How Do You Solve a Problem like Loreta?

This essay reflects on the politics of recovering a trans Latinx past through an examination on the nineteenth-century figure Loreta Velazquez. She was a Cuban-born woman who migrated to the United States and masqueraded as a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War. Her life, which she chronicled in A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army, has been critically examined as an early Latinx text that also reflects practices of gender nonconformity in the nineteenth-century United States. These reclamations necessarily negotiate her as a minoritarian subject with her status as an upper-class white Cuban woman and slave-owning Confederate. To contend with these logics, this essay moves toward a heuristic of deidealization when engaging with archival subjects like Velazquez, which, following the scholar Kadji Amin, decouples historical work from the need to find the “right” kinds of trans historical figures. Instead, deidealizing the archive allows for a more rigorous consideration of the relationship between gender nonconformativity and systems of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.