Subcommander Marcos: the Man and The Mask by Nick Henck (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2008 manipulation, gender, and power in her testimony about childhood. In her narrative, she also refers to angry disputes regarding her rearing between her mother Marı́a and her grandmother, Marı́a’s mother-in-law. In this context, her father would not allow her mother to scold Ursula because, as she writes, “I was the child of his heart” (116). As Rojas retells, this connection “made her mother jealous and provoked her mother to accuse [him] of an excess of physical pampering.” In response, Ursula Suárez recounts that her father carried her to his room where she showed him “my signs of affection.” For Rojas, these are examples of physical contacts related to punishment and affection in the context of the century. However, it is possible to open the question on how she uses this passage, if there is a sexual connotation in the argument between her mother and father, one that the writer cannot explore freely due to a male empowering dominance in Chilean society. Another reading on the particular would suggest that Suárez’s memoir uses this passage to construct her persona with a strong image of childhood that overcomes any possible contender. In any case, the question would be how the confessor managed her testimony to express herself as a child. This is particularly interesting since she conveys that a former confessor destroyed an earlier version of her Relación. From this perspective, the liaison among writing, power, and veiled gender relationships could be an addition to the discovery of a “seemingly lost” history of childhood. Nevertheless, these are minor suggestions to the accomplishment of a book that brings light to scholars from diverse disciplines. In the conclusion , Bianca Premo also offers valuable insights on writing about colonial childhood as a form of discovery from hidden places—and two almost literal examples of this are the excruciating studies on abandoned children in Cuba by González and Ann Twinam. In connection to the findings of the chapters, some topics of research could be addressed, such as the education of young Indians in Peruvian José Marı́a Arguedas’ fiction, relationships between migration and Latin American exploited children, and a comparative study of child slaves in USA and Brazil, to name a few. Alejandro Latinez Department of Foreign Languages Sam Houston State University SUBCOMMANDER MARCOS: THE MAN AND THE MASK. By Nick Henck. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, p.528, $24.95. January 1st to January 12th , 1994: twelve days of gunfire in Chiapas, Mexico, would lead to more international attention than thirty years of war throughout Central America, due in large part to the media savvy of the revolutionary mastermind, Subcommander Marcos. More than ten 98 Book Reviews years have passed since the Zapatista uprising, and yet Marcos, the most renowned leftist guerrilla leader since Che Guevara, has been without a proper biography. Henck’s timing could not have been better. There will be further developments in the Zapatista camp, to be sure, but Marcos’s unique role in history has been secured, and the greater part of the intrigue surrounding his persona appears to have run its course. This biography has a definitive feel about it, unlike the two previous biographies in Spanish : Marcos: ? un profesional de la esperanza? (1994) by César Jacobo Romero, and Marcos: la genial impostura (1998), by Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico. The former is obviously restricted to an early glimpse of the stealthy revolutionary, as it was published before Marcos’s true identity was unmasked , and his media stardom had only just begun. De la Grange’s and Rico’s work is more problematic. Bearing the signs of a backlash, their biography is unapologetic in its criticism of Marcos, the so-called “imposter”: a prejudice that Henck explains is owing to a personality clash between Marcos and de la Grange, who was consequently replaced as Le Monde’s Chiapas correspondent. Whatever the case may be, the bias in the de la Grange and Rico biography leaves Henck in the favorable position of writing his version as corrective biography from a seemingly more objective perspective, and he makes the most of this advantage...