Booknotes: Latinx Civil Wars

New Arrival:

• Latinx Civil Wars: The Formation of Latinidad in an Age of Revolution and Rebellion by Jesse Alemán (NYU Press, 2026).

The American Civil War experiences and perspectives of Spanish-speaking persons living across the Far West and Southwest borderlands of North America, including those that actively took up arms for either side, has received stronger attention in the literature over the past couple decades. Even more recently, the push toward expanding our understanding of the international dimensions of the conflict has spread to deeper examination of connections with the Caribbean islands and the countries of Central and South America. Of the island group, Cuba figures prominently in the discussion, as it does in Jesse Alemán's new book Latinx Civil Wars: The Formation of Latinidad in an Age of Revolution and Rebellion.

From the description: "The mid-nineteenth century was a crucible for the emergence of US Latinidad. Against the backdrop of the US–Mexico War, the Cuban wars of independence, and the American Civil War, Latinx identity took shape in fractured and contested ways―through struggles over race, slavery, and governance in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba." Alemán's study "uncovers this turbulent history through a rich archive of letters, military dispatches, journalism, and literature that reveal Latinx identity as itself at war during the long Civil War era."

Alemán references writings from a wide spectrum of individuals, both famous (or infamous) persons and those more obscure to today's reading audience. His study, which "begins in California and ends in Cuba" (pg. 24), merges the "lives and words" of "well-known figures―such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Loreta Janeta Velázquez, and Rafael Chacón―with overlooked participants like Miguel Otero, James Santiago Tafolla, and Federico and Adolfo Cavada." Their assembled writings "illuminate how questions of race, displacement, and assimilation reverberated across national and cultural borders, producing competing visions of what it meant to be Latinx in nineteenth-century America." Through this examination of "the fraught intersections of race, class, language, and national allegiance across Union and Confederate lines," we ultimately come to interpret "Latinidad as a product not of unity, but of conflict and contradiction."