Helpless Martyr or Hardened Mambisa: Race, Gender, and Agency in the Cisneros Affair

Abstract

I am submitting a paper concerned with investigating the events of Cisneros Affair of 1897. In the course of my research, I found that the vast majority of prior scholarship focused on the affair in the context of US Imperialism and print culture. Consequently, scholars rarely examined the actual events of the affair, and so the majority of scholarship accepted the American version of events in which Cisneros is an undeserving victim of Spanish Imperialism as deeply gendered and racially charged but accurate overall, . However, several scholars acknowledged evidence of an alternative telling of the story in which Cisneros attempted to kill a Spanish officer. A wide ranging survey of scholarship and primary sources presents a strong argument for an alternative interpretation. I argue there is a strong possibility that Cisneros was not a helpless innocent but in fact schemed to murder a Spanish officer for the cause of Cuban Independence.