Alejandro Velasco

So clearly it was a sense not only that the government was unstable, but that anything can happen and who knows what the future brings.

So, Hugo Chávez was born in 1954 in Barinas, in the Plains region of Venezuela.

The reason why it's significant is because that's a region known as sort of the heartbeat of the country.

It's where most of the folkloric music comes from, some of the folkloric literature comes from.

And so, it's really kind of a nationalist core of the country.

And that deeply informed his sense of self.

Some people have said that he's like...

hardscrabble, super poor.

That's not quite the case.

His parents were schoolteachers.

He had several siblings, and so it's not like they were doing well, but it's not like they were living in misery.

His upbringing in the 1960s was really just kind of an impoverished but not miserable, in that sense, sort of life.

Part of what's significant about his

biography is that much in the way that, and I'm not comparing myself to Chavez, but much in the way that I was sort of narrating my own upbringing and life history, both in Venezuela and since I arrived in the United States, there's one that is indexed by these moments

dramatic moments in Venezuelan history, so too was it for Chavez.

He was born in 1954 during that period of dictatorship that I talked about before the advent of democracy, but his youth was in the formative period of democracy.

When he became an adolescent, he joined the military academy at a moment when the military academy in the context of democratic stability had become really professionalized and was seen by many as a pathway towards upward mobility.

But also, as somebody from the poor sectors, popular sectors of Venezuela, he had interest in the kinds of things that all of us do in Venezuela, which is baseball.

And he was actually a standout baseball player and had dreams of becoming a major league baseball player in the United States.

And so that's all to say that...