Chesa Boudin was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2019 on a platform of ending mass incarceration and mitigating racial disparities in law enforcement. He previously served as a Liman Fellow in the San Francisco Public Defender's Office and is on the board of the Civil Rights Corps. He was a Rhodes Scholar, earned his JD from Yale Law School, and is the author of Gringo: Coming of Age in Latin America.
""Gringo" might well be Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London"
for the Millennial Generation, except that instead of Paris and
London, it's Caracas and Quito and the Amazon Basin." -- Russell
Banks, author of "Cloudsplitter" and "Dreaming Up America"
"A compelling firsthand account of the unregulated greed, social
neglect, and deliberate misrule that has provoked so many Latin
Americans to demand a better life for themselves and their
children. Boudin's vivid reports are filled with memorable
characters whose stories capture the tragedies and the promise of
this vast region." -- John H. Coatsworth, director, Institute of
Latin American Studies, Columbia University
"Boudin has a pitch-perfect ear for the cadences that make up daily
life in a region grappling with change. More than a well-written
and clear-eyed guide to the efforts of yet another generation of
Latin American leaders and activists trying to chart their own way,
it's a handbook for "estadounidenses" on how to listen to and learn
from those below the Rio Grande who also call themselves
Americans." -- Greg Grandin, author of "Empire's Workshop"
"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 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, 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
"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
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