Righting historic wrongs: It’s worth doing
In the Spanish coastal city of Malaga, in the summer, just as the Ferris wheel and festival attractions were being raised for the annual feria, amid all the fruiting pomegranate trees and towering palms, I sat waiting with my mother for our appointment with a Spanish notary public in a third floor government office.
To that point we had submitted a detailed genealogy to government and religious agencies, passed Spanish civic and language tests, received state, federal and foreign background checks, sent all documentation to be notarized and had hired a Spanish lawyer to represent us before the government.
On our appointed day in Malaga, we carried an envelope full onto bursting with rigorous proof that we were who we claimed to be and that our Spanish colonial ancestors were who we claimed them to be. But most importantly, our documents showed that our ancestors had been fleeing to Spanish America, secretly preserving their Jewish faith in defiance of religious and political authorities. Having signed and submitted the finished application to the Spanish government, the legal representatives there told us to expect our passports to be issued through the consulate in Texas in a little over a year. We breathed a heavy sigh of relief to be done with the long bureaucratic process of applying to be readmitted to Spain centuries after our ancestors had been expelled.
As of Oct. 1, it is officially past the deadline to file new applications to the Spanish government under the June 2015 bill granting citizenship to Jews with Spanish origins. Over 500 years after the expulsion or forced conversion of Jews and Muslims by the newly unified Spanish crown (and the accompanying rise of a Spanish Inquisition searching for heretics who had not converted in earnest), the Spanish government passed the law granting citizenship to descendents of those Jews forced out of Spain. The bill was slated to last three years but was extended an extra year, in which time, according to the Spanish Ministry of Justice, 132,226 people applied to the Spanish government for citizenship by the same process I followed. According to the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities, most of these applications came from Latin American countries, with Mexico alone producing more than 20,000 applicants. The United States and Israel both had around 5,000 citizens apply for a Spanish passport through the program.
Residents of Northern New Mexico were uniquely positioned in our relation to the citizenship law in that we have grown up with a particularly vibrant (if somewhat curated) awareness of our Spanish colonial roots. My grandmother, a few years ago, first alerted me to the rising public interest in Sephardic Jewish heritage, remembering to me various incidents or rumors of relatives performing rites of Jewish religious observance. I didn’t need to hire a genealogist to prove my Sephardic descent, thanks to various published genealogies relevant to my lineage and the exquisitely researched book on clandestine Jews in New Mexico by Stanley Hordes. Once I received a letter from the Jewish Federation of New Mexico affirming my Sephardic heritage, the process began in earnest. I’d proven that I was eligible for Spanish citizenship, but over the next year and a half I would have to prove I was willing to toil over stacks paperwork for it.
When I took the required Spanish language test at the Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the largest hall in the building was filled to capacity with people sitting for the test. Everyone there likely had similar motivations, seeing a passport that grants access to the whole European Union as an invaluable asset. Elsewhere, others may have applied to the Spanish government as a means of fleeing political turmoil in countries such as Venezuela. Perhaps some people who passed through that Albuquerque testing center saw Spanish
citizenship as a way of escaping the demonization of American Hispanics under President Donald Trump. The great historical irony of this situation is that in some cases, droves of people were making every effort to prove they are Jewish in order to escape from the threat of tyranny and discrimination at home.
To apply for citizenship based on one’s Sephardic heritage does not mean one needs to be a part of a Sephardic Jewish congregation. An applicant is not required to be a practicing Jew at all. Many nonreligious applicants may not be interested in embracing Jewish traditions, and I know from my short time in Israel that many Jews know very little about Sephardic history in the Americas.
But in a place such as Northern New Mexico, where Hispanic heritage is exalted and commodified through the Sociedad Folklorico and the annual Spanish Market, the history of Sephardic Judaism carries with it a lot of possible implications. Through my application, I was able to come to some understanding of what it meant to be a New Mexican of Sephardic Spanish heritage. Any attempt to correct the evils of the past is better than an effort to forget.
It might seem odd in our modern context, with so many living refugees, to be focused on the suffering of refugees who have been dead for centuries. But this act of repatriation is important as it establishes a precedent of a nation making amends for a largely forgotten atrocity, and it sets an example for how disparate and seemingly opposed elements of national identity can be reconciled. Hopefully, those of us from prosperous countries who benefit from this law can remember the hardships endured by our ancestors and offer our help to those fleeing persecution, violence and discrimination who are still very much alive.
Marco Alarid White is a native of Santa Fe who recently completed his application for Spanish citizenship.