Early in 1999 an 18-year-old American from Chicago arrived in Guatemala City seeking adventure and  to learn Spanish.  That visit began an 8-year odyssey that crisscrossed Latin America and provided some extraordinary experiences and encounters that are recalled in GRINGO: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America (Scribner, 2009), which the director of Columbia University’s  Institute for Latin American Studies calls “a travel book with a difference…a must-read for [anyone] seeking to understand the social conditions, and the social movements, that are driving much of Latin America to the left.”

About the author: Chesa Boudin has led an interesting life.  When he was 14 months old, his anti-war activist parents were arrested for their roles in the fatal Brinks Robbery in upstate New York . His mother was sentenced to 20 years to life and his father to 75 years to life. Chesa was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and raised as one of their three sons. Upon graduating from Yale University in 2003, Chesa  attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship.   He is currently a student at Yale Law School.

Boudin lectures in English and Spanish at venues across the US and on three continents on topics ranging from the impact of parental incarceration to  Latin American politics, community service in universities and U.S. foreign policy.