Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera

Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp is a fierce piece of speculative history about an undocumented period in the life of Mexico’s first indigenous president, Benito Juarez (1806-1872).

For eighteen months between December 1853 and June 1855, Juarez lived in exile in New Orleans. Although this period is mentioned in every biography about Juarez, what his life was like during his time there remains a mystery. Herrera has employed his brilliant imagination to fill in the gaps and build a world that is richly creative and yet firmly grounded in archival reports of the vibrant melting-pot that was nineteenth-century New Orleans.

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