Gringo: a Coming of Age in Latin America

Talking Leaves...Books and Hallwalls will host author/activist Chesa Boudin as part of his national tour to promote Gringo: a Coming of Age in Latin America (Scribner, 2009). Copies of Gringo are currently available at both Talking Leaves locations, and will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Gringo charts parallel journeys—political and personal, geographic and interior—which began a decade ago. The first is the sweeping transformation of Latin American politics that started with Hugo Chávez's inauguration as president of Venezuela in 1999. In that same year, eighteen-year-old Chesa Boudin left 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 arrived in Guatemala. He finds a world with huge disparities of wealth, where social change is not confined to classroom or dinner table conversations, but takes place in the streets.

While a new generation of progressive Latin American leaders rises to power, Boudin crisscrosses 27 countries throughout the Americas. He witnesses the economic crisis in Buenos Aires, works inside Chávez's Miraflores palace in Caracas, watches protestors battling police on September 11, 2001, in Santiago, descends into ancient silver mines in Potosí, and travels steerage on a riverboat along the length of the Amazon. He observes, talks, and listens—recording his own growth and changes alongside the voices of his hosts and acquaintances.

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.

Advance reviews have praised the book and its author for honesty, intelligence, insight, humor, and vividness. Novelist Russell Banks writes "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." Philip Lopate offers this praise: "This superb travel memoir has the benefit of an appealingly honest, intelligent, and reliable narrator, whose humorous self-scrutiny and compassionate insights bridge two worlds with extraordinary tact. I found it engrossing, moving, and compulsively readable."

Chesa Boudin is a 28-year-old Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Yale and Oxford Universities. Currently attending Yale Law School, he is coauthor of The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions—100 Answers and coeditor of Letters from Young Activists. His four parents are all 60's New Left anti-war activists.

Some publications related to this event:
May, 2009 - 2009