Gringo: A Coming-of-age in Latin America

I am reading this. It's rather good. Talented young Chesa Boudin, 28, with impeccable American leftist credentials, writes thoughtfully of his journeys through South America, where he attempted as far as possible to travel and live as local people do, to understand the poverty-shackled lives of millions of the world's poor, and to try to come to an understanding of how accurate is the charge that the greatest capitalist beast ever, America, is responsible for the conditions that exist in its back yard.

He also weaves into his reportage some of the personal growth and change that he encountered during his journeys. So far, I sense that he is an honest writer, unwilling to let idealogy affect what he sees with his own eyes. The American Left has never perhaps fully recovered from its first great flirtation with Stalinism, when, in spite of growing evidence to the contrary in the 1930s, many writers and commentators persisted in presenting a Soviet paradise, when in fact it was already a dystopic hell ruled by a monster.

Since then in America, the lion's share of argumentation, of killer one-liners, of easily-digestible, simplistic, short-term policies -- the answers to all society's questions, if you will -- have gone to conservatives and the right, saying to the electorate: "yes, you may have your car and eat it!" And the electorate has swallowed. If the wheels are now coming off this mode of carriage in the age of our planet heating up and the environment starting to show signs of wear and tear, remains to be seen. Already it seems that there's a high chance that succeeding generations of Americans will not enjoy the increase and betterment that have come to expected as an American birthright.

As for Boudin himself, currently attending Yale Law School, where do his impeccable lefty creds come from? Here's what he says in chapter one. He's telling of the poor Guatemalan family he stays with to improve his Spanish. First meal time, they ask about his family, his parents:

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.

And to think I picked up the book simply because of the lovely bright colors on the dust jacket!