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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  Memories of Cibola

All material used with the kind permission of the author, given to me personally.

from CIBOLA
"Are some of us descendants of Sephardic Jews? The evidence indicates that the ancestry of some Hispanics in New Mexico can be traced back to the Jews who left Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. Looking at world history, three important events happened in Spain in 1492. The first was the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. The second was the start of the Spanish Inquisition. And the third was the expulsion of the Moors to Morroco after seven hundred years in Spain and of the Jews, to all corners of the globe. All three events, especially the discovery of the Americas and the start of the Inquisition, had global implications.

The Inquisition to suppress 'heresy' in Spain was earth-shaking to non-Catholics, especially the Jews, who had been in Spain since the Middle Ages. It was established by the Catholic rulers of Spain, Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand, in 1480, and was severely enforced in 1492 by Tomás de Torquemada, the inquisitor general. Anyone who was not Catholic had to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism. Thousands left Spain and migrated to other countries. Thousands of others 'converted' to Catholicism but secretly practiced their Jewish religion in hiding--hence the term crypto-Jew. They were called marranos by the Jews who left rather than convert, and conversos by the Spanish.

The intensity of the Inquisition, including death penalties, made many conversos nervous, and some found ways to migrate to the Americas, even though it was against the law. The New World offered remoteness even in Mexico and other Latin American countries, but most certainly in the frontier region of New Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In the past twenty-five years, more and more has been said and written about crypto-Jews in New Mexico. The foremost historian, researcher, and writer on the subject is Dr. Stanley Hordes, former historian of New Mexico, and now director of HMS Associates, a historical consulting firm based in Santa Fe.

Some time ago I had breakfast at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe with Dr. Hordes, and he showed me slides of northern New Mexico gravestones marked with stars of David carved into the stone. He said, 'When I was historian of New Mexico, some Hispanics slipped into my office, quietly closed the door, and told me of some family in their town that didn't eat pork and prayed in a secret room.' He tells of dozens of people he has interviewed who are following Jewish traditions to some degree, lighting candles on Friday, carving the menorah on gravestones, placing little stones on the grave when visiting a loved one's resting place, or even a grandfather telling a grandson in a remote cornfield, 'Somos judíos' ('We are Jews').
My first encounter with the subject came as I was drinking coffee with a Costa Rican professor, at a sidewalk cafe in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1976. During our conversation he paused and said, 'Señor Peña, do you know that you may be Jewish?' To be honest I was a bit surprised and responded with another question, 'What makes you think so?' He said, 'Research is finding that many of the conversos in Spain took place names such as Ríos (rivers), Peña (rock), Mesa (mesa), Montaño (mountain) when they discarded their Jewish names.'

In 1984 when we returned home from the foreign service in Latin America, where I directed the Peace Corps in a couple of countries and the United States Agency for International Development in several others, we read about some of the research being done on crypto-Jews, especially in the Southwest. Dr. Rowena Rivera and Dr. Tomás Atencio, professors at the University of New Mexico, have colloborated with Dr. Hordes in a research project on the subject at the university's Latin American Institute. Dr. Frances Hernández, professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, is also involved in similar research and has done extensive writing on the subject. Their findings show increasing evidence of a Jewish connection. However, after centuries of secrecy and hiding, the traces are disappearing with every passing generation.

For the past few months, I've been visiting cemeteries in our Hispanic villages in Cíbola County, looking for signs. So far I've found none. The first graveyards in the area date back to 1800, whereas those around Santa Fe date back to the 1600s. The importance of this subject is not whether Hispanics are descendants of Jews or not, but rather, what are our origins? So far history is showing that some of the Spanish who came to colonize the Americas were conversos, or their descendants. They found refuge in northern and central New Mexico, the areas from which they came later to colonize Cíbola County. God only knows to what extremes they may have gone to avoid the severity of the Inquisition; we can only hope that their descendants among New Mexico's Hispanics can recapture some of their heritage before it is completely lost."