Latin American history traditionally has been defined by larger-than-life heroes such as Simon Bolivar, Emiliano Zapata, and Evita Peron. Recent scholarship, however, tends to emphasize social and cultural factors rather than great leaders. In this new collection, Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw bring heroes back to the center of the debate, arguing that heroes not only shape history, they also "tell us a great deal about the places from which they come."

The original essays in this collection examine ten modern Latin American heroes whose charisma derived from the quality of their...

Before there was Che Guevara, there was Emiliano Zapata, the charismatic revolutionary who left indelible marks on Mexican politics and society. The sequel to Samuel Brunk's 1995 biography of Zapata, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata traces the power and impact of this ubiquitous, immortalized figure.

Mining the massive extant literature on Zapata, supplemented by archival documents and historical newspaper accounts, Brunk explores frameworks of myth and commemoration while responding to key questions regarding the regime that emerged from the Zapatista movement,...

The life of Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata was the stuff that legends are made of. Born and raised in a tiny village in the small south-central state of Morelos, he led an uprising in 1911--one strand of the larger Mexican Revolution--against the regime of long-time president Porfirio Diaz. He fought not to fulfill personal ambitions, but for the campesinos of Morelos, whose rights were being systematically ignored in Don Porfirio's courts. Expanding haciendas had been appropriating land and water for centuries in the state, but as the twentieth century began things were becoming...