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Works of Radical Imagination

Announcing the Ernesto Che Guevara bilingual curriculum guide in collaboration with the Center for Latin American, Carribean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt University

March 17

by Claire Kelley

Bilingual curriculum guide for The Motorcycle Diaries and other
Che Guevara Library titles

Seven Stories Press and The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt University have collaborated to create a bilingual curriculum guide for The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara, a popular title taught in introductory and intermediate Spanish-language courses. The guide also features discussion questions for the other eight initial titles in the Che Guevara Library, the new book publishing project from Seven Stories Press to reintroduce the great essays, journals, and diaries of Che Guevara and other essential works from Latin America in both English and Spanish editions.  


Download the Che Guevara Library bilingual curriculum guide here >

Bilingual Curriculum Guide

The teaching resource offers pre-reading activities, guiding questions, post-reading resources, a suggested student project, and an essay assignment, and is intended for use in upper-level high school Spanish classes  and intermediate to upper-level college Spanish courses. It was written by Elyssa Cross, a high school Spanish teacher in the Metro Nashville Public School system and Kai Gardner, who also has experience teaching Spanish in a secondary charter school, and is currently a student in the International Education Policy and Management program at Vanderbilt University and a graduate assistant at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.  

 

"This partnership to create an educational resource for teachers and professors to use in high school and in higher education courses will bring the legacy of Che Guevara to a new audience of students," said Claire Kelley, Director of Academic and Library Marketing at Seven Stories Press. "We are thrilled to work with CLACX to utilize their pedagogical expertise in order to engage and assist educators who would like to adopt this new beautifully designed and repackaged collection of books for their classes."

 

The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) is a new research center at Vanderbilt University, created in Fall 2021 to bring together the former Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Program in Latino and Latina Studies (LATS). CLACX fosters research and teaching that examine the borders and intersections between Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, enriching all through comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives.

 

"This new resource will enhance the use of the Che Guevara Library as an interdisciplinary tool in the classroom," said Colleen McCoy, CLACX Outreach Coordinator. "We look forward to sharing it with our educator networks."

CLACX is a National Resource Center on Latin America, designated by the US Department of Education. Alongside providing Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, NRC funding supports professional development workshops, summer institutes, and cultural arts events to engage K-16 educators and the community. This bilingual curriculum guide is part of that work to engage and to further the teaching of Latin American cultures, languages, and histories.

Edited by Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia and Disamis Arcia Munoz
Foreword by Aleida Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager—and thus a letter writer—for his entire adult life. The letters collected here range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959, from the most personal to the intensely political, revealing someone who not only thought deeply about everything he encountered, but for whom the process of social transformation was a constant companion from his youth until shortly before his death. His letters give us Che the son, the friend, the lover, the guerilla fighter, the political leader, the philosopher, the poet. Che in these letters is often playful, funny, sometimes sarcastic, and deeply affectionate. His life was short, and these twenty years, from when he was 19 until days before his death, show it was also incredibly rich and full.

As his daughter Aleida Guevara, also a doctor like her father, writes, "When you write a speech, you pay attention to the language, the punctuation and so on. But in a letter to a friend or a member of your family, you don't worry about those things. It is you speaking, in your authentic voice. That's what I like about these letters; they show who Che really was and how he thought. This is the true political testimony of my father."


Las obras completas del Che Guevara - Español 

Edited by Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia and Disamis Arcia Munoz

La primera edición de las cartas del Che Guevara, la mayoría nunca antes publicadas en inglés.

"El Che no era solamente un intelectual, era el ser humano más completo de nuestra época."
–Jean Paul Sartre

"En el presente, cuando para muchos la ética y otros profundos valores morales se consideran fácilmente comprados y vendidos, el ejemplo del Che Guevara toma una dimensión aún mayor."
–Rigoberta Menchú

"Los poderosos del mundo deben prestar atención: profundamente dentro de la remera en la que hemos tratado de atraparlo los ojos del Che Guevara permanecen llameantes con impaciencia."
–Ariel Dorfman

Ernesto Che Guevara fue un viajero—y por lo tanto un escritor de cartas—a lo largo de su vida de adulto. Las cartas coleccionadas aquí incluyen un amplio rango, de cartas a sus padres durante su viaje en motocicleta a la extensiva carta a Fidel luego del éxito de la revolución cubana a comienzos de 1959, de lo más personal a lo intensamente político, revelando a alguien que no solo ahondaba a través del pensamiento en todo lo que encontraba, pero para quien el proceso de transformación social fue un compañero constante desde su juventud hasta poco antes de su muerte. Sus cartas nos dan al Che hijo, amigo, amante, guerrillero, líder político, filósofo y poeta. En estás cartas el Che es juguetón, gracioso, a veces sarcástico y profundamente cariñoso. Su vida fue corta, y estos veinte años, desde los 19 hasta días antes de su muerte, muestran que también fue increíblemente valiosa e intensa.

Su hija Aleida Guevara, también doctora como su padre, escribe en el prólogo, "Cuando escribes un discurso, prestas atención al lenguaje, la puntuación y demás. Pero cuando escribes una carta a un amigo o a un miembro de tu familia, no te preocupan esas cosas. Eres tú quién habla, en tu voz autentica. Por eso me gustan estas cartas; muestran quien era realmente el Che y cómo pensaba. Este es el verdadero testimonio político de mi padre."

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