The latest addition to my website isYuri Herrera‘s La estación del pantano (Season of the Swamp). Future Mexican president Benito Juárez was exiled by president Antonio López de Santa Anna. Juárez and his companions end up in New Orleans. It is 1853. We know tthey were there for eighteen months but we know nothing of what they did in that time. This is Herrera’s imagining of their stay.They struggle but manage to find work. They are horrified by slavey which they see in all of its brutality. They enjoy the carnival but hate the summer when yellow fever is rife. They see crime everywhere but also police brutality. Herrera gives a very colourful account of mid-nineteenth New Orleans as seen from the perspective of exiled Mexicans.