 Jesse Alemán is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches nineteenth-century American and Chicano/a literatures. He earned his PhD from the University of Kansas and held a UIUC Latino/a Studies Program postdoctoral fellowship throughout 2002. During his tenure at UIUC, Alemán taught a nineteenth-century U.S. Latino/a literature class and completed two projects. He recovered and republished with a critical introduction The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003). He also researched and wrote an award-winning article, “The Ethnic in the Canon; Or, on Finding Santa Anna’s Wooden Leg” (MELUS 29.3-4 [2004]: 165-82]).
 The Woman in Battle is an 1876 autobiographical narrative by Loreta Janeta Velazquez, a Cuban woman who claims to have crossed dressed and fought for the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. Since its original publication, the narrative and its author have attracted critical attention, and this has not changed since the 2003 republication of the book. Velazquez and her exploits, as well as Alemán’s on-camera commentary on the cross-dressed Cuban confederate, are featured in two documentary films: Rebel (in production with Iguana Films) and Full Metal Corset: Secret Soldiers of the Civil War, which aired in March 2007 on the History Channel.
While at UIUC, Alemán also stumbled across Santa Anna’s prosthetic cork leg, which is held as a trophy of war at the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Alemán, Professor Rolando Romero, and former UIUC graduate student Amanda Nolacea Harris trekked to Springfield to view the fake leg and learn how it got to Illinois in the first place—a story that Alemán recounts in “On Finding Santa Anna’s Wooden Leg,” an article that was awarded “Best Essay” in a special issue of MELUS, the journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. The leg itself is still held at the museum, encased in glass.  | 
