Yuri Herrera’s evocative novella, crisply translated by Lisa Dillman, follows the real-life fortunes of Benito Juárez in the cultural melange of 1853 New Orleans. The former governor of Oaxaca was to become Mexico’s first indigenous president, but landed in the US city after he was exiled by his country’s autocratic leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Juárez’s silence about his 18-month sojourn in New Orleans is a gift for a Mexican writer such as Herrera, whose 2020 work, A Silent Fury, reconstructed a 1920 mining tragedy in his home town of Pachuca. Herrera currently teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans, and one can see the appeal of researching and writing a speculative account of a Mexican hero in a landscape you’re exploring yourself. His careful layering of detail is clearly gleaned from newspaper archives and other historical documents.

Herrera brilliantly conveys Juárez’s disorientation on arrival at the city’s port, his attempts to understand the language and the “not being seen”. He has a lot of fun imagining the strait-laced lawyer’s experience of the Mardi Gras (the “spontaneous parades”, “bonfires and drums”, “the clamour of celebration”), the various “coffee shops” he frequents with his fellow conspirators, and the yellow fever epidemic Juárez and his travelling companion, Pepe, are fortunate to survive.

However, the book’s main plot involves the rescue of an escaped slave after Juárez witnesses the plantation owners’ insidious trade of “hands”. “Hands with no person. But of course, each pair of hands had a person. They could convince themselves that what they were doing wasn’t being done to a person if they called them hands.” Later, Juárez watches a wealthy New Yorker call over a waiter to remove a feather that has landed on his shoulder – “and that too was a horror: what have we lost when you can’t shake off your own jacket or wash a single dish, when comfort is your only concern”.

These vividly imagined encounters, Herrera suggests, helped fuel Juárez’s desire to emancipate his own people on his return to Mexico.

• Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply