Loreta Janeta Velázquez: Grappling with Latinx Confederates in the Classroom Climate

While the US Mexico War is a pivotal moment for scholars of Mexican American literature, the US Civil War poses a different set of problems for scholars. The paper “Loreta Janeta Velázquez: Grappling with Latinx... [ view full abstract ]

While the US Mexico War is a pivotal moment for scholars of Mexican American literature, the US Civil War poses a different set of problems for scholars. The paper “Loreta Janeta Velázquez: Grappling with Latinx Confederates in the Classroom Climate” discusses central questions of engaging students in work on 19^th century Latinx memoir in a political climate that has only begun to publically address the problem with fetishizing of Confederate statues, memorials, and narratives in general. When scholars discuss recovered texts by Latinx authors as resistant, the question rightly becomes: resistant to what? However, by answering this question as resistant to Anglo narratives of conquest, and allowing the recovered text to claim moral high ground, what happens when the Latinx writer embodies the wrong side (gender issues aside!) in that historical conflict? This presentation discusses the potential and pitfalls of incorporating Latinx writers in the early American literature survey. Certainly the course is a space long dominated by slavery, captivity, temperance, civil disobedience, and Manifest Destiny; the paper argues that recovery from national wounds means looking at all the nuances of resistance and complacence that haunt the text.