Review by Choice Review
This is a long, extensively researched, heavily annotated, but tediously written biography of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, more popularly known as Subcomandante Marcos, the masked figure of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation that agitated the Mexican political system between 1994 and 2001. The book's three parts comprise 32 chapters. The first five chapters rapidly cover the middle-class northern Mexican background and formal education of Guillen, including his graduation from Mexico's National Autonomous University in 1980 and his stint as a dynamic young professor at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana. Twelve chapters in part 2 deal with the organization of the Chiapas guerrilla movement until the dramatic peasant uprising in 1994. The final 15 chapters cover Marcos and the Zapatista movement, while a very short conclusion makes elaborate but indecisive claims as to the historical importance of Marcos in the modern history of Latin American guerrilla warfare. While Henck (Keio Univ., Tokyo) occasionally considers the wider Mexican and Latin American political and social context, his book draws its strength from its elaborate details rather than its keen analytical insights. Earlier studies by Neil Harvey (The Chiapas Rebellion, CH, May'99, 36-5314) and George Collier (Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, CH, Dec'95, 33-2304) are much better. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, faculty. F. W. Knight Johns Hopkins University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
