Juárez spent 18 months in New Orleans. Herrera imagines that time and how it prepared him to become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas.

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
 
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.
 
Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

Yuri Herrera (Actopan, Hidalgo, México, 1970) received his BA in Political Science at UNAM, MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. His first novel Trabajos del reino (in English: Kingdom Cons) won the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven 2003 and received the “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008; his second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) was finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His third novel is La transmigración de los cuerpos 
(Transmigration of Bodies). The three novels have been translated into multiple languages, and published in English by the British publisher And Other Stories. He has also published two books for children in Mexico: ¡Éste es mi nahual! and Los ojos de Lía.   

In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. In 2016 Rice University and Literal Publishing published Talud, a collection of his short stories. Also in 2016 he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are the historical narrative A Silent Fury: The El BordoMine Fire, and the sci fi short stories collection Diez planetas. He has taught literary theory, creative writing and Latin American literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico; and at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, before coming to Tulane University, where he is an Associate Professor.  

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