Download - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

Words & ReflectionsThe book is illustrated with blackand white cartoons by Jeff Danzigerand Signe Wilkinson, and it is notedthat this sparest of forms is representedby staff cartoonists at fewer than onetenthof U.S. daily newspapers. Whileit won’t help the employment situationof professional cartoonists in thecurrent news economy, in this bookthe editors give ways to solicit cartoonsfrom the public—and soundsomewhat surprised that this has actuallyworked.“In the end, the secrets are simpleand the rules are few,” Aregood concludes.“If you have something to say,spit it out. If you don’t, shut up. Therest is mere technique.” ■Nancy Day, a 1979 Nieman Fellow,is director of Advanced JournalismStudies at Boston University and afreelance editor and writer.Nday@bu.eduEssays by a Mexican Journalist Explore the AmericasExposing the ‘nervous system of countries struggling with great change.’Looking for History: Dispatches From Latin AmericaAlma GuillermoprietoPantheon. 303 Pages. $25.By Dianne SolísAmerica and the Americas are oftentwo concepts that those of us living inthe United States have trouble grasping.We think of America as limited toonly the United States. Yet travel thewhole of the Americas and its citizenswill tell you that they, too, are Americanswith their own histories, theirown pursuits of liberty and justice.And so Mexico-born writer AlmaGuillermoprieto tells us simply andbluntly that she wrote her new book,“Looking for History,” with the “convictionthat Latin America has its ownindependent life.”What emerges is a collection of 17essays that take readers through thesad psychological and political battlesof Colombians, Cubans and Mexicans—allfrom countries that shapeU.S. policy like no others in the WesternHemisphere. Interspersed are profilesof the Argentineans Evita Perónand Che Guevara and Peruvian MarioVargas Llosa.Nearly half of the book is devoted toa series of scarcely believable talesfrom Mexico, where Guillermoprietowas born and returned to live in themid-1990’s. All of these essays appearedin The New Yorker and in TheNew York Review of Books between1994 and 2000.In this book, Guillermoprieto is ather best in her psychological portraitsof Latin America’s unconventional politicos.Among them are Vargas Llosa,the Peruvian writer who lost a presidentialbid; Guevara, the icon by whichthe Latin American left defined itself,and Vicente Fox, the Mexican rancherwho dethroned a corrupt politicalmachine to take the presidency.Guillermoprieto makes it clear whyVargas Llosa, an author of inspiringprose, failed miserably in his presidentialbid. He wasn’t much of a patriot,having written, “Although I was born inPeru, my vocation is that of a cosmopolitanand an expatriate who has alwaysdetested nationalism.”Her essay about Vargas Llosa alsoopens up a window into a crueltheme—what Guillermoprieto calls afundamental trait of Peruvians, but isvery much a continuing problem ofLatin America and those in the diasporato the United States. These nations andtheir peoples are constantly immersedin conflict over their mixed blood andclass. It’s “the deep-seated explanationfor the conflicts and frustrations ofPeruvian life,” Guillermoprieto writes.In her artfully handled essay on Che,it’s easy to understand whyGuillermoprieto, with her sympathiesfor the poor, was drawn to Che as asubject matter. Here she dissects threeweighty tomes, published in 1997, onChe. And in doing so she quickly takesthe reader into her generation’s ownpsyche. “Guevara was born in LatinAmerica’s hour of the hero,” she writes.“So many of our leaders have been socorrupt, and the range of allowed andpossibly public activity has been sonarrow, and injustice has cried out so106 Nieman Reports / Fall 2001