LA ESTACION DEL PANTANO

THE SWAMP SEASON offers a view of the arrested and uncertain time that always precedes revolution, the action of a few bold people trying to reverse the established order. Benito Juarez became the first indigenous president of Mexico in 1858 but before that he spend some time in exile in the US, specifically in New Orleans, with other liberals, accessing into a multifaceted and international new milieu. Little is known of his time in New Orleans so this book aims to fill the the "hole marked by the full stop" in Juárez's autobiography. Accompanied by a small group of political exiles, in 1853 Juárez disembarks in a fascinating yet stinking city that, located on the banks of a swamp, absorbs them like a sponge. New Orleans is a beehive of heterogeneous identities where imprisoned women are sold on the streets and where capitalism shows its most grotesque primitive drive. Juárez and his companions surrender to the mud, to the jasmine flowers, to the music, to the strangeness of the language and to the unbearable summer, but, above all, they come face to face with the stark and neverending reality of the trade in human beings. Yuri Herrera dives into History to offer us a masterly novel that, with great storytelling power, while firmly based on archival research, manages to find a secret key to a present in the open. Herrera writes with the overwhelming freedom and transgression that characterizes his works and brings a feast of brilliant poetic images and gorgeous language.

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.