Becoming Sephardic: Historical Consciousness and Emergent Ethnoreligious Identification in New Mexico

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.