“Erase the Jew Part”: Sephardic Diasporic Representation in Rudolfo Anaya’s <i>Alburquerque</i>

Abstract Descendants of Iberian conversos have inhabited New Mexico since Oñate colonized the region in the late sixteenth century. According to Hordes (2008), Spain’s remote, northernmost province was attractive to conversos under investigation by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Despite this shadow history, Jewishness is seldom discussed in Chicana/o narratives of the borderlands. Anaya’s Alburquerque (1992) breaks this silence, and therefore can be read as a foundational work of US Sephardic diasporic fiction. Yet, while Anaya expands Jewish representation beyond Ashkenormativity, Alburquerque’s narrative reenacts the erasure of Hispana/o-Jewishness; Elvira, a descendant of converso settlers, purchases documents to falsify her Jewish ancestry. In three generations, her biological grandson’s Sephardic heritage is an unknown, unknowable element of his mixed-race “coyote” identity. By unpacking Anaya’s creative use of genealogical, ethnographic, and folkloric evidence of New Mexico’s long-standing Hispana/o-Jewish presence, this essay redirects the discussion of Sephardic alterity away from essentializing questions of Jewish authenticity, affiliation, and “blood,” and toward the formulation of a new concept I call the “Judeo Spanish fantasy past.” I use this analytic to clarify the nature of “Jewish” participation in European conquest of the Americas, and to contrast this history with other examples of settler colonialist projects worldwide.