That said, I have never been exiled. The subject of this week\u2019s book is an exile, and it made me think there might be a reverse to \u201ca prophet has no honor in their hometown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A book that is set in New Orleans\u2014just an all-timer of a setting. Swampy, Romantic, musical, interested in interesting architecture\u2014all of that, of course, masking the ugliness and brutality and suffering both the land and the people can often inflict. A book, despite all that, is about Mexico. A book that\u2019s about politics and revolution, but those things keep getting interrupted by pedestrian issues like \u201cwe don\u2019t have any money\u201d and \u201cwe aren\u2019t from here.\u201d This is as disorienting as these initial paragraphs get, which I imagine mirrors the characters\u2019 feelings, because I\u2019m talking, of course, about Season Of The Swamp<\/em> by Yuri Herrera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Season Of The Swamp<\/em> by Yuri Herrera<\/strong>: the basics of this wonderfully brief novel are this: future first Indigenous Head of State in the Americas, Benito Ju\u00e1rez, is about as far away from that dream as he can be. The recently restored Santa Anna government has exiled Benito and his main homies, and they’ve landed in New Orleans in the 1850s. So, you know. Importing slaves is illegal, but slavery is still the law of of the land, and jazz hasn’t been invented yet. No word if Benito had beignets, but it’s always possible I missed something. Point is, it’s not Mardi Gras ’04 With The Bros, but it still New Orleans<\/em>\u2014racially diverse, a mishmash of a few very strong cultural flavors, and hot as Hell in the summer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a lot in this novel, given its length. Each section its own sort of capsule, building to Juarez’s return to Mexico. It’s all imagined, I should say, so when I type “we see his politics developing,” that’s made up. I don’t typically go for these types of historical novels\u2014scars from otherwise well-meaning, upper middlebrow Boomers reading antebellum historical fiction and imploring me to remember that “not every white person was bad, you know.” Perhaps I just needed one aligned with my politics (and set in New Orleans). But I think two things: the shortness and focus<\/em> of this book does it a lot of favors, and the idea that an Indigenous leader could rise up out of any right wing morass is an inspiring story worth being rehearsed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It also helps that Herrera is an incredible writer. I almost couldn’t finish the book, how much I was stopping to write down epigraphs in my phone’s notes app. The really strong part I wanted to focus on is when Benito and homies are in a slave market. Maybe the most concise way to put it is the unedited first notes I wrote, the moment I finished the novel: it is remarkable how clearly people from other countries can see the U.S. for what it is. This novel has an incredibly wrenching depiction of a slave market. I don\u2019t want to get into details, but safe to say it\u2019s an indictment of the evil hive mind white supremacy creates. It shows how, despite its hegemony, in some ways? The colonial empire of the Americas\u2014the entrenched colonial white supremacy of the U.S. and Canada, and the more insidiously assimilated white supremacy (from Spain and Portugal on up to 19th- and 20th-century U.S.) of Central and South America\u2014that order is frail. That order depends on a capitalist hive mind, this Hobbesian fiction that life is necessarily nasty, brutish, and short. Life should be<\/em> exciting, beautiful, and dignified. Capitalism and empire depend on humans competing in a zero-sum game, and that order does not<\/em> have to stand. Something new can built, on more equitable foundations, on more sustainable foundations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? I recently got put on to Madlib’s solo work (of course I am a big MF DOOM fan), which led me to his jazz band, Yesterday’s New Quintet. I put on the Stevie<\/em> album because 38 minutes seemed like a good amount of time to sample someone’s work while committing to a whole album\u2014then, I realized that it was all Stevie Wonder covers. OH NO ALL STEVIE WONDER COVERS. Been a hit in Casa de Corlew, Mal even asked me to send her the link. So I found a YouTube video, and here you go:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"book,](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_6466-768x1024.jpg\")