1 Post-Script of Albert Garcia-Balañà, “Colonial Wars, Gender, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Soldiers’ Writings, Metropolitan Views”, published as chapter 10 of E. Martí-López (ed.), The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spain (London: Routledge, 2020), pages 136-149 Colonial Wars, Gender, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Soldiers’ Writings, Metropolitan Views Albert Garcia-Balañà Universitat Pompeu Fabra To start with: on colonial women in letters home from Spanish soldiers At the beginning of April 1896, Dionisio – or Dionís – Torruella, a Catalan textile worker and conscript soldier who had arrived in a war-stricken Cuba aged barely 19 in autumn 1895, wrote to his mother Cándida Alujas, in Sabadell, near Barcelona, from Güira de Macurijes in the Cuban province of Matanzas. Answering a letter from home that had reached him in the previous weeks, Torruella wrote: “He recivido otra [carta] suya del 2 de Febrero en la que me encarga que no beva mucho rhum y deje las negritas, en cuanto a lo último debo advertirle que no hay ningún soldado en la compañía que no tenga una [“negrita”] por su cuenta[,] por las circunstancias que como que están pasando tanta miseria y muchas tienen los maridos al campo, aunque sea solo por un poco de rancho[,] hace uno lo que quiere de ellas. Poco tenga Vd. en cuenta que para mí no quiero que llegue este caso[,] porque demasiado sé lo que tienen de malo y más ésas de raza de color.” (quoted in Garcia-Balañà 2019, 172–73) [ENGLISH TRANSLATION: “I have received another [letter] of yours of 2 February in which you tell me not to drink a lot of rum and to keep away from the negritas, as to the latter I should warn you that there isn’t a soldier in the company