JALEN GIOVANNI JONES is a Black and Filipino writer from Los Angeles. His work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Workshop, the Tin House Workshop, and the Lambda Literary Retreat, and he will be attending the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in summer 2025. A winner of the David Madden MFA Award and Five Minute Lit’s Fall 2024 Contest, Jalen’s writing can be found in Electric Literature, The Offing, Foglifter, and elsewhere. He is the Assistant Editor for the Southern Review, the Social Media Editor for Electric Literature, and a third year at LSU’s MFA in Creative Writing. He’s also directed the Delta Mouth Literary Festival, and once, Emma Stone generously stepped on his foot. You can reach him on Bluesky @jalengjones.bsky.social and IG @jalen_g_jones
Jalen Giovanni Jones (JGJ): Loca is a dual-perspective novel with two deeply rich characters, Sal and Charo, and you balance the two perspectives so effortlessly—not just between chapters, but within them. Not all writers can pull that off this well. What was it about the story that made the dual perspective feel necessary? And was it natural for you to write into that duality, or was that aspect breaking new ground for you craft wise?
Alejandro Heredia (AH): It felt pretty natural writing the novel in this way, especially because Charo and Sal came to me together, in conversation with each other. When I was trying to think of these characters, they were always talking to each other. I was paying a lot of attention to what they were saying to each other, but also paying a lot of attention to what they were not saying, and what they were withholding. It always felt to me that the novel needed to be about the two of them, about their friendship, but also about the moments where their lives collided, diverged, and went in separate directions.
JGJ: So interesting that they came to you together, already as a pair. Did you have any particular strategies to get to know these characters? Or did they appear to you almost fully formed, more or less?
AH: For this novel, it was always a long process of discovery. There were things that I knew about them from the start—I always knew that Sal was really into astronomy, and I always knew that he was running away from the past he was trying to sort of look away from. I always knew that Charo had this complex relationship to motherhood. But there was so much about them that I didn't know, that I discovered through the process of writing. [Drafting Loca], I moved through the novel pretty straightforwardly. I don't go back and forth a lot during a first draft. Then when I come back, and as I'm revising, I'm trying to tease out how I can iron out the emotional logic of these characters, to make sure that they make sense on the page, and that they're making decisions that feel real regardless of how the reader might feel about them—that they feel like it makes sense for the character.
JGJ: You inhabit a lot of similarities with Sal, you both being queer Dominican men, and Charo, also Dominican, but a woman. Was it ever more difficult tapping into Charo and inhabiting her experiences, due to the slightly greater distance in how you identify compared to Sal?
AH: They were both difficult in their own ways. I mean Sal, even though we share on a very superficial level these identities, we are very different people. He was difficult to write about because he is somebody who is so withholding; he's a bit elusive and opaque at times, and wants us to honor that because he's opaque to himself just as he is to other people. That was hard, teetering the line between figuring out how much I wanted to divulge about his life, and how much I wanted to leave mysterious, to unfold naturally throughout the novel. So that was really, really, really challenging. It was one of the biggest challenges of the novel.
I think that there's an assumption that readers have, that because we are sort of similar in superficial ways, that Sal would come easier to me. But I think Charo’s journey actually came easier to me, because I grew up watching the women in my life so closely. A lot of the questions that I had about motherhood, and being in community, and feeling claustrophobic in community, they came a little bit easier to me.
JGJ: The claustrophobia of community—let's get into that. How do you feel that community can become claustrophobic? I’m sure especially in a place like New York City, where everybody is stacked on top of each other, that’s especially the case.
AH: Part of what I was trying to explore in the novel was the ways in which community can save us, but also try to force us to conform to versions of ourselves that we have no interest in aligning ourselves with. Throughout the novel Charo feels very good about being around a bunch of Dominicans in the Bronx, in what I call Dominican Village, right? She is able to listen to music from her culture. She works at a place where most of the people are Dominican. She doesn't have to explain herself in so many ways. And that comes through the privilege of having this immigrant community in the Bronx in the 90s. The drawback of that is that people in her neighborhood are imposing these ideas of motherhood, womanhood, and personhood onto her that she doesn't feel are always aligned.
There's a scene in the beginning of the novel where she's walking to the hair salon, and she comes across two of her parents' friends who are reporting back to them. For her, that's claustrophobic. She's like, “I'm here to be sort of a new version of myself. I immigrated and left my home behind so that I can be someone new, and yet I have these folks watching me and reporting my every move to my parents back home.” There's a real tension there that I wanted to explore. Community, for me, has never been entirely good or entirely bad. It's complicated. I wanted to draw out these moments where it feels good, but also the moments of tension. At least for Charo, it makes her feel like she can only be a mom in one way. She can only be a woman in one way, a person in one way, because that's what’s accepted where she is.
JGJ: I love that. Maybe this is specific to the literary world, but I feel like everybody's always saying that “community is the answer.” It's talked about like it's this pure and good thing, and in a lot of ways it can actually be challenging. It can be claustrophobic. Suffocating, making you feel like you have to be a certain way. Charo’s journey really captures that.
Talking about these dual characters, this story also has that sort of duality in its settings, between the Bronx and Santo Domingo. Me knowing you personally as a writer, I know you're always on the move for your career. My question is: how are you able to ground yourself as a writer who's always on the move? And by extension, how are you able to ground your writing?
AH: In some ways I don't know. I'm cheating a little bit, because this entire novel is about the place that I know best: the Dominican Village in the Bronx. The Dominican community in the Bronx I know like the back of my hand. It's where I grew up, and it's where my roots are, and in so many ways a lot of writing about the Bronx in the 90s came naturally to me.
In my own life, I don't know that I feel very grounded. I have moved so much the last few years; since 2020 I've moved maybe seven or eight times within New York, and then eventually outside of New York to pursue writing. But I will say that it has been really beneficial to leave home behind. It has allowed me to look at my home anew, so that I can ask myself some questions from a distance about this place that I believed I knew very well.
Currently I’m curious about the non-Dominican communities in the Bronx, and the moments of connection and tension between and across communities. I've only been able to see that because I've left the Bronx, and have been able to ask myself new questions about that place. So I will say it's really, really helpful to be unmoored by one's familiar basis, but I am also a creature of habit. My writing requires that I have a very boring life. So wherever I am—doesn't matter where I am—I just need to have a boring life, so that I can get some writing done.
JGJ: Oh my gosh, boring life?! And these people are going to parties and are in the club?! You capture it so well.
Obviously this is circled around in the book, but I was wondering if you had any defining beliefs on how immigrating from the DR to the Bronx, that trek in particular, changes people. Those two locations have such a deep history with one another. And do you see that relationship being very different in 1999, when much of the book takes place, compared to now?
AH: I can only speak with authority based on my own experience, in that I moved from Santo Domingo to the Bronx when I was seven. That move is really what made me a writer, because I had to learn a new language when I was seven years old. It made me very hypervigilant and fastidious about words, and why people use one word and not another, why certain translations made sense and some didn't make sense, why people spoke in a particular vernacular and not the other vernacular. It was a way of being hypervigilant about language, as a way of surviving. And so that has impacted my life incredibly.
I moved to the US in September, 2001. The world that I'm writing about in the 1990s isn't so different. I'm writing mostly about 1999, and that isn't so different from New York in 2001, but demographics are definitely changing, right? Walking in the Bronx, for example, you don't see as many bodegas now. You see a bunch of delis who are run by different folks of different migrants, The Bronx continues to be a safe haven for Dominican immigrants, but it as a place is also changing rapidly.
JGJ: Loca also likes to play with time. Things aren’t given to us exactly chronologically. Some parts are totally in the past, some parts are in the novel’s present, and some sections weave in memories of the past into the present. How was it balancing these different time periods, making sure they read smoothly?
AH: The structure was really challenging. It took a couple years, up until I started working with my editor, to figure out a pacing and a structure that made sense for the logic of the book and its thematic elements. So much of the Sal and Charo story is about what you lose when you are not in a responsible relationship to your past. I wanted to play with this very popular theme of “the past is present.” That's why I decided to tell even those scenes of the past and the present action, so that they're happening in the same tense as the present action of the story. It was challenging, but I think it was really fruitful, teasing out that theme of characters who are trying to escape their past, all the while entirely living within how the past informs all the things that they do in the present.
JGJ: You mentioned earlier that when you were learning English, it made you really particular about your relationship with language. That's related to another thing I found really interesting about Loca—sometimes there will be entire sentences that are in Spanish, and there’s this refusal to translate or explain it in a didactic way. I really enjoyed that confidence with which you write, where you don't feel like you have to overexplain yourself. What was the foundation for that decision?
AH: In large part, it came from a desire to not move these characters from the center of their own experience. These are characters that are moving back and forth between English, Spanish, and Spanglish. I wanted to honor that in the book. A lot of it also came from the literary lineage in which I'm writing. There are other writers who have had to italicize their Spanish, who have had to translate whatever other language they were writing into English within the same text. I'm standing on the shoulders of writers who refused to do that, who then gave me permission to also not do that. It wasn't something that I even questioned doing, but that was because I had seen writers like Junot Diaz and others, who refused to translate for a non-Spanish speaking or strictly Anglophone audience in the US. It was both my own confidence and desire to not move these characters from their center, but it was also a privilege, or something that was a gift that was handed to me by the privilege of literary tradition.
JGJ: Let's bring in the title, Loca. I loved how it comes into the story, and how it represents this camaraderie but also this play with gender, which is something that's interrogated throughout the novel. Did you always know that that word was going to be the title? How did it come about?
AH: I did not know that. I had another title for the novel for a very long time, and then I started working with my editor, Yahdon Israel, who in our very first meeting together said “I don't think the title of your book is this other thing. I think the title of your book is Loca—and here's why.” He was able to tease out some of those thematic elements of the book that I just couldn't see, because I was so in it, and had been in it for so long. But as soon as he said it, I was like, “Oh yes, that is the title of the book.” It's playful, but it also resonates with so many of the themes in the book. As you say, it points to some of the fuckery with gender that's happening in the book. It also points to the book's investments in vernacular. It was really important for me to include vernacular, from the various vernacular from the worlds that I come from, in the Bronx and Santo Domingo. So that's Dominican vernacular, Dominican American vernacular, Black American vernacular, American queer vernacular, and Dominican queer vernacular—all these different linguistic worlds that I saw growing up, I wanted to incorporate into the book. The title felt like a perfect way to acknowledge and center that In the book.
“Loca” is also a word that is used to denigrate queer people, as well as cis heterosexual people who are not adhering to the social norms around them. I also wanted to point to that with the title—that this is a book about characters who are at odds with their community, who are trying to find a sense of belonging, but not finding a sense of belonging in the places where they think that they should find it. Where they find community is in friendship, rather than in these other other forms of community.
JGJ: That perfectly leads into my last question for you. In the sleeve of your novel, it talks about how Loca is this exploration of what the possibilities of friendship are, when things like family, nationality, and identity groups fall short. I want to know your take on how identity groups fail us, and how friendship therefore makes up for how those identity groups might not always be enough.
AH: I understand the importance of identity groups in the United States, and I understand the political utility of saying “I share an identity with someone, and therefore we should build political resistance together. We should build community together.” I understand that instinct, and I think it's been very useful for a lot of marginalized groups in this country. It continues to be very useful. However, it also occurs to me that basing or creating community along the lines of shared identity is not enough—one, for the political visions that we might have for our present and our future, but also in regards to trying to live the kinds of nuanced, complex lives that I believe we deserve to be living. The way that we talk about identity in our contemporary moment suggests that you arrive at an understanding of identity, and that's it. I arrive and I understand my Blackness, or I understand my queerness, or my Dominicanness or whatever, then that's it. I've arrived. I've arrived at this community, this identity is something that belongs to me, and then I just remain static for the rest of my life. In contrast, friendship, when it is done with rigor and with intention, is a place where people are allowed to change their minds, change their hearts, evolve, grow, contradict themselves, be imperfect, be a single self or multiple selves, all in one. That feels like a richer place and grounds for creating community, than only on the grounds of “we share an identity.” That, to me, is a beginning. But it can't be the end.
Reading Alejandro Heredia’s stunning debut novel, Loca, feels like you’re being welcomed into a new friend group. Centered around a pair of Dominican immigrant best friends living in the Bronx, the novel unfolds over the course of a turbulent year on the cusp of the new millennium. As any best friendship does, Loca welcomes you with an immediacy and generosity that makes any time and place feel like home. Dancing away existential dread, over numb feet at a New York City nightclub. Tangled in a new lover’s sheets, glowing by the fish tank. Quiet under a pillow-fort, watching anime like little kids. When secrets are unearthed, and you learn of the pasts that haunt your new closest friends, it feels devastatingly personal. The further I got through the book, the more my heart ached; I didn’t want it to end.
Since becoming friends with Alejandro through a mutual writer friend of ours, I’ve thought much about the ways in which we, as writers inhabiting many of the same communities and identity labels, challenge and support one another. Across their similarities and differences, Loca’s Sal and Charo do the same: they build each other up, but also push each other to test their limits. It’s through these relationships that I believe many of us, knowingly or not, find deep revelation. Meeting with Alejandro over Zoom, I aimed for our conversation to dig deep into the claustrophobia and challenges of “community,” the craft choices behind his generously written novel, how identity groups sometimes fail us, and how friendship might make up for it all.
Loca. Alejandro Heredia, Simon & Schuster , 2025. 352 pages.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Jalen Giovanni Jones
