Jesse Alemán – författare

Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others."Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or dime store novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both who claim in their autobiographical pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering.Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.

Uncovers how Mexican-American and Cuban-American writings during the US Civil War shaped Latinidad amid conflicts over race, slavery, and national identityThe 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.Latinx Civil Wars 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. These embattled 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.Alemán reconstructs this contested landscape by bringing together 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 lives and words trace a diaspora negotiating the fraught intersections of race, class, language, and national allegiance across Union and Confederate lines.Challenging historians and literary scholars alike, Latinx Civil Wars demonstrates how the formation of Latinx identity was entangled with slavery, independence, racialization, and rebellion – revealing Latinidad as a product not of unity, but of conflict and contradiction.

Uncovers how Mexican-American and Cuban-American writings during the US Civil War shaped Latinidad amid conflicts over race, slavery, and national identityThe 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.Latinx Civil Wars 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. These embattled 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.Alemán reconstructs this contested landscape by bringing together 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 lives and words trace a diaspora negotiating the fraught intersections of race, class, language, and national allegiance across Union and Confederate lines.Challenging historians and literary scholars alike, Latinx Civil Wars demonstrates how the formation of Latinx identity was entangled with slavery, independence, racialization, and rebellion—revealing Latinidad as a product not of unity, but of conflict and contradiction.

A retelling of U.S., Latin American, and Latino/a literary history through writing by Latinos/as who lived in the United States during the long nineteenth century Written by both established and emerging scholars, the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century engage materials in Spanish and English and genres ranging from the newspaper to the novel, delving into new texts and areas of research as they shed light on well-known writers. This volume situates nineteenth-century Latino intellectuals and writers within crucial national, hemispheric, and regional debates. The Latino Nineteenth Century offers a long-overdue corrective to the Anglophone and nation-based emphasis of American literary history. Contributors track Latino/a lives and writing through routes that span Philadelphia to San Francisco and roots that extend deeply into Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South Americas, and Spain. Readers will find in the rich heterogeneity of texts and authors discussed fertile ground for discussion and will discover the depth, diversity, and long-standing presence of Latinos/as and their literature in the United States.