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GRINGO: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America With Author Chesa Boudin
GRINGO Thursday September 10th 7:00PM Contact: Kate Bittman t. 212.632.4951 kate.bittman@simonandschuster. “An extraordinary debut.” ―Russell Banks “This is not Latin American for Yuppies, which shouldn't be much of a surprise, knowing the lineage. It's cheap beer, fried plantains, long dusty bus rides, radical politics, the repeated kindness of desperately poor people sharing what they have with an outsider, and Chesa Boudin's eagerness to share what he's seeing and what he's feeling, with sympathy and empathy—as he tries to sort it all out. There's much to learn in this book." ―Seymour Hersh, staff writer at the New Yorker
“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 “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 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.” ―Phillip Lopate “This gripping narrative weaves together [Boudin’s] personal journey with his acute, on-the-ground political observation.” ―Booklist In the early months of 1999, an 18-year-old American from Chicago arrived in Guatemala City. He sought adventure and planned to learn Spanish but, beyond that, had no particular goal or destination in mind. He wasn’t even sure what it was that kept him moving. Certainly he never intended to write a book. But for Chesa Boudin, that visit was the beginning of an eight year odyssey that crisscrossed Latin America, presenting a variety of extraordinary experiences and encounters, now brought together in GRINGO: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America (Scribner; April 14, 2009; $25.00), which John H. Coatsworth, director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University calls, “a travel book with a difference…a must read for students and citizens seeking to understand the social conditions, and the social movements, that are driving much of Latin America to the left.” Perhaps a hunger for adventure and political engagement is in Chesa Boudin’s genes. A Rhodes scholar with degrees from Oxford and Yale Universities (and currently a student at Yale Law School), Boudin is the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, well-known American radicals and former members of the Weather Underground. In 1981, after dropping off 14-month-old Chesa at his babysitter, they participated in a robbery of a Brinks armored car in upstate New York. Both parents were sent to jail – Chesa’s mother was sentenced to 20 years to life, his father to 75 years to life – and he was adopted by old friends, also from the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin was released on parole in 2003; David Gilbert remains incarcerated. Boudin’s middle class upbringing was punctuated by visits to his parents’ maximum security prisons. It was against this backdrop, and with the political consciousness it engendered, that Boudin paid his first visit to Latin America. His timing could not have been better—Hugo Chavez was just taking power in Venezuela, heralding sweeping radical change across the subcontinent. Boudin subsequently traveled throughout the region – visiting every Spanish speaking country as well as Brazil, ever curious as to what was driving the remarkable social transformations taking place in front of his eyes. The stories Boudin tells are written from the ground up. He never takes a plane when a fifteen-hour bus ride in the company of unfettered chickens is available. We witness him sleeping on his hammock and becoming horribly ill from bacteria-ridden river water on the Estrela da Amazona, a decrepit Amazon ferry boat; we crouch with him behind smoldering cars as students battle with police in Santiago, Molotov cocktails and tear gas galore; we descend with him, breathless and claustrophobic, into the hellish tunnels of Bolivia’s silver mines that “eat men,” where the miners remove 5,000 tons of rock every day and the average life expectancy is under forty; we join him in his work as a translator for President Hugo Chavez inside the presidential palace in Caracas, even as US-Venezuelan relations deteriorate; and we see him struggle with his own privilege in the face of grave poverty. From his first day in Latin America, Boudin is positive he doesn’t want to be the “typical tourist who goes to the global South only to disappear into luxury hotels and elite white neighborhoods,” but at the same time he is unsure of where the alternative will lead him. Like a modern-day version of The Motorcycle Diaries, GRINGO weaves stories from Boudin’s personal journey together with his political experiences, making for an informative, touching and gripping read. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chesa Boudin is a Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Oxford and Yale universities. In 2001, at the age of 21, he was selected in a worldwide search by Goldman Sachs as one of 50 Future Global Leaders. Boudin is the co-author of The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions – 100 Answers, co-editor of Letters From Young Activists and translator of Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution. He is a regular contributor to The Nation. GRINGO: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America By Chesa Boudin Publication Date: April 14, 2009 240 pages; $25.00 ISBN: 1-4165-5911-6
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