Wars of Rebellion: US Hispanic Writers and Their American Civil Wars

In my introduction to the 2003 reprint of The Woman in Battle, Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s 1876 narrative, I had to deal with the authenticity of an autobiography by a Cuban woman claiming to have cross-dressed as a Confederate soldier to fight in the US Civil War. Immediately after its original publication, skeptics questioned Velazquez’s veracity, and since then, the narrative and its author continue to spark debates about the truthfulness of her account. I took a different approach, however, since I think cross-dressing challenges the notion of authenticity altogether. Instead, I maintained that, even if Velazquez did not do the things she claimed to have done in the book, the narrative is nonetheless culturally authentic insofar as it expresses the historical confluence between Cuba and the Confederacy. Velazquez’s cross-dressing as Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army, was an act of transnational transvestism, I argued, that embodied the shared hemispheric history between Cuba and the Confederacy in relation to slavery, whiteness, and a rhetoric of anti-imperialism that likened the Union to the Spanish empire in the Americas (xxxiii).

On the one hand, my introduction seemingly skirted the debate about Velazquez’s “true” identity and her narrative’s factual authenticity, but on the other, it opened up an intellectual space for thinking about the US Civil War transnationally. Thus, Velazquez is a paradigmatic figure for my current book project, “Wars of Rebellion: US Hispanic Writers and Their American Civil Wars.” She reminds us that nineteenth-century US Hispanic identity formed across the Americas during an era of internecine conflicts, and her narrative charts that process of identity formation as akin to civil war. In fact, before she dons a Confederate uniform, organizes an Arkansas regiment, and then participates at the battles of Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh, she is already conflicted internally: “I have no hesitation in saying that I wish I had been created a man instead of a woman” (130). While most scholars examine and debate her US Civil War experiences, the wars she wages before she cross-dresses are equally significant for US Latino/a studies. She spends two years in a Catholic boarding house perfecting her English, for example, and with this linguistic transition begins her assault on the gendered cultural practices of her family’s Spanish heritage. As she explains it, “It is the custom in Spain, and among the Spanish people in America, for the parents to make what they consider suitable matches for their children, and the young people are expected to accept any arrangement that may be concluded on their behalf, without murmuring. This does not seem to be the proper way of conducting such an important piece of business as marriage, and it is very contrary to the notions which are common in the United States” (43–44). Once Velazquez arrives in the US and begins to learn English, the Cuban maiden quickly learns that old-world practices have no sway over the new. “Some of the [American] girls professed to know a good deal about the law,” she continues, “and insisted that if my parents wished to force me to marry against my own consent, I could defy their authority, and appeal to the courts to allow me to choose a guardian” (45). Such lessons at the Sisters of Charity school take hold, as Velazquez concludes: “A marriage by parental arrangement was the last thing in the world to suit a scatter-brained, romantic girl like myself, . . . and it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that I rebelled” (44).

Things go from bad to worse for Velazquez’s parents, especially her father, after Loreta is able to “read, speak, and write [English] with fluency” (41). Her parents had arranged for her to marry Raphael, a saucy Spaniard who has her father’s fancy, but instead, Velazquez falls for an American army officer, her best friend’s betrothed, no less, and uses her newfound English skills to declare her love for him in writing. It’s bad enough that he’s an American...