10 women travelers who broke all the rules

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Born the year before the fall of Saigon and raised in south Texas in the last decades of the Cold War, Stephanie Elizondo Griest was taught from a young age that communism was the enemy and that speaking Spanish was a shameful tie to Mexico. Eager to leave Corpus Christi behind and, like Martha Gellhorn, harboring youthful dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent, Griest asked a working journalist how to follow in the same line of work. He told her to learn a foreign language – specifically, Russian.

What followed was an unexpected four year foray into the heart of the Communist Bloc as Griest traveled to Russia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, China, Vietnam, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, East Germany and Cuba in the years just following the fall of the Berlin Wall, from 1996 to 2000. Around the Bloc is a memoir of one young Chicana woman’s travels off the beaten tourist path behind the former Iron Curtain, a journey that changed her assumptions about both politics and her own Tex-Mex heritage.