Chesa Boudin stood in front of a round table in a corner of 57th Street Books last Wednesday night and looked around at the packed house. It was his 28th appearance in just over two weeks for his new book, The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions–100 Answers. Earlier that day, as the honored guest at a lunch discussion sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, he’d addressed an intimate gathering of about 20 that included Venezuela’s consul general to Chicago, two economists, and a banker as comfortably as a tenured professor before a class full of freshmen. But now he seemed momentarily on edge. “All of my friends and family are in the audience,” the 25-year-old Hyde Park native explained.
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“I’m proud of you for standing up for your anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics,” Boudin writes to his father in Letters. “However, your decisions had real human costs including the murders of three fathers and husbands, and the traumatic disruption of untold children’s lives, my own among them.”
“I’ve always had one foot in different worlds,” Boudin says. “I grew up in a white, upper-middle-class household. On the other hand I always had to go through a metal detector and steel gates to hug my parents.”
“Everywhere he goes he has family,” says Dohrn, who has traveled all over the world with him. Bill Ayers says, “If you go to Caracas with Chesa, he’s got friends that are cabdrivers and street people, and friends that are intellectuals and people in government.”
While Boudin signed books and exchanged e-mail addresses, his fifth-grade teacher, Bob Kass, came up to critique his former student’s performance. Boudin asked Kass if he took too much time answering people’s questions. “I have that problem, too, so I’m not going to criticize you for that!” Kass laughed.
