“A lot of my work is about exploring the absences in our national memory,” Carter said during a recent phone interview. “I work on race and gender stories often. This is a film that looks at the Civil War armies from a completely new angle. We feel like we know the Civil War, but this character broadens our consciousness of those armies and introduces us to the presence of southern Hispanic communities in the 19th century and the Cuban community of New Orleans and the women soldiers, who haven’t been talked about very broadly, who were fighting for both the North and the South.”
The Times Picayune (NOLA)
By Dave Walker
‘Rebel,’ the story of a New Orleans woman who fought in the Civil War, debuts on PBS
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By Dave Walker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on May 23, 2013 at 10:42 AM, updated May 23, 2013 at 11:21 AM
“Rebel” debuts on PBS.
Filmmaker Maria Agui Carter’s “Rebel,” which will air at 9 p.m. Friday (May 24) on WYES as a presentation of PBS’ “Voces” series, tells the unlikely tale of Loreta Velazquez, a Cuban-born woman who, after a domestic life as a wife and mother in New Orleans, became one of an estimated 1,000 women who fought in the Civil War.
“A lot of my work is about exploring the absences in our national memory,” Carter said during a recent phone interview. “I work on race and gender stories often. This is a film that looks at the Civil War armies from a completely new angle. We feel like we know the Civil War, but this character broadens our consciousness of those armies and introduces us to the presence of southern Hispanic communities in the 19th century and the Cuban community of New Orleans and the women soldiers, who haven’t been talked about very broadly, who were fighting for both the North and the South.”
Havana-born, Velazquez was sent to school in New Orleans as a girl and married a Texas army officer. That husband, the first of
several, died in a combat training accident. She also lost all three of their children to disease. Adopting the name Harry T. Buford,
she joined the Confederate Army herself, saw action in several battles, and served as a spy – perhaps for both sides.
All of which was recounted in her autobiography, “The Woman in Battle,” published in 1876 to lasting controversy, but which is still in print today.
“I came across her story on the Internet and then searched out her original memoir,” Carter said. “It was just astounding. I didn’t really pursue it until I came across a series of articles written by a senior military archivist at the National Archives who had written about the estimated 1,000 women soldiers of the Civil War, and spoke about Loreta as one of those.
“What really sparked my interest was, the more I found out about her, the more it looked like she had been actively erased.
“I was really intrigued by a lot of articles attacking her for her morality, just assuming in general that the women who had
served as soldiers were either insane or they were prostitutes. Those were common assertions about these women. In particular,
finding out about Confederate Gen. Jubal Early’s attacks on Loreta was illuminating.”
A hero of the Confederacy, Early was “an unreconstructed Southern apologist for The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil
War with happy Mammies and chivalrous Confederate soldiers and virtuous Southern maidens,” Carter said. “It’s that ‘Gone with
the Wind’ romance of the Confederacy.”
Carter’s research on the film included a year of living in New Orleans detailing the known history of her subject’s life and times.
Here, she tried “to become imbued with and understand her viewpoint of the Southern Latina growing up in 19th century New Orleans,” she said. “It was a Latin city, a sophisticated mélange of cultures.”
Some of that research illuminated one of the story’s key paradoxes: Forget momentarily the task of passing as a man in the
ranks and camps. How and why would a Hispanic female go to battle for the slavery side?
“I did hesitate to think I could make a film about this woman who chose to be a Confederate,” Carter said. “Here was a woman, an immigrant, who had come to the South and had known only the South, and wanted to be an integral part of that society. Part of that meant embracing what America meant to her, which was the American South and New Orleans.”
Further reading about “Rebel:”
Glenn Garvin @ MiamiHerald.com:
Carter does confront the most serious barrier to the elevation of Velazquez as a champion of personal freedom: the fact that she
was fighting for the cause of slavery. She even brought a personal slave named Bob with her into battle, where he helped keep the secret of her gender. As one of the historians interviewed for Rebel puts it, both pointedly and poignantly: “She is trying to expand her own boundaries of the possible, while enslaving another human being.”
Martha M. Boltz @ WashingtonTimes.com: To paraphrase a very old song title, “Loreta, we hardly knew ye,” and that is sad. After this length of time, more real convincing facts should have been found. If they can be. The movie, however, is worth watching as much for what it has been unable to tell as for what it tells. But the questions go on.
Patricia Portales @ SACurrent.com:
Agui Carter Agui Carter draws on a critique by Civil War Confederate General Jubal Early, who discredited Velázquez’s narrative to
the point of casting her wartime participation as merely that of a prostitute. Velázquez is said to have met with Early to defend her
military experience, and still shots of newspaper articles chronicle her arrest and verify that she was wounded in combat. “While we may not know everything, we can corroborate quite a bit of what she writes in her book,” says DeAnne Blanton, Senior Military Archivist at the National Archives and author of a book on women soldiers in the Civil War. The recovery of archival material has given Velázquez attention in the last decade, and Agui Carter’s documentary provides the visual culmination that brings this historical figure back from the past.