Traveling tropes: Race, reconstruction, and “Southern” redemption in The Story of Evangelina Cisneros

This essay considers the entanglement of race, gender, and imperialism in U.S. discourse on Evangelina Cisneros, a white Cuban woman imprisoned in a Havana jail during her country’s final War for Independence from Spain (1895–1898). I argue that, an event historically tied to the colony’s abolition of slavery, Cuban Independence in writings about Cisneros becomes discursively imbricated with the reconsolidation of white supremacy in the U.S. South following the Civil War. The study establishes a dialogue between U.S. discourse on the events published in the late 1890s–the articles on the affair that appeared in The New York Journal and the multi-authored book The Story of Evangelina Cisneros (1897)–and Southern white supremacist author Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s Trilogy of Reconstruction (1902–1907) in order to explore the ways in which the Evangelina Cisneros text network mobilizes racial and gender paradigms typically associated with post-Reconstruction Southern “Redeemer” thinking.