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

Abstract

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).

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