Chesa Boudin's "Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America" reminded me of a Bolivian con game. In one variant a shill stops a gringo (North American) on the street, shows him a city map and asks if he can help find an address. I don't need to go into the rest of the con -- it involves a fake policeman, a taxi ride and a mugging -- but it's illuminating why the mark gets hooked: Why would a tourist from the U.S. think he could help a Bolivian find his way around? The answer is two-fold: Gringos are eager to help and gringos think they know everything.
These themes, among others, are interwoven in "Gringo," sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not. Boudin's parents are alumni of the Weather Underground, who were put away for a very long time when he was a baby. He was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, also former Weatherpeople, who became household names in the recent presidential campaign.
With that background, Boudin had a different viewpoint from the typical teenage backpacker tourist. Unfortunately, knowing about U.S. intervention in Latin America and sympathizing with struggles for self-determination doesn't help much when confronting the key issue of being a socially aware traveler from the U.S.: You have more money and privilege than almost anyone in the global South.
The relationship exists, whether or not you travel to Latin America (if you actually can afford the trip), but it gets personal if you do go there. Boudin first confronts it when he is too embarrassed to tell his Guatemalan host family he's not getting enough to eat. "I took to filling up on the one thing that was generally in large supply: handmade corn tortillas ... I tried to comfort myself by reflecting that I was at least experiencing what many local people were going through, but I felt increasingly miserable..." He is aware of it when new friends with scant resources freely share their food and lodging: "I was careful with my money to the point of being stingy, while my hosts were infinitely generous." He worries about whether it's politically incorrect to buy food for a family of street kids. His political consciousness and upper-middle-class upbringing sometimes combine to block his compassion and understanding, as when he suggests that an abused but compliant Mapuche maid came from a different "strain" than her brave ancestors.
Boudin's adventures could make for a thoughtful -- or at least funny -- exploration of U.S. radical/liberal guilt about money, charity and generosity in a very different culture. Boudin identifies these issues but doesn't resolve them on a personal level. He's not able to laugh at his teenage preconceptions. Much of his writing reads as if its been politically vetted: "I didn't want to be the typical tourist who goes to the global South only to disappear into luxury hotels and elite white neighborhoods that may well be geographically removed but are culturally contiguous extensions of the United States or Europe."
The narrative gets interesting as Boudin reports on political movements, starting with the aftermath of the Argentine currency meltdown and then (through using his family's connections) getting intimately involved with the revolutionary Venezuelan government. This sometimes makes for heavy going -- he's not very good at integrating political analysis and historical narrative with his travelogue -- but the descriptions of people in action during periods of social crisis and radical social change are illuminating. In describing a polling place early in the morning during the Venezuelan election of 2006, he writes "there were groups of motorcyclists racing around, lighting rockets and noise bombs -- poor people's fireworks -- to get stragglers out of bed and mobilized. One motorcycle driver was dressed up in a perfect Che Guevara outfit