Latinx Civil Wars

American Antiquarian Society 185 Salisbury Street Worcester, MA 01609 United States Jesse Alemán reflects on his 2026 book, Latinx Civil Wars, 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. His research, much of it done at AAS, drew on a rich archive of unpublished personal letters and manuscripts in Spanish and English, official Union and Confederate records and dispatches, and published essays, poems, manifestos, news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. In this hybrid talk, Alemán shows 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.