[GCFL-discuss] Mexican Jews

[gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net]

OK, I'm going to take this one seriously.

Yes, there are Mexican Jews. They came from Spain during the 1500s,
partly to get away from the Inquisition, which eventually set up shop in
Mexico and tortured a number of them to death. There is some speculation
that the tradition on southwestern ranches of being silent and not
talking about anything you don't have to talk about, especially to
strangers, may derive in part from Jewish families who moved to remote
ranches in what was then northern Mexico, and understandably did not talk
about much except the weather.

I ran across a biography several years ago about a man who at age ten,
was taken by his grandfather to a creek behind their home in New Mexico
(it used to be part of Mexico), and grandfather poured a pitcher of water
over his head. He asked, what are you doing. Grandfather said, "I'm
washing away the baptism. You are not really Catholic. You are Jewish.
This was in the 1950s. The family had been openly Catholic and covertly
Jewish for centuries.

Oh, there are also Chinese Mexicans. A friend of mine met one in
California once. She looked Chinese, which derived from her ancestry, but
her only language was Spanish.

Siarlys