The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  Then Jeff Shaw spoke up. Although he had met Marianne Medina in the hospital two years earlier and may even have glimpsed Shonnie, Shonnie’s case didn’t come to his mind—but Shaw did have another 185delAG carrier of his own to report. Since BRCA testing had become available, each of the genetic counselors had seen one or two Hispano breast-cancer patients who were 185delAG carriers. Going back to their files, they learned that all of the women had roots in the San Luis Valley.

  Mullineaux spoke next with Ruth Oratz, a New York University oncologist who was then working in Denver. Those people are Jewish, Oratz told Mullineaux. I’m sure of it. Oratz was a close colleague of Harry Ostrer’s. Convinced they were onto something interesting, the four counselors enlisted a genetic scientist, Sharon Graw. Graw’s analysis of the mutation confirmed the telltale Jewish spelling, and the group published its finding in 2003 in the journal Cancer. Their research paper—the first report of 185delAG in Hispanos and the foundational document for this book—was titled “Identification of Germline 185delAG BRCA1 Mutations in Non-Jewish Americans of Spanish Ancestry from the San Luis Valley, Colorado.” Germline means inherited. By non-Jewish, the researchers meant that the six women in the study who carried the mutation claimed that their families were Catholic. They denied being Jewish or having Jewish heritage.

  Some of the subjects had started to wonder, though. One woman, after quizzing her relatives, told the researchers that she suspected she had Jewish ancestry after all. Another subject, a patient of Mullineaux’s named Beatrice Martinez Wright, went further. With the zeal of an investigative reporter chasing two stories at once, Bea Wright went looking for cancer cases and evidence of Jewishness in her family tree. Everything that this chapter contains is contained in Bea Martinez Wright, either in her cells or in her awakened sense of her Jewish heritage. Shonnie may have left the stage, but the long-running story of the secret Jews of New Mexico is about to intersect the Medina family because Bea Martinez Wright was Shonnie’s first cousin, once removed.

  Bea’s father, Luis Maximo Martinez, who was called Max, and Shonnie’s grandmother Dorothy were brother and sister. They were born a year apart in the large brood produced by Luis and Andrellita Martinez. Recall that Andrellita Martinez had breast cancer, survived it, and went on to die of another cause. Almost certainly, the 185delAG mutation was introduced to the cancer-plagued family by way of Andrellita. Almost certainly, she was the obligate carrier, a person to whom a mutation can be traced without proof of a DNA test. It had to be either Andrellita or (less likely) her husband.

  Max, Dorothy, and the other offspring of Luis and Andrellita were raised in Culebra in the 1930s and 1940s, but Max Martinez was restless and left for bigger places. Large families outgrew little properties; more people left during the postwar years than stayed. Max settled first in Colorado Springs and then in Pueblo, Colorado, an obligate but unknowing carrier of the mutation like his mother. Max and his wife, Rosalia—her maiden name also was Martinez—had seven children. Beatrice was born in 1954 on a farm where her father was a migrant laborer. Andrellita traveled from Culebra to the place where Max was working in order to deliver Bea.

  Meanwhile, Dorothy’s oldest son, Joseph, an obligate carrier too, remained on the land in Culebra. Three years older than Bea, Joseph Medina had little if any knowledge of his first cousin. Bea’s own memory of Joseph was better, because she made visits to Culebra to see their grandmother. Bea even remembered that Joseph had a little daughter, Shonnie. Married twice, with three children of her own, Bea resided in the Boulder area, a long way from the San Luis Valley.

  Beatrice Martinez Wright was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, when she was forty-five years old. Shonnie had died the year before, but Bea didn’t know that then. Bea had a mastectomy of her right breast and chemotherapy. She had the good fortune to be treated at a major medical center in Denver. Having heard of cancers among the women on her father’s side, she informed her doctor, and considering that, plus her relatively young age, the doctor recommended that she see a genetic counselor, who was Lisa Mullineaux. That is how Bea learned that she carried the BRCA1.185delAG mutation and that she was descended from Jews.

  In the fall of 2001, Bea scheduled an operation for removal of her healthy left breast as well as her ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus. These were aggressive prophylactic measures for a person of her time and place. Before she would have the surgery, however, she decided to return to the Valley and to New Mexico to warn her relatives, as many as she could find, about the mutation in the family. She also wanted to tell them the exciting news that the Martinezes and Medinas were related to Jews. I was mostly concerned with our cancer history, she said. This was flowing in our veins. I thought, We’ve got to take care of it because it hurts when you hear of another one gone down.

  Bea also hoped to do some genealogical fact-finding on the trip. I have sixty first cousins, some I never knew I had, she said. I made the trek because I needed to know where I was from. She drew up a pedigree of the cancer cases she’d gathered, and she made a stack of photocopies of the chart and other material to hand out to her relatives. About the mutation she wrote: “This is the same mutation found in the Ashkenazi Jewish Ancestry! So somewhere in the family line, from past generations I’m of Ashkenazi Jewish Ancestry!” At that time most geneticists and genetic counselors did not know that 185delAG affected Jews worldwide, not just Ashkenazim, and that the route of transmission to Hispanos was probably via Sephardic Jews.

  When Lisa Mullineaux told Bea that her mutation was Jewish, Bea recalled a magazine article she’d read a few years earlier. It was about the secret Jews of New Mexico. Bea compared what she remembered of the article with peculiar incidents from her childhood. There were odd goings-on in her grandmother’s household. Andrellita and other female relatives would light candles on Friday evenings, as if for a furtive Shabbat. During a funeral, or was it afterward, during the period of mourning, the women would cover all the mirrors in the house. When they swept the rooms, they’d make a pile of dust in the center of a room, never at the doorways. And there were some other practices that, looking back, seemed unusual. Were these things Jewish? As far as Bea knew, her grandmother had been a sincere Catholic. Her father, Max, dismissed her questions out of hand.

  In the library and on the Internet, Bea read a number of accounts of New Mexicans who had rediscovered their Jewish heritage. She learned that the phenomenon was called crypto-Judaism and that it had started with the suppression of Jews in Spain and had carried over to the New World. Although one expert maintained that crypto-Judaism had died out in New Mexico centuries ago, others declared that memories like Bea’s proved it was still alive.

  By the time she and her husband left for the San Luis Valley, Bea had become a believer not only in the Martinezes’ Jewish ancestry but also in a Hispano Jewish identity. These are two different things, and a person with a rock-solid religious foundation might embrace the first, accepting a Jewish forebear or two, without buying into the second. But Bea was a disaffected Catholic, you have to understand, and had been for a long time. The Catholic Church kind of sucked, she said, apologizing for her bluntness. I didn’t believe it, I’m not a Catholic, she said. But Bea was too modern-minded to become a Jehovah’s Witness like her cousins. Rather, she described herself as a Gnostic Christian who could talk to God anywhere, and in addition she admired the approach of the New Age psychics. Unencumbered by tradition, Bea could claim a Jewish identity for herself, as many Hispanos were doing even without the evidence of DNA. Admittedly it is hard to get a fix on Bea’s beliefs because her mind was swirling. Her cancer scare and the 185delAG mutation had upended her understanding of her family and its history, that much was certain. She drove off to tell her relatives.

  And while she is en route, it is appropriate to introduce New Mexico historian Stanley M. Hordes, the scholar most responsible for the rediscovery of Jewish heritage by Hispanos. Though Bea would not
have recognized his name, the information she had gathered about crypto-Judaism was generated in large part by his efforts. If Harry Ostrer stood for nature, i.e., the biology of Jewishness expressed through DNA, Stan Hordes represented its counterpart, nurture, or Jewish identity expressed through the cultural landscape of northern New Mexico and the San Luis Valley. If Harry was a fox, always seeking new insights and new collaborators, Stanley was a hedgehog, never wavering from a single idea. Working independently, the two researchers converged in Bea Wright, because she was one of a handful of Hispanos who carried both a Jewish gene and what Hordes called a Jewish consciousness.

  Stanley Hordes was the official state historian of New Mexico during the early 1980s. His job in those days was to manage the archives in Santa Fe and browse around in New Mexico’s colorful past. His name (pronounced HOR-dees) sounded Latin, as if he might be from around here, and he spoke very good Spanish, but in fact Hordes was an outsider to the academic establishment of New Mexico, an Ashkenazi Jew from back East. He was an independent thinker, a dogged worker, something of a loner, and sensitive to slights. Mrs. Hordes didn’t raise a thick-skinned child, he once said about himself.

  Part of his job for the state was assisting people with their genealogies. I began to receive some very unusual visits in my office, Stan recalled. People would drop by and tell me, in whispers, that so-and-so doesn’t eat pork, or that so-and-so circumcises his children. Hordes, who had written his doctoral dissertation on the crypto-Jewish community of seventeenth-century New Spain, pricked up his ears. The hushed rumors he heard in the state archives were echoes of accusations that had been made in the offices of the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico City in the 1640s. To accuse a high-ranking citizen of Judaizing was a useful political tactic and might well strike the mark. For the Spanish settlers of the Americas had included genuine Catholic converts, aka conversos or New Christians and their descendants, but also false converts, the crypto-Jews or Judaizers, who maintained their faith in camera. Crypto-Jews existed among the nobility and political leadership in Mexico City. Although the Inquisition on two occasions campaigned to root out the Judaizers, it is clear from the records of the trials that their practices endured, even in the face of executions.

  According to Hordes’s research, the crackdowns probably caused crypto-Jews to venture farther up the Rio Grande to frontier outposts where they might avoid persecution. The period of the colonizing of New Mexico coincided with such a crackdown. Juan de Oñate, New Mexico’s conquistador-founder—a man who whipped himself as he crossed the Rio Grande out of respect for the Easter season—came from a converso family, as did a number of members of his expedition. These periods were exceptional. On the whole, the authorities in Mexico City were tolerant of conversos, and in Santa Fe they were even more so. All pressure on crypto-Jews ceased after 1700, when the colony entered its second phase, following the Pueblo Revolt, and Judaizing was a forgotten issue when New Mexico passed into American hands in the 1840s. Until he began hearing the rumors to the contrary, Hordes assumed that the secret Jews of New Mexico had withered away, history having made no mention of them for centuries.

  But when he went into the field in pursuit of the stories, Hordes found evidence to change his mind. A watered-down variant of Judaism appeared to have survived well into the twentieth century, its trail still warm. “Children growing up in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,” Hordes wrote, “witnessed their parents lighting candles on Friday night, refraining from eating pork, or slaughtering their meat with special care not to consume the blood, but were not told the reason for these observances.” Some of the Hispano families, such as Bea Wright’s, seemed to have forgotten the Jewish significance of the customs, holding onto them only by habit, while others knew full well what they were about; or at least the older generation had known, if their children were to be believed. “It was only when their suspicions were aroused decades later,” Hordes wrote, “that they asked their elders, who reluctantly answered, ‘Eramos judíos’ (We were Jews).”

  Stanley gathered many such testimonies. His informants took him to backcountry cemeteries and showed him gravestones with six-pointed stars. They brought out objects from their closets that resembled mezuzah cases (for holding a sacred Jewish scroll), dreidels (a four-sided toy or top), and other vaguely Jewish items. Hordes became a clearinghouse for stories and signs of crypto-Judaism. He joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico, where his writings and lectures attracted sociologists, ethnographers, and folklorists to the new field. After journalists got wind of it, the coverage jogged more memories and prompted additional believers to come out of the woodwork. Hordes appeared in a National Public Radio documentary, “The Hidden Jews of New Mexico,” which had multiple airings and is still requested today.

  In the early 1990s, crypto-Judaism was a lively cottage industry worked by an enthusiastic cadre of amateurs and professionals. The Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies put out a quarterly newsletter, and each year it held a meeting in a different southwestern city. The speakers presented historical and literary papers; genealogies and personal revelations were explored. Although Hordes, the society’s cofounder, wasn’t the only investigator of secret Jews, past and present, he was the most energetic in the field. The challenge, he explained to audiences, was figuring out how to document the lives of people who tried not to leave anything behind.

  The old-guard Hispano historians in Santa Fe and Albuquerque were dubious about crypto-Judaism because Stanley Hordes, in the words of one, wasn’t of the culture, and because the evidence he offered was anecdotal and ambiguous. It wasn’t supported, said Adrian Bustamante, a leading New Mexico researcher. It wasn’t documented. Even if it’s true, Bustamante complained to Hordes, many ethnic groups have contributed to the Hispano people. Why are you focusing on this one?

  Why do I do it? Stan would respond, acknowledging a certain hostility to his work. To strip the veneer off. I’m interested in finding out who we are as a community. Strip the veneer off what exactly? The stereotype that all Jews are from Poland and Russia, he replied. For most people, Jewish and Spanish are antithetical. The fabric of Jewish heritage in New Mexico is richer than we thought.

  Another skeptic was Fray Angélico Chavez, a Franciscan priest and a venerated figure in New Mexico scholarship. Chavez’s book on the origins of New Mexico’s families had triggered the popular interest in genealogy in the state, as descendants sought to link themselves to the original Spanish colonists using his charts and his inventory of colonial surnames. Chavez’s best-known book, My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico, in which the author imagines his people gestating, laboring, and finally being born when Juan de Oñate and company traverse the Rio Grande, plays up New Mexico’s sorrowful Catholic heritage but is silent about its submerged Jewishness.

  When Hordes and his revisionist colleagues reread Fray Angélico, however, they noticed a Jewish strain of another sort in the priest’s historical narrative. Repeatedly Chavez compares the New Mexico settlers to the high-country herdsmen of ancient Canaan, the Rio Grande River to the River Jordan, and the desert north of El Paso to the Sinai or the Negev. He depicts a second Palestine, the piñons and junipers on the hills taking the place of gray-green olive groves. Here a different band of shepherds ekes out a living underneath cold, starry skies and a fierce God. Chavez even detects a racial symmetry between the colonists, with their black and sometimes frizzy hair, and the Semitic peoples of the Middle East who had migrated to Iberia and thence to the New World.

  Previously this had been taken as a romantic, Judeo-Christian conceit, but now it was asked, What’s with all the Jewish allusions? Did Chavez mean to signal the role of Jews in the foundation of New Mexico? The priest was adamant that he had no hidden agenda. Crusty in his old age, Fray Angélico dismissed the importance of crypto-Judaism. He merely meant to link the settlers of New Mexico, Castile, and Palestine, three pastoral peoples on the same latitude, though living
at different times. Fray Angélico’s disavowal did not completely persuade Hordes and others. They pointed out that his book on the first families of New Mexico included two of his own ancestors who were accused of Judaizing.

  All in all, the construction of crypto-Judaism was expanding robustly in the 1990s, until the arrival in New Mexico of Judith Neulander, a one-woman wrecking crew. Neulander, an ethnographer and PhD student, had been eager to adopt Hordes’s methods. He duly took her into the field as he interviewed people, and he showed her the gravestones and curious totems of his research, but something went wrong and Neulander decided that crypto-Judaism was a sham. If it had ever existed, it no longer existed—it was an imagined community, she wrote in a broadside in 1994. For the rest of the decade and into the next, Neulander churned out papers attacking Hordes’s findings. She accused him of asking leading questions and planting suggestions of Jewish identity in his informants. The reports of Jewish customs were FOAFtales, she declared, an acronym meaning that they came from a friend-of-a-friend. These FOAFtales couldn’t be verified, the actual practitioners having died. About the hexagrams carved on the gravestones? A lot of cultures employed that sign. The dreidels? A lot of cultures had fabricated toys like that. Secrecy was a fig leaf over a dearth of evidence. Neulander wrote that, absent a formal Judaic tradition among Hispanos, there were better explanations for the rites and objects being uncovered—vestiges of Seventh-Day Adventism or Pentecostalism, for example, which missionaries brought to the area in the early twentieth century. And since race often lurks below people’s opinions about other people, Neulander asserted that the darker-skinned Hispanos were trying to elevate their status by associating with light-skinned European Jews.