For those of you who missed the meticulously researched cover article in the New Orleans GAMBIT, written by Bill Sasser: http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-09-14/cover_story.html
From GAMBIT:
Dressed in corsets and crinolines, she sits before a mirror, shaking her hair loose as she takes scissors in her hand. Lock by lock, her long brown tresses fall around her skirt. Raised as a Southern belle, she soon will be on a battlefield wearing cavalry boots and the uniform of a Confederate officer, kicking her horse forward as muskets spit fire.These scenes are being shot for Rebel, an upcoming documentary by filmmaker Maria Agui Carter, who came to New Orleans this summer to dramatize segments of her biography of Loreta Janeta Velazquez. According to Velazquez's memoir, first published in 1876, at age 19 she disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War, seeing combat as a Confederate cavalry officer at Bull Run and Shiloh. She also became a spy and a double agent, working under a number of aliases. Born in Havana in 1842, she was raised in antebellum New Orleans before setting out on her remarkable odyssey through the Civil War, a story that until recently was all but lost to history.
Velazquez herself wrote about it all in The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford Confederate States Army. Her life story runs counter to the history of the Civil War as we know it -- which is why she remained in the margins until being rediscovered recently by a new generation of historians.
"Five years ago nobody had heard of Loreta Velazquez, now suddenly she's hot," says Carter, a native of Ecuador who spent the past academic year working on Rebel as a Rockefeller Fellow at Tulane University's Institute for Cuban and Caribbean Studies. "Her story itself is fascinating, but I'm interested in the bigger parts of the picture. The actual history of the Civil War was much more complicated than white men fighting over issues of black and white."
More news to come!
-The REBEL Staff
