Alejandro Heredia

In his column, Alejandro Heredia meditates on the concept and practice of community: is it a group of people who beyond identity might have no personal and interpersonal bonds, or a commodity for corporations, non-profits, egotistical activists, and social media spiritual gurus looking to make profit off of an increasingly conscious society, or is it shared visions of the future as building blocks of collective living?

Columnist Alejandro Herredia meditates on the democratic power of perreo.

Tenderness teaches us that if we consider softness with enough rigor, if we consider ourselves with enough softness, a wound is a portal, not an end. 

I faked all of my book reports as a kid – I hated reading. I got good grades in my ESL classes only because of some natural ability with words. At least that’s what teachers said. Gifted. My ease with diction and syntax had less to do with natural ability and more to do with my growing ability to adapt. I was surviving.

Alejandro Herredia debuts his new Tasteful Rude column with a meditation on the word opacity.

This imagined town in North Carolina, where all of Kenan’s stories take place, is home to preachers, farmers, Black and white people, the rich and poor. In this town lives a queer Black boy, Horace Cross, whose life is being shrunk by the social boundaries delimiting his desire, the same machinations of shame and disregard that turn many young Black queer people into ghosts of themselves.