In 2017, at a city council hearing, without planning or much thought, I got up to read an original poem about the merits of being a Bronx resident. I wanted to take a stance against gentrification in my neighborhood, against the displacement of dozens of local businesses and residents alike. I’m not a poet—even when I wrote poetry I knew I wasn’t very good. Still, I couldn’t deny the energy burning up the room after I finished reading that piece.
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The crowd made up of Bronx residents cheered and hollered. The government officials, ostensibly our enemies in that space, looked at me in awe. In one moment, I’d proven to myself and everyone in that room that art has a unique power, a specialized shiny role in the fight for justice. But I didn’t let the moment fill me up with pride. I did, instead, the (very evasive) thing I have always done in the wake of personal achievement: I used the moment to propel me to do better, smarter, more impactful work, for me and my community.
I was writing stories while I was organizing against gentrification in The Bronx in 2016. I was using my lunch breaks to write my novel while I worked as an assistant at a union, under one of its organizing departments, in 2018. I lived a typical young writer’s life in my twenties, squeezing writing hours wherever I could. But unlike some of my writer friends, I actually enjoyed my day jobs. Organizing pushed me to think in the language of strategy, impact, power. All useful words in combating the forces of displacement, or the greed of corporations looking to cut costs at the expense of the creative economy.
On top of paying the bills and teaching me invaluable skills like how to create a toolkit, how to request a permit for a mobilization in a public space, and how to run a successful digital campaign, through these jobs I also got to meet incredible people, like actors who’d given up their creative careers to organize full time on behalf of their fellow artists, or activists who’d been leading movements in the streets of New York since the 1970s.
It has been liberating, to separate my political action out in the world from my individual, artistic curiosities on the page.
I grew up in working class barrios in Santo Domingo and The Bronx, two places where one’s fate is deeply connected to that of one’s neighbor. Often, these connections lead to problematic places, like that time my cousins hooked our satellite connection to the neighbor’s so our family wouldn’t have to pay for cable, the time a group of local gangsters vowed to kill my brother due to some mess he’d gotten himself into, or the time my uncle’s neighbor plotted to stab him, because my uncle had crossed some imagined (and, my grandmother would say, bullshit) property line. Feuding with neighbors is the norm, where I come from. But so is all the positive stuff that comes to mind when one thinks about a neighborhood: taking care of each other’s children, offering each other unwarranted advice, keeping an eye on a vecina’s cheating husband, gifting each other second-hand clothes.
I internalized a lot of self-hatred about my communities growing up. I hyper-fixated on all the things wrong with my upbringing. But my work helped me see the value of what we could do together, when we weren’t fighting. Throughout my years as an organizer, I witnessed gatherings in building lobbies, in community centers, in front of company headquarters and government consulates.
I learned, too, that literature can have a place in these movements for justice. My education taught me that the works of writers like James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, even the plays of Shakespeare in small towns in Haiti, as Edwidge Danticat has written about, have had and continue to have a great impact on the ideological blueprints of revolutionary movements and community building efforts.
As the common adage in activist spaces goes, “everyone has a place in the movement.” And writers, intentionally or not, have contributed in large and small ways to the progress of social justice. Some writers, like June Jordan, have argued that a writer’s responsibility is to be as engaged with her community as she is with the page. Or, said differently by Toni Cade Bambara, “the role of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.”
In 2023, before I left my last community organizing job as the convener of 50+ literary organizations gathering to do social justice work, I had the great privilege of working with Iris Morales. Iris, who has been an activist since her adolescence, all through the Young Lord’s movement and beyond, has, in the last few decades, turned to literature. She started her own press, Red Sugarcane Press, she’s co-authored children’s books inspired by a 1969 Young Lords protest, and she’s written seminal texts centering the leadership of women of color in revolutionary movements.
In our few conversations, over the phone and in person, Iris emphasized the life-long perseverance needed to dedicate one’s life to justice. She also emphasized the need to be dexterous. Here, I paraphrase: “I didn’t believe in voting as an avenue for change. I don’t know that I still do, entirely. But we need everything. Voting, protests, art, literature. We need all of it to make the world a better place.”
Iris validated the work I’d spent nearly a decade doing. I had proven to myself that the intersection of literature and activism was serious enough to dedicate one’s life to. And I had found the perfect avenue, with a salary and benefits, to continue doing this work. But that’s exactly when I realized that I needed to leave the world of organizing behind.
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It took a long time to arrive at my own ideas about the world. I wanted, like everyone around me, to believe deeply that the language of social justice could be the balm for our collective struggle. I still believe deeply in community organizing, as one of the few avenues through which a people can express their dignity and self-determination. But my own truth is that I find the language of social justice stifling and reductive, increasingly so as it’s been co-opted by the masses who use said language to build social media platforms, political careers, advertisements.
Social justice has become another thing to hide behind to avoid accountability, another altar to which we’re expected to bow to without thought or critique. We treat the language of social justice as scripture rather than what it is: an ideology, a way of looking at people and the world, sometimes useful, sometimes not.
The language of social justice, phrases like political identity and intersectionality, coined by the Combahee River Collective (1977) and Kimberlee Crenshaw (1989) respectively, take on a different use in the 21st century. Phrases that were created to affirm someone’s humanity in the face of anti-blackness, misogyny, homophobia, etc., terms which were originally designed to expand a group’s political and human possibilities, or for practical (and revolutionary) purposes in the court of law, are now used to dehumanize people by putting them into boxes. One’s ideas, behaviors, desires, tastes, relationships, visions of the future; all we are is the sum of our identities and our binary political leanings.
My interest in people and communities persists. Because I continue to write fiction, and have left organizing behind (at least in the form of a 9 to 5 job), I feel obligated to make a case for the utility of my work. It has to matter, someway somehow, out in the material world, otherwise, why do I do it? But the truth is, half the time I’m convinced that writers overemphasize the political power of our work. Every time I’m asked to give a talk about the intersection of activism and literature, I have to remind people: literature is not the protest, it’s not the community garden, or affordable child care, or universal healthcare. It’s literature.
Legendary poet and educator June Jordan understood that if literature is to be useful in educating, in moving, in inspiring, it should be the first step. “I want to kick, pull, drag people into action,” she said in an interview once about her work. Jordan understood the power of poetry, but based on her work, and even just this statement, I think she would say that the difficult and most important part is still left, after you’ve read the poem and dissected the short story: we still need to take action.
Another problem with collapsing literature and activism is that it has become common to suggest that a piece of writing is only “good” if it is politically useful. But forget the fact that sometimes it’s the work that reiterates the status quo as feigned resistance that gets the flowers and the money in our literary landscape. The point is that judging a novel or story’s value based only on its political utility is reductive, at best; at worst, disrespectful to the rigor that writers put into their work. And yet, that is much of how contemporary society values literature and writers, from how non-profits and residencies doll out awards and resources, to how reading communities engage with our work. What “communities” does this work represent? What political issues does it explore?
Maybe my problem isn’t with ideas, but with people. How we dilute everything to its most reductive components. How much we need labels and boxes to mis/understand each other. Before and alongside the language of social justice, there are gods, nations, hood feuds, all small and large ways we set ourselves apart from the other.
In contrast, the novel is capacious. It gives me the freedom to think about community in ways that being an organizer didn’t always allow me to do. In my work, goodness is difficult to come by. Messed up people and saints all have to put up with each other. People fail, people thrive, people exist within, in contrast to, and far beyond the confines of their supposed identities.
At the center of my novel, Loca, is the question of communal responsibility. I was trying, and continue to try, to wrestle with this question. How can we be responsible to each other, not only through ideas, but through embodied action and everyday living?
Toward the end of the book there’s a short scene between a young Dominican man finally facing all the hurt he’s been trying to run from, and a librarian. I created the librarian as racially ambiguous. She could be “from everywhere and nowhere at once,” I write. Inspired by a prior conversation, the young man asks her, “who are your people?” (a question, by the way, that I learned in a training right before a protest.
Community organizing language is all over my work, much as I try to resist it). What he is trying to understand, perhaps, is what country, or race, or ethnic group she belongs to. But the librarian doesn’t clarify her ethnicity. She doesn’t align herself with a gendered solidarity to other women. She doesn’t even name her family, a lover, friends. Instead, she claims “other librarians” as her own.
When I write, I am insisting on a way of looking at the world. What if, more than her political identities or political affiliations, what if this woman, glimpse of a woman as she is, since she only appears once, briefly, for just a few sentences in a 300+ page novel, what if who she claims as her own are the people who share her profession?
I suppose before my time people thought of themselves like this. Did my grandfather think very much about his identity as a carpenter? As an alcoholic? A lover of nature documentaries? Would he have claimed others who shared in these particular human experiences as his own, or did see himself as entirely unique? I don’t know. Maybe I’m blinded by optimism for the way things once were, as so many of us are.
I insist on the utility of fiction…because I believe the language of social justice is not the only way to understand ourselves, to understand each other.
In another scene, two characters discuss the death of a friend. The first man says homophobia is to blame, that the second man shouldn’t blame himself for not showing up as a friend because there were larger forces at play that led to the dead friend’s demise. But the second man doesn’t accept this. He can’t. He’s trying to grapple with the line between systemic injustice and personal responsibility, and it seems, at least in that scene, that blaming homophobia for the death of his friend is too easy, that what we owe each other must be more complicated than these larger stories which would have us believe we’re only puppets playing our role in the sociological scripts that dictate our lives.
In my work, I propose no easy answers. Only questions. Only imperfect people trying to understand what is theirs to carry and what isn’t. What we owe each other and what is unbearably our own responsibility to carry.
To avoid trite binaries, I think it’s helpful to admit both of these major practices have shaped the way I think: organizing prepared me to look at the larger systems that reduce a life. Fiction allows me to understand a life wholly, that a person has their worth and meaning beyond politics, identity, and systemic oppression.
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The only thing more important to me than writing is how I live my life. It’s important for me to show up to mutual aid efforts, to the protest, to the voting booth. Writing good fiction will never supplant the action needed to participate in the commons, as I’ve heard Zadie Smith refer to our shared spaces. But it has been liberating, to separate my political action out in the world from my individual, artistic curiosities on the page.
I recede into the realm of fiction (while I can afford it) because it demands nuance, deep thinking and feeling. And yes, it’s true, a part of it is cowardice. I like my routines and my imagined people on the page. It’s safer than the potential of getting expulsed from college or getting arrested, both of which I’ve risked.
I’m also tired. My friends and I joke about that sometimes. How young we are but how tired, because we’ve been organizing since we were teens. While some of our peers were out enjoying parties, travel, profitable careers, we were out trying to save the world, or at the very least, fulfilling our measly roles in organizations that tried to do good work.
I insist on the utility of fiction not because I think it’s more useful than community organizing (I do not believe that), and not only because writing is my calling in life, which puts me in the position to defend it—I insist because I believe the language of social justice is not the only way to understand ourselves, to understand each other. Fiction offers us a way of looking at people’s interior and interconnected lives that is rigorous, insightful, that holds space for contradiction and opacity. It is not better; it is only different than the mode of contemporary popular thought, and that to me feels worth protecting, even if only because I believe it’s quite alright, despite what folks might say online, that we’re not all thinking in the same mode.
But here I am again, getting lost in nostalgia, saying nothing new—arguing, as people have argued for as long as people have been around:
maybe a good story will do.
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Loca by Alejandro Heredia is available from Simon & Schuster.
