Publication Date

5-1-2025

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of Hispanic Catholic New Mexicans have discovered that they descend from Iberian Jewish victims of the Spanish Inquisition. For some, this new information has prompted them to identify as Jewish in various ways. However, many have faced considerable difficulty in gaining recognition of their newfound ethnoreligious ancestry among family members, normative Jewish communities, and the Spanish and Portuguese governments that offered reparative citizenship to Sephardic (Iberian Jewish) descendants. In this ethnographic context, this dissertation explores how shifting understandings of religious identity and ancestral pasts affect identification practices in the present. Drawing on theoretical analyses of historical consciousness, narrative, and the American southwest, I argue that Sephardic New Mexicans draw on multiple, possibly conflicting epistemologies to establish their Sephardicness, grounding it at once in the scientific and in the sacred, in emergent interaction and in ancient history, in their physical bodies and in spiritual sensations.

Keywords

identity, racialization, American southwest, chronotope, Jewish English, recognition

Project Sponsors

A Hibben Doctoral Research Award through the Maxwell Museum and the UNM Department of Anthropology, an American Sephardi Federation Broome and Allen Fellowship, collaborative community research seed funding from the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, a New Mexico Jewish Historical Society Research Fellowship in Honor of Dr. Henry J. Tobias, an Archaeological Society of New Mexico Scholarship Award, UNM Graduate and Professional Student Association New Mexico Research Grants, a generous grant from Dr. Maria Sanchez, and a University of New Mexico Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Anthropology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Suzanne R. Oakdale

Second Committee Member

David W. Dinwoodie

Third Committee Member

Les W. Field

Fourth Committee Member

Catherine Rhodes

Fifth Committee Member

Michael Trujillo

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