RADIO REVIEW : The Exodus of New Mexico’s ‘Hidden Jews’

KCRW’s broadcast of “Search for the Buried Past: The Hidden Jews of New Mexico” at 2 p.m. today(FM radio 89.9) may seem like an example of public radio at its esoteric worst.

Here after all is a half-hour documentary about the handfuls who claim to be descendants of Jews who fled from Spain to Mexico during the early 16th Century, then to New Mexico, to escape religious persecution. The only evidence proffered by producer Benjamin Shapiro for his story is the words of these intensely secretive survivors and vestiges of Sephardic folk songs and folk tales.

But these voices--most of which request anonymity--are too contemptuous of the gilded myth of Spain in New Mexico, too wounded to be mere self-serving anecdotes. “When I was growing up, I’ll tell you, I was constantly being beaten up,” says a priest who withholds his name. “We were made fun of, because we were called Judios , or Matadores de Cristo, Killers of Christ. They would gather, you know, that we were different.”

His difference dates back to 1492 and a Spain obsessed with unity after 700 years of Moorish rule. In the name of the Inquisition and racial and religious purity, Spain’s 200,000 Jews were expelled or forced to convert to Catholicism. About half converted. Those who eventually came to the New World continued to secretly practice their religion. Then, in the 1590s, when the Inquisition infected Mexico, some conversos , or hidden Jews, escaped to the frontier colonies of northern New Spain.

Since then, New Mexico’s conversos have led an underground existence--publicly practicing Catholicism; privately celebrating their faith behind closed doors. Their paranoiac secrecy has nevertheless seemed to undermine the very act of transmitting their faith to future generations. But extinction isn’t Shapiro’s only message.

As Albuquerque religion writer Demetria Martinez points out, the conversos subvert the myth that “sangre pura,” or pure Castilian blood, runs in the veins of New Mexico’s Hispanics. The few Iberians who came to the New World were themselves an array of ethnicities ranging from Jews to Basques to Andalusian Gypsies. By the time they marched into New Mexico, they brought with them a new society of Mexican Indian, black and mestizo soldiers and settlers.

Shapiro’s program, therefore, is an important reminder and negation of what the late Carey McWilliams called the Spanish “fantasy heritage” of the Southwest. Unfortunately, the myth lives on in our midst in those who would pretend to make themselves more Hispanic, or European, and ultimately more palatable.