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Latinx Civil Wars is the first book-length study of US Latinx writings about the Civil War by Mexican American and Cuban American Union and Confederate combatants and sympathizers whose sense of Latinidad emerged from a theater of civil wars over race, slavery, and governance raging across the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. Set against the backdrop of the US-Mexico War, the Cuban wars of independence, and the American Civil War, the book argues that US Latinx Civil War writings are embattled texts of racial formation, cultural assimilation, and linguistic transformation that show Latinx identity to be at civil war with itself during the long Civil War years.
Drawing on a rich archive of unpublished personal letters and manuscripts in Spanish and English, official Union and Confederate records and dispatches, and published essays, poems, manifestos, news articles, memoirs, autobiographies, and novels, Jesse Alemán demonstrates how the formation of nineteenth-century Latinx identity was entangled with slavery, independence, racialization, and rebellion—revealing Latinidad as a product not of unity but of conflict and contradiction.
Jesse Alemán is a professor of English and Presidential Teaching Fellow at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches nineteenth-century American and US Latinx literary and cultural histories. He is the author of Latinx Civil Wars (New York University Press, 2026), the editor of The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velázquez, and the co-editor with Rodrigo Lazo of The Latino Nineteenth Century. Alemán was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS in 2023-2024. He was elected to membership in April 2012.