What those two ancestors do have in common is that people like to kill them for no reason other than being who they are.
Who am I? ¿Quién soy yo?
I first became interested in who I was while attending Oklahoma State University. One of my friends there, Darryl, was from a tiny town near McAlester, Oklahoma. My first year there, during the semester break, I spent nearly a month with Darryl and his family. There was a Native American Reservation near there that I visited, and even went out with one of the young women there. I was surprised by how alike they and I looked. I recall thinking there must be a lot of Native American blood in me. If I remember the town correctly, it was probably a Choctaw Nation Reservation.
I am not claiming to belong to any particular tribe, only that a third of my DNA is from Native American Ancestors.
The surprising part was finding out that I had such a large percentage of Jewish Ancestry. Most of that is primarily Sephardic Jews—those who were Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century.
My Jewish ancestry is probably from Crypto-Jews who settled in Northern Mexico. One of my ancestors was a member of the founding families of Monterrey, Mexico. I have traced many of my ancestors to Texas and New Santander.
One notable episode during the colonial period was the establishment of the New Kingdom of León. In 1567 the Carvajal family arrived to New Spain under nobleman Luis de Carvajal. With the exception of him and a cousin, the family was Crypto-Jewish.[10] In 1579, Carvajal was granted land in what is now northeastern Mexico, just north of what was then considered New Spain. The area welcomed both Conversos and practicing Jews, with about 75% of the initial settlers being secretly Jewish.[3][4] Some theories state that Monterrey developed as a commercial center despite its colonial era remoteness because of Crypto-Jewish influence.[10] However, Luis de Carvajal and members of his family were persecuted in 1589 for practicing Judaism.[3] De Carvajal’s nephew, Luis de Carvajal the Younger, kept memoirs detailing his life and persecution; these are now considered to be the earliest writings by a Jew in the Americas.[11] The auto-da-fé of Mariana Carvajal has become part of Mexican art and literature.[12] By 1641, the colony had grown, and some of the settlers would later move to establish new settlements in Coahuila, Texas, and New Santander.[4
The Old World and Israel seem to be asking those of us with Jewish Ancestry to go back.
My question as to why my family always used flour tortillas is answered.
One of my brothers always suspected that our mother’s family had many Jewish customs; he was right.
The founding governor of Monterrey, Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva left Spain back then. He publicly converted to Catholicism but, as historians now note, maintained his Jewish faith in secret. He eventually died in prison after the Inquisition found evidence of him and his family practicing Judaism. Though much of this history is not well-documented, many say he brought the region’s Sephardic Jewish population.
The influence of the community is in the customs and cuisine of Northern Mexico
In the third episode of Eva Longoria‘s “Searching for Mexico,” she visits Monterrey to try the regional dish. Longoria explains how that cabrito and the flour tortilla trace back to the Sephardic Jewish communities of the 16th century.
Some theorize the flour tortilla comes from crypto-Jews using wheat to make unleavened bread. The other dish that is thought to come from the Jewish population is cabrito, a roasted baby goat.
As Mexican chef and restaurateur Juan Ramón Cárdenas explained to Vice, the dish dates back to the first Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the 16th century. Goats thrived in the region’s hard desert and mountain environment.
The shepherds of the north, largely Sephardic Jews, switched from lamb to goat to avoid detection. “The shepherds, who would stay with their flocks for months at a time in those days, used to put the kids [baby goats] on a spit and roast them. That style became known as al pastor (in the way of the shepherd),” Cárdenas told Vice.