All Posts By

Jose Nino

Blog

Confederate Sister Spies

The story of Maria Dolores "Lola" Sánchez reveals a forgotten chapter in American Civil War history, another one that illuminates the substantial yet underappreciated contributions of Hispanic Americans to the Confederate cause. Born in 1844 to Cuban parents who had settled in Florida during the mid 1840s, Lola descended from one of Florida's oldest and most distinguished families of Spanish…
Jose Nino
March 10, 2026
Blog

The Merchant Prince of the Rio Grande Who Chose the Confederate Cause

When 200 Union cavalrymen rode toward Laredo on March 18, 1864, their mission seemed straightforward. Destroy 5,000 bales of Confederate cotton stacked at San Agustín Plaza, worth millions of dollars at wartime prices, and cripple the South's economic lifeline to Mexico. What stood between them and their objective was a garrison of just 42 men commanded by a Mexican American…
Jose Nino
February 25, 2026
Blog

From Cuban Freedom Fighter to Confederate Colonel

When Spanish bullets tore through Ambrosio José Gonzales's thigh in a Cuban plaza in 1850, he became immortalized as the first Cuban to shed blood fighting for independence from Spain. 14 years later, he would command Confederate guns against Union troops at the Battle of Honey Hill, inflicting one of the most lopsided defeats of the Civil War. Born in…
Jose Nino
February 12, 2026
Blog

How a Spanish Officer Became the South’s Most Celebrated Filibuster

Narciso López de Urriola entered the world on November 2, 1797, in Caracas, Venezuela, born to a family of prosperous Basque merchants who enjoyed considerable colonial privilege. His relatives navigated the turbulent Venezuelan Wars of Independence by pledging allegiance to the Spanish crown. History would deliver a bitter irony when this young man, who would eventually epitomize Caribbean liberation movements,…
Jose Nino
January 29, 2026
Blog

A Venezuelan on Southern Soil

In the tangled web of modern geopolitics, where Venezuela and the United States circle each other with increasing hostility, a forgotten chapter whispers of a time when a Venezuelan patriot walked the American South soil not as an adversary but as an admirer, a student, and ultimately a brother in revolution. His name was Francisco de Miranda, and his story…
Jose Nino
January 14, 2026
Blog

The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun

Few American statesmen traveled a more remarkable foreign policy journey than South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). The young War Hawk who promised to conquer Canada in four weeks became the elder statesman warning that conquest would destroy the republic itself. Such a foreign policy transformation would seem foreign to present-day public officials, who are completely enthralled by the…
Jose Nino
January 5, 2026
Blog

The Forgotten Voyagers

In the shadowed corners of American history lies a story rarely told, a narrative of colonists who crossed an ocean twice to forge communities in the swamps and plains of the Deep South. These were the Isleños, a people whose very name whispers of distant shores and forgotten tongues. The Spanish word for "Islander" would come to identify an entire…
Jose Nino
December 18, 2025
Blog

The Confederates Who Chose Brazil

They sailed into Brazil more through memory than fact now, not as tourists or traders but as refugees from a vanquished republic. Between 1865 and 1875, an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 former Confederates left the wreckage of the American South and started over in the Empire of Brazil. Their exodus counted among the largest political departures of United States citizens…
Jose Nino
December 10, 2025