Rediscovering Jewish History in the Southwest

In Luisa Leschin’s new radio play, the Carvajal family has a secret, closely guarded by the grandparents.

Although they live in Santa Fe in the 1860s, the Carvajals are not Catholics, like most of their neighbors. They are Conversos, secret Jews forced to convert or flee Spain when all Jews were expelled in 1492.

Leschin’s “Forgotten Rituals: The Secret Jews of the Southwest,” which will be taped before a live audience Saturday at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, is, remarkably, a comedy despite its sensitive subject matter.

And it’s one that Leschin may be uniquely qualified to write.

A co-founder of the comedy troupe Latins Anonymous, Leschin grew up in Guatemala, where her father, the late Hector Gomez, lived in exile after heading the government of El Salvador. But Leschin’s mother, Louise, is a Russian Jew who returned to Hollywood where her family had settled, just long enough to give birth to Luisa before rejoining Gomez in Guatemala.

“I’ve always felt Jewish because I am, in fact, Jewish, even though I wasn’t brought up in the Jewish faith,” says Leschin, alluding to the belief that one is Jewish if one’s mother is Jewish.

Like many Jewish Latinos, Leschin knew something about the secret Jews of the Southwest, but not much. She began to learn more when Rosemary Alexander, who founded the Autry’s Wells Fargo Radio Theater program a decade ago, encouraged her to write a play on the subject.

“In the 1980s a lot of Latinos from New Mexico and the Southwest began discovering that they were Jews from 400 years ago,” she says. “Many of them went through a kind of identity crisis, asking, ‘Who am I, anyway?’ ”

Often, the only evidence of Jewish roots in these Latino families was a sense of being different and the persistence of Jewish traditions and practices, without any real sense of what they meant or why they continued.

The women in a family might light candles on Friday night--as Jewish women do at the beginning of the Sabbath--”for no apparent reason.” Some families avoided pork, butchered livestock kosher style, made a matzo-like flat bread in the spring and kept few santos or representations of the Virgin Mary in the house. The family might cling to these practices, without ever knowing why, even as it practiced Catholicism.

As Leschin began to research the subject, she learned that, in 16th century Mexico, then part of New Spain, as many as one person in four may have been Jewish. Many Spanish and Portuguese Jews who pretended to convert to Christianity resettled there because they were able to practice their true religion until the Mexican Inquisition began persecuting them.

Leschin’s play is about a couple from feuding families who fall in love. She took the last name of the smitten young man, Oscar Carvajal, from that of a secret Jew from Portugal, Luis Carvajal, who came to the New World with Columbus (another secret Jew, she and many others believe).

“He was so religious that he circumcised himself as an adult,” she says of the historic Carvajal, who was martyred by the Mexican Inquisition. In the play, Oscar’s grandparents keep the flame of Judaism alive, but don’t tell the younger people their secret.

Oscar’s beloved, Mariana Santana, discovers that her devoutly Catholic family has secrets of its own. Meanwhile, the audience gets to participate, if only vicariously, in both a Southwestern posada--the traditional Latino reenactment of the Nativity--and an imagined Converso Hanukkah celebration.

Leschin found the Internet to be the best source for information on the Conversos, especially the material maintained by the Leona G. and David A. Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives at the University of Arizona Library.

“I ended up getting all my research from the Internet, which was a personal first for me,” says Leschin.

In the play Leschin appears as Rachel, the long-suffering Carvajal grandmother. As the cast rehearsed, Leschin recalls, one member after another began to wonder if he or she had Jewish roots.

Jonathan Nichols, the Cuban-American actor who plays Oscar, recalled that he had a great grandfather named Carvajal. Yvonne Coll, of Puerto Rican heritage, remembered her mother telling her that they might be Jewish and cautioning her not to tell anybody.

Others in the mostly Latino cast already were aware of their Jewish heritage. Miriam Tubert is a practicing Jew from Argentina. Richard Cansino’s mother is a Holocaust survivor, his father the brother of Latina superstar Rita Hayworth.

Leschin, who lives in La Canada, is having a breakout year as a writer. She is writing her movie, “Dance Palace,” for Universal. “It’s like a Latino ‘The Commitments’ ” about a 15-person salsa band, she says. She’s doing the pilot for a new animated series for Warner Bros. called “Los Machos.” And she’s working on a pilot for Columbia-Tristar for a new series for Telemundo called “Salsa on the Side.”

Without giving too much away, Leschin says her star-crossed lovers ultimately triumph and create new traditions of their own.

Meanwhile, at Leschin’s house, she’s already reading Hanukkah stories to her 7-year-old son, Dario.

“Forgotten Rituals” will be taped Saturday at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. for broadcast Dec. 19 on KPCC FM 89.3 at 5:30 p.m. For more information, call the Autry at (323) 667-2000, Ext. 317.

*

Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.