Earlier this year, the magician and magic dealer Martín Pacheco published his long-time aspiration—the book that would officially bring David Bamberg, who performed as Fu Manchu, back to the Latin American community of magicians. That book was Una Vida Para La Magia (A Life for Magic), which Genii reviewed earlier this year in the July 2025 issue.
The book was first published in English in 1988 as Illusion Show. It has been renowned as one of magic’s great autobiographies. It was a book written by a magical savant about the ideals and the frustrations of our craft: the art and the reality.
In these excerpts that follow, from Pacheco’s lavish Spanish-language edition, Pacheco explains Fu Manchu’s importance to Latin-American magic, and reproduces Bamberg’s original introduction, which was omitted from the English edition. The excerpts were translated by Roberto Mansilla, who has added his own appreciation of Martín Pacheco, which is where we begin.
