In Alejandro Heredia’s You’re the Only Friend I Need, two young boys navigate the tension and social pressures surrounding gender expression and fluidity. When they meet Ren, who embraces femininity in their dress, their eyes sparkle with a sense of comfort, as well as a sense of fear. Which includes the very real threat of punishment from authorities who deem their gender expression unnatural and in need of policing. Heredia captures this fear,“Noel does not think it, refuses to turn his feeling into thought for fear that will paralyze him. He feels it. The body responding to danger, to the possibility of meeting the baton of some cop, dressed as they are” (39). The novel also highlights the lingering impact of colonialism, particularly through the reference to Parque Colón, where a statue of Christopher Columbus towers over the square, “At the center, a statue of the colonizer looms over the square…He stands in all of his power. As if to say, ‘If I found you, I can lead you.’ As if he were the center of the whole universe…” (33). This imagery serves as a stark reminder of how Spanish colonization reshaped cultural and social structures, imposing rigid ideals of gender and morality. Within Mestizo circles, I have heard discussions about how, before colonization, Indigenous communities had a more fluid understanding of sex and gender beliefs that the Spanish deemed unholy and sought to suppress through forced conversion and cultural erasure. It’s striking how those colonial ideals continue to shape societal norms today.
This struggle for self definition and acceptance also resonates with Eli Clare’s The Mountain, where people across various identities are forced to climb the brutal slope of “normalcy” and “success.” The mountain demands assimilation, offering no space for difference, no peace for those who refuse to conform. It is a reminder that, even now, systems of power work to constrain identity rather than allow it to flourish.
This is such an amazing post and an excellent point. I noticed the details within “You’re the Only Friend I Need” that you mention here, and I think Heredia composed them in such a way that they are a focal point of the story, even if they do not stand front and center. I like how you connected the boys’ fear of repercussions to the broader social context of colonization— “The mountain demands assimilation” is a sharp way to describe domination. I think it is imperative that we (as a society) realize that homophobia and transphobia historically, consistently have racism built within them, because of the insinuations that those cultures which celebrate diversity are “inferior” or “less sophisticated.”
I love how you apply the racial contextualization to this story! The machismo society of the Dominican Republic adds a deep layer to the analysis of this scene, giving a different cultural perspective to the U.S. perspective of ridicule of gender expression and experimentation that we are familiar with. I think further exploring the implications of this environment on queer people and identities would be a very interesting topic to write on, especially if it is posed against the texts that we have looked at referring to the U.S. reactions to the same types of identities.