Otra Vez by Ernesto Guevara

Otra vez is a travel diary, it's transparently personal, almost hypnotic in the simple, personal, unguarded way Guevara writes of his travels. His writing has a natural elegance, unstrained, as if he were engaged in a private conversation with the reader over some wine after a good meal.

His love for his native Americas is palpable, especially in the descriptions of the ruins he explores as he moves northward from Argentina to Mexico City, where he rather casually mentions the meeting with Fidel Castro that changed the course not only of his own life but of the lives of thousands of others.

And suddenly the text changes. Something has happened between the last travel diary entry and the passionate torrent of belief that ends the slender volume.

In common with Born Again in Bhagdad, the crucial thing happens off-page, and that's the conversion experience itself. I continue to think about why and what that is. Is it because these moments happen with such speed that we can't take the time to write them down as they happen? Is it because there's something inherently ineffable about any conversion experience? Make no mistake, Guevarra may have been ideologically a communist before he met Fidel Castro, but he was a fire-breathing true-believer only afterward.

I'm saying nothing here about the politics, or the content of the politics. I became interested in personal stories that weren't usually seen as travel narratives, and have begun seeking them out and looking at them from that angle. And seen from this angle, Otra vez is an extraordinary personal narrative of making one's way through South America on very close to no money at all, and Guevarra's descriptions of the ruins made me weep that he didn't choose to be a writer instead of anything else.

While they have much in common, Bhagdad is all about explaining, convincing, the stories are structured to bring the reader if not to agreement, then to understanding, and is written toward a presumed audience. In Otra Vez, the text is comprised of musings to the writer himself, and Guevara's conversion needs no explanation, it burns the page.

For me, the most riveting moment of Otra Vez was when Guevarra says he is convinced by the figures on the some ruins that "We Americans"
came originally from Asia. My Anglo-centric education rebelled, my concept of myself and my ancestors who came here in boats changed, and my historical paradigm changed.