Some Hispanics With Jewish Roots Pursue an Exit Strategy: Emigrate to Spain

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Ana Maria Gallegos’ family has called this part of the West home for centuries. But after growing horrified by the resurgent racism she has seen across the United States, she reviewed her options and decided on a plan: emigrate to Spain.

Gallegos joined a growing number of Hispanics from the United States benefiting from a 2015 Spanish law seeking to atone for one of the grimmest chapters in Spain’s history: the expulsion of thousands of Sephardic Jews in 1492. The law offers citizenship to descendants of those Jews, many of whom converted to Catholicism but secretly adhered to Jewish traditions as they settled in New Mexico and other frontiers of the Spanish Empire.

“I had neighbors start spewing the same racist talk as the president of the United States,” said Gallegos, 54, a court reporter raised here in a Catholic family. “All this hatred just scared the wits out of me, but fortunately I had this ancestral connection.” She left New Mexico this year with her husband and 12-year-old daughter, moving to Málaga in southern Spain.

Americans pursuing Spanish citizenship often cite a mixture of reasons, including the chance to experience the different cultures of Spain, access to public health care, or the lower cost of higher education at European universities. But many also express alarm over a recent surge in hate crimes and harassment targeting Hispanics, and President Donald Trump’s demonization of Latin American immigrants as criminals and invaders.

Their efforts to obtain Spanish citizenship reflect a troubling new twist in the Hispanic experience in the United States: Some whose families have been here for centuries now feel so vulnerable about their place in society that they are finding refuge in the country that expelled their ancestors five centuries ago.

Such fears seem to be growing more acute. Sixty-seven percent of Hispanics in the United States say the Trump administration’s polices have been harmful to Hispanics, compared with 15 percent during the Obama administration, according to a poll released in October by the Pew Research Center. Forty-nine percent of Hispanics say they have serious concerns about their place in American society, up from 41 percent in 2017, the poll showed.

“Our applications jump every time Trump says something scary,” said Sara Koplik, director of community outreach at the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, an organization vetting applicants for the Spanish government. “Some want Spanish citizenship as a kind of insurance policy in case things go very wrong in this country.”

The Spanish law does not require applicants to give up their existing citizenship and they do not have to be practicing Jews, but they must have their Sephardic ancestry confirmed by established Jewish organizations and pass demanding language and civics exams. Estimates vary on how many Americans might be eligible, since many Hispanics are unaware of their own Sephardic heritage. But scholars who specialize in Sephardic migration say that people with such ancestry number in the hundreds of thousands in the United States, if not more.

Albuquerque has emerged as a flash point for people from the United States and Latin America who are pursuing applications, thanks in part to the expertise of historians such as Koplik in certifying Sephardic heritage, and the openness of the state’s Jewish Federation to examining applications from people who are not practicing Jews. Hundreds of applicants have already traveled here to take language and civics exams at the Cervantes Institute, an organization funded by Spain’s government to promote the teaching of the Spanish language and culture.

Koplik said that applicants have come from around the Americas, but are largely divided into three groups: Venezuelans trying to flee their country’s severe economic crisis; Mexicans from the relatively prosperous state of Nuevo León, where there is a large concentration of people with documented Sephardic ancestry; and multigenerational Hispanic families with roots in what is now the American Southwest.

The Spanish law allows applicants to pursue citizenship by proving that they have at least one Sephardic ancestor who fled Spain some 500 years ago. New Mexico, with its wealth of colonial-era archives and U.S. census data after the American conquest in 1848, stands out for its relative ease of delving into records compared with other places where so-called crypto-Jews settled.

“We know that various people who came to New Mexico in the earliest phases of Spanish colonization had Sephardic backgrounds,” said Dennis Maez, 60, a professional genealogist in Albuquerque who has already conducted detailed ancestral studies for more than 60 people applying for Spanish citizenship. “From there, it’s a matter of connecting the dots through the centuries.”

Altogether, more than 6,400 people from around the world with Sephardic ancestry have obtained Spanish citizenship under the law since 2015, including hundreds so far from the United States. Authorities in Spain this year extended the deadline for applying under the measure by a year, until October 2019, to give some applicants more time to prepare for exams and prepare vetted genealogies. Historians have documented in recent decades how crypto-Jews converted to Catholicism under threat of death during the Spanish Inquisition but stealthily maintained Jewish practices and rituals. They moved from the Iberian Peninsula to different parts of the Spanish Empire, initially the Canary Islands, followed by colonial holdings in the Caribbean, central and northeast Mexico. By the 16th and 17th century, many had settled in New Mexico.

“The isolation of New Mexico from the administrative center of Mexico City served as an attraction,” said Stanley Hordes, a former New Mexico state historian. He said administrative and genealogical records show the extent to which crypto-Jews participated in early exploration and settlement efforts in New Mexico in the 1580s and 1590s.

For some, even that was not far enough. Bernardo López de Mendizábal, a 17th-century governor of New Mexico, was charged with secretly practicing Judaism. He had to forfeit his office and his property, and he died in prison.

New findings in the field of genetic research are shedding light on the Sephardic origins of many Hispanics in the United States — and also, incidentally, on the extent to which many Hispanics have extensive Native American ancestry. Many Hispanics in the region share a gene mutation with other Jews around the world that causes heritable breast cancer, confirming whispers in some families about Jewish ancestry.

Patricia Aragón Luczo, a retired flight attendant from New Mexico, traced her Sephardic ancestry all the way to Juan de Vitoria Carvajal, a member of the Spanish expedition that conquered New Mexico in 1598. She said she hopes to divide her time between Spain and the United States.

“There’s a connection that I feel to Spain that’s hard to put into words,” she said. “It’s just a place where I feel very welcome.”

Laura Muñoz, 26, an employee at an education technology company in San Francisco who is pursuing Spanish citizenship along with five other family members, said she was attracted by Spain’s public health care system and the chance to live in cities that prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists over motorists.

“Going to graduate school in Europe also appeals to me,” said Muñoz, whose family emigrated from Bolivia to the United States. “Imagine not having to pay off loans for 20 years.”

Neither Luczo nor Muñoz mentioned any concern over the current political climate in the United States — but several others did. Elmer Sierra, a military veteran from Brownsville, Texas, said he was especially rattled by the Trump administration’s recent decision to deploy thousands of troops to the border with Mexico when illegal immigration is at historically low levels.

“The turning point for me was Charlottesville,” said Sierra, 49, referring to Trump’s 2017 remarks that there were “some very fine people” among the white nationalists involved in what became a deadly protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Now fascists are the good guys, our allies are our enemies, immigrants are criminals, and I’m afraid our leaders will start a war to distract from their incompetence,” said Sierra, who recently took his civics test as part of Spain’s citizenship requirements. “So much in American society is upside down. If it gets worse here, I want this option.”