Gringo: A Young Radical Comes of Age in Latin America (T)

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 Chávez'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 progress-ive Latin American leaders rises to power, Boudin crisscrosses twenty-seven 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 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.

Border Crossings

The rugged handmade wooden canoe fitted with a powerful outboard motor pushed up against the dirt shore of Lake Petén Itzá where the town's first houses nestled the beach. There was no "Welcome to San Andrés" sign. A handful of chickens clucked around, a few pigs rooted in the dirt, and the sweet smell of burning plastic garbage filled the air. San Andrés, with its rapidly growing population of five thousand, covered the steep hill leading up from the lake and back toward a lush tropical jungle where an ancient civilization had reached its peak some six hundred years ago. Mayan stone cities and temples, long abandoned, were the region's primary attraction for foreigners.

On the journey across the lake from the triple city of Flores-San Benito-Santa Elena, with its few tens of thousands of people, I had sat in the rear of the boat near the loud motor and intense fumes: being the gringo and a first-time visitor, I had no way of knowing better. Riding in the back, I had the additional disadvantage of waiting while the rest of the passengers -- all Guatemalans -- disembarked. A group of young men with neatly pressed school uniforms and meticulously gelled straight black hair got out first. Next, an old woman with an impossibly large bag was helped ashore; then a younger woman with an infant at her breast and two smaller ones following behind with sacks balanced on their heads. A couple of men carried machetes and wore muddy knee-high rubber boots -- workers in the fields or the jungle.

As the people in front of me climbed onto the dirt embankment, I looked down the beach and saw small groups of young women and girls washing clothes by hand and carrying water in plastic tubs. On the other side of the beach, heading away from town toward more trees and unsettled jungle between the villages dotting the lakefront, partially clothed families bathed and splashed in the shallows of the cool water. "Oye gringo!" Hey gringo, time to go. The boatman, no more than twenty with a thin mustache and sneakers well cared for but far past their prime, wanted me off his boat. Sporting new, sturdy boots and a big hiking bag that was strapped, unnecessarily secure, to my back, I jumped out onto the wet ground and started walking up the hill. I passed one-story cinder-block and wood houses on narrow, partially paved streets and footpaths. The sun burned down, scorching everything it touched, and the people I passed stayed in the shadows while children played and ran freely. A few blocks up, climbing steeply, I stumbled on Eco-Escuela. It was a one-room language school built on stilts out over the hill. The back wall was cut away to provide a panoramic view of the lake.

This was to be my new school but I didn't stop there. Instead I continued farther up the hill to the small wooden house of Doña Eugenia, which was where I had arranged to stay for my two-month-long visit. I was to share my new home with Doña Eugenia's only daughter, Delia, and, when he got back from working in the jungle, her quiet, amiable husband, Jesús. Doña Eugenia had short hair and was one of the only married women in town with just one child -- an oddity in a community where contraception was rarely used. Her daughter was sixteen, with a squat frame and feet more used to flip-flops than shoes. The women were both tiny, coming up no higher than my chest. It would be a week or more before I met Jesús. He had a warm smile, and like most men in town who worked in the fields or the jungle, carried a machete wherever he went. I wasn't the first gringo they had hosted, so my Birkenstocks, headlamp, and wide array of sunscreens came as no surprise.

Dinner on my first night at their house was handmade corn tortillas fried into tostadas and covered with cabbage and grated cheese. While I ate hungrily, I tried out the various getting-to-know-you one-liners I remembered from Spanish class in high school. Soy de Chicago; tengo dieciocho años; me llamo Chesa: C-H-E-S-A. ¿Cómo estás? We struggled to get to know one another, but my Spanish was a severe limitation, often slowing conversation to a total halt. While on my third or fourth tostada Doña Eugenia asked me ¿Qué hacen sus padres? Small talk about what her exchange students' parents did was probably a safe ice-breaking question for most of the gringos Doña Eugenia had hosted in the past. But her question left me with a dilemma.

I've been open and matter-of-fact about my family situation since before I can remember -- as a kid I just took it for granted that it was as normal as saying my parents were doctors or teachers; eventually, I even preferred my whole class to know at the beginning of the year rather than lying or worrying about who knew what -- and I didn't see why I should hide it now. But what were the words for jail or adoption in Spanish anyway? "Tengo cuatro padres." That part was easy, but I saw the puzzled look on Doña Eugenia's and Delia's faces.

"¿Cómo así? ¿Son divorciados?" came the inevitable reply. No, they were not divorced. They were...I had to rely on my pocket dictionary for this one...encarcelados. If I thought having parents in prison was going to give me street credibility in San Andrés, the distraught look that passed between my hosts dispelled that misconception immediately. They were worried. I started talking fast, making up the words I didn't know. Bebé, padres, crimen, tres muertos, político, negros, imperialismo, Nueva York.

How could I, with only the most basic Spanish, articulate to my now concerned hosts that in October 1981, when I was just fourteen months old, my biological parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had left their Manhattan apartment and dropped me off at my Dominican babysitter's house, only to head off into a tragedy? How could I explain that, while I played and fussed as an infant, my parents made a terrible mistake, the worst of their lives? They had waited in a U-Haul in Nyack, New York, as a couple of miles away, members of a radical armed group of black nationalists robbed a Brinks truck of $1.6 million. Tragically bungled, the Brinks robbery left three men dead and an entire community traumatized. By the time my mother and father received a twenty-years-to-life sentence and a seventy-five-years-to-life sentence, respectively, friends of theirs, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, had taken me into their family and become my other parents. How could I explain to Delia what the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s had been about, or how my parents, white Jews, got involved in antiracist and antiwar activism and ultimately armed robbery?

For more than a decade before I was born, all four of my parents had lived on the run from the FBI as members of the militant political group called the Weather Underground; they had a common history. In 1980, after the Underground had fallen apart, Bill and Bernardine surfaced, and voluntarily turned themselves in to the authorities -- the most serious charges against both of them had been dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins, and mail interceptions, initiated by the attorney general and an FBI assistant director. Bernardine was given three years probation for charges stemming from a protest. When I landed in my new household, Bill and Bernardine already had two sons: Zayd and Malik became my older brothers. With the support of my new family, through visits, letters, and phone calls, before I can even remember, I began to build relationships with my other parents from the distance incarceration creates. Somewhere in the gray area between collective family memory and where my own recollections start, I grew accustomed to going through a metal detector and steel...