Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America

“Modern Latin American history is brimming with heroes,” write Ben Fallaw and Samuel Brunk at the start of this collection of essays. Good analytical studies of these heroes are not quite so plentiful, although there is a growing literature on state commemoration, historia patria, and the intimate connections between nationalism and hero cults. This book, however, is concerned not so much with probing these connections as it is with championing a return of “the study of the individual — in this case, prominent ones — to the center of historical analysis” (p. 11). The volume consists of ten chapters concerned with the lives and reputations of individual historical actors, bracketed by an introduction and conclusion in which the editors propose some general rules about what makes a hero.The individual chapters offer solid and in some cases really excellent analyses of their subjects. Most chapters open with a biographical overview of the hero in question, consider the process of hero-genesis, and conclude with some discussion of their subject’s posthumous reputation. In this regard the book will make a useful teaching tool; the contributors have done a good job of pitching their accounts at a level suitable for undergraduates without, for the most part, sacrificing depth of analysis. John Chasteen’s chapter on Simón Bolívar provides a tremendously readable account of the stories and legends that underpinned Bolívar’s mythic status. In contrast, Charles F. Walker’s account of Agustín Gamarra’s “rise and calamitous fall” (p. 41) offers a compelling discussion of a caudillo who failed to achieve mythic status. Shannon Baker reviews Antonio López de Santa Anna’s perplexing career. Víctor Macías-González describes Porifiro Díaz as a Levi-Straussian bricoleur, in a nuanced discussion of Porfirian political ritual. Samuel Brunk contributes an excellent chapter on the emergence of the Zapata cult and its subsequent appropriation by the Mexican government, which attends to both official commemoration and popular ideologies. Ben Fallaw discusses the career of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the “world renowned Socialist leader” (p. 128). Richard Grossman describes the life and influence of Augusto Sandino. Nancy Deffebach’s excellent chapter discusses first Frida Kahlo’s own views about heroism and then the artist’s posthumous status as a Latin American icon, “Saint Frida.” David Nugent shows that it is possible to explain the popularity of APRA, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s political party, without relying simply on Haya’s charisma. The final chapter, by Linda B. Hall, is an engaging mini-biography of Eva Perón, the famous “repentant brunette” (p. 239).The contributors make a laudable effort to highlight interconnections between the different chapters, and together they raise a number of interesting issues about memory, reputation, and status. Whether these chapters are concerned fundamentally with heroes and hero cults is another question; Porfirian state protocol, for example, while fascinating, appears to me to have only tangential relation to the heroic. The editors’ definition of heroism is extremely broad, which in my view weakens its analytical purchase. They define a hero as “a person to whom remarkable courage, talent, and other noble, even godlike traits are attributed by members of a community” (p. 1). Is any well-regarded public figure a hero? Is the talented Gael García Bernal heroic? This capacious definition seems unhelpfully vague in that it strips the idea of the hero of any historical specificity, thereby focusing attention away from questions of power (which communities are attributing these traits?) and the particularities of culture (what traits are perceived as noble?). As a result, perhaps, the book’s analytical framework is somewhat underhistoricized. While the editors muse in the introduction and conclusion about the nature of Latin American hero cults, they provide little sense that the construction of heroic pantheons of próceres, or founding fathers, lay at the heart of nineteenth-century nationalism and was the outcome of specific historic processes quite different from those that propelled, say, Frida Kahlo to international prominence. I think the conceptual unity of the book would have been enhanced had the editors devoted more attention to the historical contexts shaping official nationalism’s celebration of heroes and próceres, and the differences between official hero worship and other forms of popular memory.Nonetheless, individual chapters offer much for the reader to ponder. The stories and legends surrounding Bolívar, the songs that insist that Zapata did not die, the conversion of Eva Perón into an Argentine Madonna, all attest to the powerful mythologizing forces that cloud the image of individual historical actors. The constant appropriation of religious language and iconography by hero cults is also striking. And on a more frivolous note: who knew that at their famous 1914 meeting Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa compared their taste in hats

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