The questions of why and how heroes enter the public domain and become figures of veneration remain highly poignant in the Latin American context. At a time when new presidents, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or Evo Morales in Bolivia, have developed a resonant charismatic leadership of their respective countries and when heroes from the past have been rediscovered and/or reinvented, in the case of Simón Bolívar in Venezuela or Emiliano Zapata in Mexico, it is evident that the study of heroes and hero cults in Latin America is apposite.
The construction of their heroic status and the willingness of a given collective at a particular time openly to accept such a construction will inevitably vary depending on whether the emergence and perpetuation of a given hero cult arises during the chosen hero's lifetime or posthumously. Above and beyond the particular act of heroism per se (a military victory or a particularly brave and selfless action), hero cults surface, remain, change and/or fade away in at least four significantly different contexts: first, whilst the heroes are alive; second, whilst they are alive and in positions of power; third, whilst they are alive and after they die; and fourth, after they have passed away.
In each scenario the factors that contribute to the making and breaking of the cult are noticeably different. This can be explained by focussing on active and passive makers of hero cults; on the one hand the governmental/institutional/state-based/elite-led hero cult designers and, on the other, a majority that is willing to buy into the constructed cults. To put it differently, for there to be a hero cult, apart from the obvious need of a hero, it is essential that there is a group of imaginative and resourceful people willing to build a hero cult, and a populace whose context has made them receptive to believing in and cultivating this fabricated cult.
When the cult emerges during the lifetime of the chosen hero, there are, more often than not, political actors determined to promote it (through fiestas, official ceremonies and rituals, educational syllabuses, the use of public names and spaces, monuments, statues, and constructed sites of memory). There may be imagined communities that are receptive to this kind of social engineering. But then again, there may not – or, at least, not in the long term – which may explain why certain heroes (for example, Agustín Gamarra, Antonio López de Santa Anna, or Porfirio Díaz) have struggled to retain their Messianic status after they died or fell from power. In contrast, when the hero cult emerges after the chosen hero died, although the process whereby the cult is established mirrors that seen when the hero is alive (regardless of whether s/he is in power or not), the motivation behind the act of social engineering and the context that proves receptive to it is markedly different. With the veneration of Simón Bolívar, for instance, we are not talking about a cult promoted by Bolívar's entourage and supporters, but about one developed years after he died, with a view to using or abusing the constructed or perceived heroism and transcendence of this particular hero to service, assist, or give meaning to subsequent political groups and/or projects that have come to the fore in entirely different contexts. The fact that despite the distance of time there has been a willingness on behalf of a significant proportion of the population to accept these reinvented traditions/cults is, perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of the phenomenon and one which continues to require further study. To put it bluntly, it is not too difficult to understand in Weberian terms why a given community in a time of crisis and upheaval finds comfort and solace in celebrating the attributes of a hero it has seen ‘save’ them with its own eyes and during the lifetime of the said hero's contemporaries. But why would a community feel the need to sacralise individuals it did not encounter empirically and whom it admires, celebrates and identifies with through the seemingly arbitrary eyes of an official discourse that has chosen to deify a select number of historical characters at the expense of vilifying a significant number of others? What does Felipe Carrillo actually represent to the younger generation of Yucatecans? Why are Nicaraguans still inspired by a man who actually invented his imperialistic middle name – Augusto César Sandino? We are also confronted by that ‘chicken or the egg’ question: are hero cults a top-bottom construct or a bottom-up dynamic? Are we faced, as suggested so far, by elites who, depending on circumstance and/or luck, strike a chord with ‘their’ people by promoting the cult of certain heroes, or, instead, are these cults cultivated organically from below and then used and recycled by those in power to give themselves legitimacy?
Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw's edited volume is an extremely welcome collection of essays that tackles these questions and offers suggestive and thought-provoking insights into the processes whereby particular heroes have developed long-term cults, or not, in the Latin American context. Unfortunately there is not the space here to do justice to all the contributions by discussing each one individually. The heroes studied in the volume include Simón Bolívar (John Chasteen), Agustín Gamarra (Charles F. Walker), Antonio López de Santa Anna (Shannon Baker), Porfirio Díaz (Víctor M. Macías-González), Emiliano Zapata (Samuel Brunk), Felipe Carrillo Puerto (Ben Fallaw), Augusto Sandino (Richard Grossman), Frida Kahlo (Nancy Defebach), Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (David Nugent), and Evita Perón (Linda B. Hall). The editors are to be congratulated for having succeeded in bringing together what are ostensibly ten very different studies into a well-integrated, coherent whole. The book has a clearly defined argumentative thread assisted by an effort to cross-reference between chapters where possible. It is also original for tackling both obvious and unexpected heroes, from the ubiquitous Simón Bolívar to transient heroes such as Gamarra or Santa Anna, and even the intimately iconic Frida Kahlo. The different chapters help us understand how a hero such as Haya de la Torre acquired a cult following while he was alive; how heroes such as Gamarra, Santa Anna, and Porfirio Díaz did so while they were alive and in positions of power; how heroes such as Bolívar, Zapata, Sandino, Evita, and to a lesser extent Carrillo Puerto, did so while they were alive and after they died; and how an artist like Frida Kahlo became a heroine after she passed away.
The fact that the chapters succeed in forcing the reader to interpret other Latin American hero cults along the lines proposed in this volume highlights its considerable merits. This particular reader was left with the urge to know how the book's theories and queries could be applied to all those other notorious heroes that were not studied here: Túpac Amaru II, Tiradentes, José de San Martín, La Corregidora, José Martí, Getúlio Vargas, or Che Guevara, to name but a few. Although the editors could be criticised for having let their Mexican interests dominate the overall flavour of the book (five of the ten heroes are Mexican), and their argument, offered as an after-thought in the conclusion, that Mexican hero cults and their relation to history are exceptional or unique, could be robustly contested, Heroes & Hero Cults in Latin America remains a very readable, enjoyable and welcome contribution to the historiography.
