The Writer from the Dance: An Interview with Alma Guillermoprieto
“I wanted to be a revolutionary, and so I broke with art, which nearly undid me.”
Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her nearly fifty-year career writing about America—North and South, from New York to Argentina. From her earliest essay in the Review, in 1994, about Mario Vargas Llosa’s election campaign memoir, to her most recent, in our February 12 issue, about the Trump administration’s coup in Venezuela, she has focused in particular on the political upheavals that have convulsed the Americas since World War II. She was one of two reporters to break the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the US-backed Salvadoran army; she has covered the collapse of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Mexican security state in the case of the Ayotzinapa Forty-Three; she has profiled charismatic, shadowy figures from the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos to Pablo Escobar.
And yet reporting was not Guillermoprieto’s first career; for more than a decade she was a dancer in New York City, where she trained with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, before moving to Havana to teach, an experience she wrote about in Dancing with Cuba (2004), one of her five books in English. In her criticism—covering books, films, food, and exercise, in addition to Latin American politics—she often writes as a memoirist, offering, as well as a critical eye on the text at hand, her experience of eating tamales, meeting Vargas Llosa, or doing Pilates. Her most recent collection, The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, came out last year.
I emailed Guillermoprieto at her home in Mexico City last week to ask about longing for the past and her hopes for the future.
Nawal Arjini: You’ve been a reporter for many decades now, but as a young woman you were a dancer working with the emergent avant-garde in New York City. What led to that transition?
Alma Guillermoprieto: I stopped dancing in the 1970s because I was hypnotized by the Cuban Revolution’s rhetoric and its obvious advances back then in the areas of health and education, compared with what I was familiar with in Mexico, where I’m from. I considered myself an artist, and the revolution told me that art was superfluous, decadent, disposable, mischievous, subversive whenever the artist was not singing the revolution’s praises, and untrustworthy, and—this is for you, gentlemen—that a suspicious number of artists were homosexual and homosexuality was all of the above, plus disgusting and contagious. I wanted to be a revolutionary, and so I broke with art, which nearly undid me. How, a few years later, I stumbled into journalism is actually a long and unrelated story, but I do reflect sometimes, now that I am seventy-six, that I can still scrabble my way around a keyboard, whereas my career as a dancer would have ended decades ago. It’s a small consolation.
Which city, among all the many that you’ve lived in and written about, do you miss the most?
I love Mexico City, truly one of the greatest, most complicated, and most seductive cities in the world. But when I am here now, I miss the Mexico City I grew up in, the peaceable, quiet city protected by its two volcanoes, and the cohesive culture of its courteous, serious inhabitants. Climate change, the drug trade, and trash culture demolished much of the landscape and the composure of society. Still, there is nothing quite like the glory of the jacaranda trees in full lilac bloom in March.
Which city has changed the most in the time you’ve known it?
I think probably Bogotá. Years ago it seemed to live somehow beyond the logic of capitalism, and one seemed to breathe a remote air there, nine thousand feet above the rest of the world. The United States felt like it was a galaxy away. Bogotá used to be a small city of houses, many of them in a sort of English style. Now it’s a huge city of brick apartment towers. It’s changed radically in, oh, thirty or so years.
You have written about your youthful optimism about the Sandinistas, and about how you now think of that kind of revolutionary idealism as naive. From the US perspective, the belief in democratic institutions as a check on tyrannical ambition now seems to have been naive—so what’s left?
Clearly, nothing that we know of. The twentieth century’s great utopian experiments, including consumer capitalism, are exhausted, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative vision on the horizon that people might want to sacrifice for and struggle to achieve, and the wreckage all around is great. We live in a dangerous time.
Much of your reporting has been about the unsatisfying aftermath of conflict, whether it’s survivors desperately seeking justice or the inability of the authorities to change anything. What are some of the better and worse ways you’ve seen this handled?
I think it’s rather that some conflicts have achievable solutions and others don’t. The narcotics trade, for example, has scythed through the social structures of much of the world, destroying families and communities and governments and the very possibility of governance. Mostly it has generated enormous violence and endemic corruption, and if there’s a solution to mafia-like institutionalized corruption, no one has yet found it. I feel obligated to say, for perhaps the hundredth time, that the origins of this disaster lie squarely in the United States and its politically motivated and utterly misconceived war on drugs.
On the other hand, one sees tremendous advances in the solutions to urban problems. For example, innovative public transportation, decentralized public services, arborization, all kinds of small and huge innovations are possible in the discrete space of a city.
Resource struggles have of course long been a part of conflicts across the hemisphere, but over the course of your reporting career, climate change has cohered into a tangible threat with more immediately visible consequences. How, in your opinion, has this changed the fights over land or indigenous sovereignty?
One of the regrets of my life is that I didn’t understand in time that the environment was a life-or-death issue, and so I never reported on it. It’s obvious, though, that some high percentage of south-to-north migration is caused by the devastation of the environment. Rural people can no longer survive producing food for the rest of us. The migration of hungry, desperate people isn’t about to stop, and governments in the Northern Hemisphere can either attempt the ICE solution or plan realistically—that is, spend the money—toward a repaired environment and a multilingual, multicultural future everywhere.
You have expressed skepticism about Mexico’s ruling party, Morena, under the country’s last president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as little more than a continuation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century. Does Claudia Sheinbaum’s tenure so far strike you as more of the same?
Absolutely not. She is Obrador’s appointed successor, and she is a committed member of the party he founded, which more or less replicates, or tries to replicate, the early structures and political habits of the populist party that ruled Mexico forever, the PRI. But she’s a different, much less needy person, facing a different world, one with the out-of-control president of a hugely powerful neighboring country studying how he can exercise his will against hers. For all our sakes, I hope she’s lucky.
Are there any young politicians or activists you have your eye on—some cause for cautious optimism, some particular political or charismatic talent?
Nope. But I have to believe they exist. Or let me rephrase that: there is a multitude of young, idealistic, energetic, brilliant young persons out there. I don’t know whether any one of them will be sufficient against the enormous problems we are facing, and the speed of change. In Colombia, for example, community organizers in areas pacified after the signing of a peace accord between the FARC guerrillas and the government in 2016 have been doing remarkable work repairing their societies and the environment. But they are being murdered in horrifying numbers.
I’m not a particularly political person—no activist, for sure—but I would love to see, long to see, a new flowering of movements and organizations coupled with innovative analysis, working toward difficult but achievable goals. (And I would be even more excited to hear from dozens of readers lamenting my ignorance and pointing out all the places where this is actually happening.) What I’ve been thrilled by, obviously, are the tens of thousands of people in Minneapolis, confronting danger and fighting for human decency.
If you like our Substack, consider subscribing to our magazine by visiting nybooks.com/substack for a special discount on a full subscription.
I've long enjoyed, become better informed and deepened and broadened my perspectives from reading the work of Ms. Guillermoprieto.