How a politician went from celebrated hero to forgotten nobody

Street musicians in New Orleans, the setting of Herrera's new novel
Street musicians in New Orleans, the setting of Herrera’s new novel - iStock Editorial

Benito Juárez is a towering figure in Mexican history. During his 14 years as president (1858–1872), he brought about sweeping liberal reform, led his side to victory in a civil war and beat off an imperial French invasion.

He had also, briefly, been an exile. Banished by his political enemies, he’d spent 18 months between 1853 and 1855 washed up in New Orleans. Little is known of what Juárez did for that year-and-a-half; Season of the Swamp, an inventive fourth novel by the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, speculates about how he may have spent it.

Herrera is careful not to present his subject as a president-in-waiting. In fact, he’s careful not to present him much at all. Juárez moves through these pages like a ghost: always there, but never quite in focus. Herrera has him working menial jobs, sleeping in cheap boarding houses and drifting through the city; but he gives away little about Juárez’s appearance, his inner world, or his life before exile. There are fleeting glimpses of Juarez the politician, as he meets with others to plot his return to Mexico. But for much of the novel, he’s an immigrant Everyman, “not knowing words and not being seen” – one anonymous individual among thousands trying to build a life in New Orleans.

Herrera has lived in New Orleans for over a decade. That adopted city, if anything, is this novel’s central character, “a living creature… forever renewing itself”. It’s vividly evoked: music, violence, mud, heat, yellow fever, in a labyrinth of opera halls and coffee houses, brothels and swamps. Herrera sets particular emphasis on the city’s ugliest aspect: its entanglement with the trade in enslaved people. Juárez, an ignorant foreigner, functions as a handy narrative device to lay out its complicated racial hierarchies: “if you want to be on the safe side,” he’s told, “just remember that on one side are the whites, and on the other everyone else.” In a secondary, and largely well-handled, plot, he helps to rescue a black fugitive.

Season of the Swamp is a self-assured investigation of New Orleans, and a lyrical meditation on the immigrant experience. Lisa Dillman has done an admirable job of capturing its sounds and rhythms in English. Juarez, Herrera stresses, “transform[ed]... his country”. By the end of this evocative little book, one wonders if Louisiana may have transformed Juárez too.


Seasons of the Swamp is published by And Other Stories at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books