In this entertaining, thought-provoking detective graphic novel set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a fictional Ilan Stavans seeks to solve a murder and locate a lost manuscript by a prominent 16th-century Crypto-Jew burned at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition.
When young Rolando Perez falls to his death from a cliff outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, the mysteries immediately begin to accumulate. Was he pushed or did he jump? What might Rolando have been so desperate to protect that he would sacrifice himself? And what does a colorful concha pastry have to do with any of this?
In the midst of the investigation, Professor Ilan Stavans arrives in Santa Fe to give a lecture about the area’s long-buried Jewish history. He’s looking forward to relaxing afterward with an evening at the opera, but his presentation on “crypto-Jews” attracts unexpected attention, and soon Ilan is drawn into a desperate race to find the long-lost documents that might hold the key to Rolando’s death. His amateur sleuthing leads him to taco joints, desert ranches, soaring cathedrals, and, finally, deep into the region’s past, where he encounters Luis de Carvajal, also called “El Iluminado.” In a sixteenth-century tale of martyrdom that eerily echoes Rolando’s, Carvajal fled Spain for colonial Mexico at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, searching for his religious heritage—a hunt for which he, like Rolando, would pay the ultimate price.
In El Iluminado, esteemed literary critic Ilan Stavans and author and illustrator Steve Sheinkin present a secret history of religion in the Americas, showing how thousands of European refugees have left a trail of ghostly footprints—and troves of mysteries—across the American Southwest. This paperback edition includes a new afterword recounting the amazing events that occurred after the original publication, including the real-life discovery of the long-lost memoir of Luis de Carvajal and its restoration to Mexico.
“El Iluminado is a revelation—a story that surprises at every turn, where the dusty histories of New Mexico’s crypto-Jews are brought to life with sharp wit and striking visuals. It’s the kind of graphic novel that stays with you well past the final page, inviting you to look deeper and think harder about our hidden histories.”
“Stavans has done it again. . . . His writing breathes life into the characters, and co-conspirator Sheinkin brings a rhythmic pace to the panels that moves the mystery to its suspenseful end; his precise yet suggestive visual creations plant us firmly in a breathtaking New Mexico. Not since Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose have I come across such a scintillating ecclesiastical murder mystery.”
“Crypto-Jews of the Southwest, your voices are about to be heard! Sheinkin and Stavans do justice to both academic scholarship and the graphic novel in this amazing new work.”
“A wondrous journey that boomerangs between the Old World and the New, between Mexico and El Norte, with Ilan Stavans on a search to find his identity in a landscape that constantly shifts, as if Krazy Kat had come to Santa Fe.”
