Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America

Gringo charts two journeys, both of which began a decade ago. The first is the sweeping transformation of Latin American politics that started with Hugo Chavez's inauguration as president of Venezuela in 1999. In that same year, an eighteen-year-old Chesa Boudin leaves his middle-class Chicago life — which is punctuated by prison visits to his parents, who were incarcerated when he was fourteen months old for their role in a politically motivated bank truck robbery — and arrives in Guatemala. He finds a world where disparities of wealth are even more pronounced and where social change is not confined to classroom or dinner-table conversations, but instead takes place in the streets.

While a new generation of progressive Latin American leaders rises to power, Boudin crisscrosses twenty-seven countries throughout the Americas. He witnesses the economic crisis in Buenos Aires; works inside Chavez's Miraflores palace in Caracas; watches protestors battling police on September 11, 2001, in Santiago; descends into ancient silver mines in Potosi; and travels steerage on a riverboat along the length of the Amazon. He rarely takes a plane when a fifteen-hour bus ride in the company of unfettered chickens is available.

Including incisive analysis, brilliant reportage, and deep humanity, Boudin's account of this historic period is revelatory. It weaves together the voices of Latin Americans, some rich, most poor, and the endeavors of a young traveler to understand the world around him while coming to terms with his own complicated past. The result is a marvelous mixture of coming-of-age memoir and travelogue.

For too long, Latin America has been a proving ground for U.S. political passions. The right aspires to dominate it. The left sees it as a means to justify ideological ends. When we're not ignoring it altogether, we stage CIA coups there or sport Che T-shirts at anti-free-market rallies. It hardly exists but for our points of view.

This is not a new phenomenon. Since the Monroe Doctrine... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in 1823, we've made it clear that the United States would not tolerate outside interference in Latin America. Teddy Roosevelt's "Big Stick" corollary 81 years later upped the ante: It insisted on our government's ability to intervene militarily if we perceived flagrant wrongdoing by any Latin American nation. "America para los americanos," as Latin Americans like to put it. The Americas — for North Americans. Even Simon Bolivar, back in Jefferson's day, predicted that it was only a matter of time before the United States assumed a hemispheric droit du seigneur that would plague his lands in the name of liberty.

For those on the right, that license has meant coups, assassinations, toxic crop sprayers. For U.S. business, it has meant a rich lode of natural resources. For those on the left, Latin America is the slate on which our every capitalist greed is written, the perfect thumping board for angry radicals. If you are angry enough, you shoulder your backpack and head south, fall in love with a terrorist guerrilla, join the Weather Underground and bomb the Pentagon or the U.S. Capitol, rob armored cars. Radicals of a more bookish bent pore over Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America," a classic of the extreme left, published in 1971 and delivered from Hugo Chavez's hands into President Obama's just this past April.

In truth, anyone deeply interested in hemispheric affairs will have read that book years ago. As incandescent as Galeano's anger can be, as passionate as his prose, as revelatory as his account of 500 years of foreign pillage and Latin American servitude, "Open Veins" is a 40-year-old call to arms.

Like Chavez's gift, the radical left seems to be caught in a time warp. In few books is this more evident than Chesa Boudin's mind-numbing rant, "Gringo." There is nothing passionate, incandescent or even remotely revelatory here. Although Boudin has an impressive pedigree as a member of the left (he's the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, leaders of the notorious Weather Underground) and has spent the past decade witnessing the myriad injustices of Latin America, his book reveals a remarkable lack of sophistication, both as an argument against free-market imperialism and as a work of travel journalism.

He calls his book "Gringo" because, while traveling in Latin America, the word "became a second name." And yet, for all the term's awkwardness, it represents an otherness that wins him friends and gets him out of scrapes with the authorities. Whether it's landing a job translating for Hugo Chavez or dodging trouble in a remote backwater, he eventually comes to value his "gringo wild card" and embraces it for the protection it represents.

This is no traveler in need of protection. Despite his publisher's claims that Boudin's book "echoes the sense of adventure of Che Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries" and the political passion of Galeano's "Memory of Fire," nothing too dangerous ever happens here. "Gringo" is a workmanlike account of 10 trips to various Latin American countries taken by a pleasant enough young man who knows what he thinks before he sets foot out the door.

It begins when he's fresh out of high school. He leaves the "mom and dad" — prominent radical theorists Bernadette Dohr and Bill Ayers — who raised him while his own parents were in jail, and heads for Guatemala, intent on going native. He rides the ramshackle buses of Peten, along with the chickens. He endures a diet of endless tortillas. He sleeps in a humble shack. He sees the Guatemalan jungle being razed bit by bit by a heartless world. "Clearing the land like this might help Guatemala export more beef to raise foreign currency to service its debts," he writes, in a typically uninspired passage, "but it also meant the destruction of ancient tropical forest."

We labor through this woefully un-Galeano-ish prose as Boudin makes his way to Santiago. Enrolling as a student in the University of Chile, he turns up his nose at luxury apartments he can well afford, refusing to live like the gringos who "isolate themselves from the ugly reality of poverty and inequality, and a neocolonial legacy." Instead, he finds himself a room the size of a large walk-in closet, where for $50 a month "rent was low enough for me to feel like I was living in solidarity with the working class."

And so it goes. In Buenos Aires, it's the evil hand of "neoliberalism" — the rule of the free market — that keeps the lower classes in bondage. In Manaus, he beds a young mother of three, sharing two rooms with more than a dozen of her relatives — all women and children. In Colombia, he travels down the Cacarica River to visit the displaced people of the Choco. In Ecuador, he whiles away days with the drunken boys of the disappearing Cofan tribe. In Bolivia, he descends the toxic tin mines of Potosi and befriends an old miner who speaks like a sociology professor. But the real drama for Chesa Boudin, the reader always suspects, is back in the United States, where the fiery legacy of his parents was forged long ago.

The anti-establishment passions of the Weather Underground that culminated in armed robbery and landed his parents in prison in Attica inform every page of this book. No event happens, no person moves through, without an accompanying polemic against the CIA, the IMF or the greedy neoliberalists who are inflicting damage on Latin America's poor. Granted, a reasoned account of the crippling effects of U.S.-backed coups or the World Bank's inability to address the urgent problems of poverty would be welcome — even timely and necessary. But Boudin's scattershot approach employs nothing like reason.

Eventually, Boudin admits, the American left is the real destination of his journey. "I came to see Latin America," he writes, "as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States, and the role my country plays in a global society."

So, there we have it. Though we await desperately needed insights into the promise that has always been Latin America, we get the shaky road map of a callow young man.

Marie Arana is a former editor of The Washington Post Book World. Currently a Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress, she is at work on a biography of Simon Bolivar. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.

Reviewed by Marie Arana, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Gringo might well be Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London for the Millennial Generation, except that instead of Paris and London, it's Caracas and Quito and the Amazon Basin." Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter and Dreaming Up America

"In Gringo, Chesa Boudin takes us on a delightfully engaging trip through Latin America, in an ingenious combination of memoir and commentary. The personal story is unflinchingly honest, and the political judgments nuanced and thoughtful. Latin America is at the outer edge of consciousness in this country, and Chesa Boudin brings it back to our attention, eloquently and vigorously." Howard Zinn

"This marvelous voyage of personal discovery provides a vivid portrait of the richness and diversity of Latin America, its wonders and suffering, the courage and irrepressible spirit of its people, as they are revealed to a thoughtful and sensitive eye during the most exciting and hopeful decade since the European conquests. It is an enthralling account, stimulating and provocative." Noam Chomsky

"Boudin has a pitch-perfect ear for the cadences that make up daily life in a region grappling with change. More than a well-written and clear-eyed guide to the efforts of yet another generation of Latin American leaders and activists trying to chart their own way, it's a handbook for estadounidenses on how to listen to and learn from those below the Rio Grande who also call themselves Americans." Greg Grandin, author of Empire's Workshop

"A compelling firsthand account of the unregulated greed, social neglect, and deliberate misrule that has provoked so many Latin Americans to demand a better life for themselves and their children. Boudin's vivid reports are filled with memorable characters whose stories capture the tragedies and the promise of this vast region." John H. Coatsworth, director, Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia University

The young son of a famous radical family takes to the roads of Latin America and comes to realize that a wave of radical change is transforming not only the places he visits, but his own take on life as well.