Departmental News

Posted:  Jan 06, 2023 - 12:00pm

Sarah Leiter, Ethnology doctoral candidate, has received the 2022 Kennedy Award for her proposal Essentially Sephardic: A Politics of Racial (Dis)similarity in Contemporary New Mexico, which she will present at a public lecture.  Based on her dissertation research, this talk will engage with the implications of claiming a Sephardic, or Spanish-Jewish, identity in New Mexico today. It will examine the complicated, sometimes contradictory, nuances of this identity as it is racialized by Sephardic and non-Sephardic New Mexicans. Ultimately it will consider what its claimants accomplish by presenting themselves as Sephardic in an embodied way.  

In the talk, she will discuss the ways in which Sephardic New Mexicans racialize their Spanish-Jewish ancestry through DNA test results and through talk about their bodily features. That is, they ascribe certain inherited traits to their Sephardicness, thereby framing ‘Sephardic’ in a way that might be interpreted in racial terms. She will begin by addressing the idea commonly posited among New Mexicans and scholars of New Mexico that asserting a racialized link to Spaniards is a claim to European whiteness. Such a claim is potentially disparaging of other Hispanic groups in New Mexico, as it can perpetuate a longstanding hierarchical racial ideology that counterposes lighter-skinned, higher-class ‘Spanish’ New Mexicans against supposedly darker-skinned, lower-class ‘Mexican’ New Mexicans. But is this what claims to Spanish-Jewishness are doing? While they can certainly be interpreted as such, Sarah will present a second analysis that considers how the racialization of this identity can establish unifying similarities in addition to divisiveness. At a time when many Sephardic New Mexicans are trying (to various degrees of success) to convert to or otherwise affiliate with Judaism, framing their biological makeup as distinctly Sephardic is one way in which they can create essential, embodied ties to Jews and Judaism. Racializing themselves as Sephardic in this way can be socially productive, as doing so may substantiate and legitimize their emergent identification practices. In considering the nuances of these practices, this talk will speak to broader topics, including processes of religious conversion and the ways in which DNA is used to transform autobiographies in the context of New Mexico.