Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America (review)

In the 1960s, Yankees feared Ernesto "Che" Guevara; now, he fascinates them. The recent proliferation of biographies and collections of speeches and writings attests to his popularity in the scholarly community. The success of recent films, especially 2004's Motorcycle Diaries and 2008's excellent two-part biopic Che, demonstrate Guevara's popularity outside academia. Finally, the absurdly ironic purchases of Che-adorned t-shirts by middle-class white youths at malls across the country show that Guevara's memory, albeit misappropriated, retains some sway among North American teenagers.

Into that vast milieu enters this edited study. Focusing on the two journeys Guevara made through Latin America between 1951 and 1956, editor Paulo Drinot states that the goal of this work is to "explore how Guevara's Latin American travels produced Che and how Che simultaneously produced Latin America through his travelogues" (p. 2). To do so, Drinot enlists some of the best-known names in Latin American scholarship in most of the nations Guevara visited in that five-year period to write brief essays about him. These scholars include Eduardo Elena (Argentina), Patience Schell (Chile), Drinot (Peru), Malcolm Deas (Colombia), Judith Ewell (Venezuela), Ann Zulawski (Bolivia), Cindy Forster (Guatemala), and Eric Zolov (Mexico). In each chapter, the authors attempt to tackle three themes: a look at the societies Che encountered, Che's representation of them, and Che's legacy in them.

Given this thematic triptych, it behooves the reviewer to examine how the contributors succeeded at each. On the matter of exploring the societies Guevara encountered, the essays clearly succeed in contextualizing Guevara's visits. Each chapter offers a succinct and well-written narrative of the nature of politics and societies into which Guevara inserted himself. That said, the reader can find a similar discussion in any of a number of country-specific monographs.

On the second theme, Che's representation of the societies he visited, the results are mixed and their success or failure seems to be determined by how much Guevara himself wrote on the particular state. In countries where the future revolutionary wrote much, the contributors were able to discuss comprehensively Guevara's motivations and the significance of his stay to his later revolutionary mission. Thus, Drinot's chapter on Peru, Forster's study of Guatemala, and Zolov's essay on Mexico offer the reader thorough analyses of Guevara. On the other hand, in the states where Guevara wrote little, Drinot's collection fails to discern his feelings. For example, Guevara's single mention of Colombia, a paragraph in a 1952 letter to his mother, provides Deas with only a limited body of evidence; Deas's short chapter thus focuses mostly on politics in Colombia in the early 1950s. In Venezuela, Che spent only ten days, so Ewell can at best assert that the country "did not contribute to the evolution of [Guevara's] political thinking" (p. 149).

On the last theme, Guevara's legacy in the life of each state, the authors succeed. This theme shows the true strength of the volume as each author succinctly shows how Guevara's foco theory influenced Latin American revolutionaries after his own death in 1967. Even in Mexico, which lacked a coordinated guerilla movement, Zolov shows how Guevara's memory influenced opposition to the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. That being said, there are other studies of Guevara's legacy, most notably Michael Casey's Che's Afterlife (2009) and Paul Dosal's chapter in Death, Dismemberment, and Memory in Latin America (2004), but neither studies Guevara's influence on such a local level.

This is a well-written study and enjoyable to read, though it breaks little new ground. Because the book is easy to follow, it may find a niche in the general market, but the contributors assume extensive background knowledge on the part of the reader and occasionally sacrifice narrative...