"I don't know where I was born, / nor who I am. I don't know where I come from, nor where I'm going. I am a branch, from a fallen tree, but I don't know the place it fell. Where are my roots? Whose tree am I a clone of?"

With this folk song from Colombia begins the second part of "Memory of Fire", the epic trilogy by Eduardo Galeano, who embarks on a journey through history with the aim "to contribute to the rescue of the looted memory of all of America, but mainly of Latin America, a beloved and scorned land." Through more than four hundred narratives that unfold chronologically, "Faces and Masks" survey the 18th and 19th centuries, a painful yet fertile era in which the peoples of the American continent seek their true identity, behind the masks imposed on them by the colonizers, in order to ultimately conquer their self-determination and rights. In these two centuries, through successive wars and revolutions, the colonies gain their independence. In front of the reader's eyes parade revolutionaries, reformers, dictators, poets and painters, slaves and masters, gauchos, mestizos. Indians and Europeans, visionary traitors, ordinary people who stood up and others who submitted. It is the era when Europeans suck the mineral wealth of Latin America, and when the United States, now independent, exterminate the Indians on their lands and demonstrate their expansionism. And Galeano's unique writing reshapes history, makes it speak in the first person, "unearths it from the bronze statues and marble monuments".