Conversos: A Secret Past

Secrets.  Every family has them.  For some families, identity contains a hidden surprise.  Probably the majority of Spanish-speaking people in the Valley and in New Mexico are Jewish and unaware of it. Conversos―Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal beginning in the 14^th century were brought to Mexico and grew to become a large group in the region.   How can a long-ago event still reverberate today?  How is our personal identity bound to ethnic identification?  In a larger sense, how many of us maintain an identity to conceal aspects of ourselves that we would rather others not know?

The Jewish identity of conversos was complicated.  Many abandoned allegiance to Judaism, gradually losing knowledge of their Judaism.  Others held on to beliefs and traditions and created new forms of worship.  Today, many families are only now uncovering centuries of secrets and redefining their cultural and ethnic identity.  Recent advances in DNA techniques have enabled individuals to discover identities that they were never aware of, resulting in new knowledge about their origins.  As the speaker, Dr. Marie Theresa Hernández states, “the narrative of the judaizantes is a little-known bit of Texas and Mexican history and deserves to be better known as it still has ramifications today for families and for the personal identity of individuals throughout Mexico and the Southwest.”