The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  But now hike up the half-mile-long path braiding the side of the San Pedro Mesa. The entire path is a Catholic shrine; it is the main tourist draw of San Luis. Completed in 1990 and topped by the white Chapel of All Saints, the Stations of the Cross Shrine produces its impact slowly. Every forty yards or so, you pass a bronze sculpture of figures closely engaged in the incidents of the Crucifixion. The sculptor, Huberto Maestas, is said to have put Culebran faces on the three-quarter-scale figures. Burnished on the drab hillside, the stations could plausibly mark the way to Golgotha. Loose rock, prickly pear cactus, sagebrush, and juniper adorn the path where Christ trudged, stumbled, and fell. Switchbacks force you to double back and come face-to-face with yourself, and by the time you have reached Station 11 you may be short of breath and quite unnerved. Although the Gospels don’t elaborate on the nailing, of course it makes sense that Jesus would have been laid on the ground, the rough wood beneath him, in order for the man who did the job to swing his arm high and pound the nail through Jesus’ wrist.

  So he hangs above Culebra, as the morning light descends on the mesa. The viridescent Valley lies all around, its vestige of snow wicked away by the cold April sun. In the foreground of the western mountains, the lower, darker mesas will be illuminated when the sun, clearing the Sangre de Cristos, discovers them one by one on the plain. Willa Cather wrote about the lit terrain, “. . . those red hills never became vermilion, but a more and more intense rose-carnelian; not the colour of living blood . . . but the colour of the dried blood of saints and martyrs.”

  Happily, the sculptor has made a fifteenth station, which is set apart from the other scenes on the mesa. Walk around to the north side of the handsomely domed chapel. The final bronze depicts Christ ascending from the top of his cross like a diver buoyantly regaining the surface. A whoosh of air is about to fill his lungs, the bends of death be damned.

  You are sitting above the circle of the earth. About one hundred miles long and fifty to sixty miles wide, the San Luis Valley is reputedly the largest alpine valley in the world. Imagine an area the size of Connecticut lifted into a deep blue sky and surrounded with snow-capped mountains. Because the desert air foreshortens the distances, any sight line quickly runs into an unscalable wall. The Valley is a time capsule, cut off from the concerns of the rest of the world. A freeze-dried religiosity from sixteenth-century Spain persists in the landscape, not degrading but also not penetrating all the way through to church attendance as it used to do. The Valley is a mountain henge, a sealed system. Growing up in this enclosure like one of Mendel’s pea plants, Shonnie Medina blossomed according to the stern rules of her Spanish lineage, although the rules were bent by a sharp turn in the family culture, and then by a single gene.

  When you have come down from the mesa, and if you are still game, take yourself across the plaza to the San Luis Museum. Go straight upstairs, bypassing the first floor and the cramped, conventional exhibits of Culebra’s history. Few visit the tiny museum, still fewer mount to the second floor. The wooden treads groan; the light falls away and you come into a tenebrous quiet. Before you is a replica of the main room of a morada, where the penitentes, the secret brotherhood, used to meet. Morada means home or dwelling. The word deliberately understates the goings-on inside.

  Three or four wooden benches—rough pews—face the north wall of the room. On the walls are retablos, simple, flat paintings that were modeled on the altarpieces of Spanish churches, and in front of the benches are primitive, life-size sculptures and mannequins called bultos. The bultos portray two dimensions of the human form plus a hint of the third, the plumpness of life painfully pressed out. There stands the bloodied Jesus, his eyes hooded, and also a hazily dignified figure known as the Virgin in Black. Another bulto depicts Our Lady of Death on the hunt. A skeleton with a plaster face, Lady Death stands stiffly in a square cart with an arrow pulled back in her bow. During Good Friday processions, one of the penitentes would haul this cart, sometimes made weightier by sand or rocks, along the road past the goose-bumped onlookers. “She is like Cupid,” writes one authority, “except that her arrows bring death instead of love.” Doña Sebastiana—the polite sobriquet you may use for her—scans coldly over your face in the crowd. “Sometimes as the cart runs over a rough spot, the arrow may leave the bow, and unfortunate is the person whom it strikes for it is known that he will die shortly.”

  A Plexiglas case contains various smaller devices of the penitent brotherhood: crosses, statues, candleholders made from tin cans, matracas (noisemakers), divisas (ribbons), and a disciplina (whip). The matraca spins in a housing like a gear with wooden teeth. When you rapidly rotate your wrist, the matraca makes a penetrating sound, intensifying the ritual. The disciplina was used for flagellation.

  The exhibit’s artifacts, collectively called santos, were retrieved from defunct moradas in New Mexico and Colorado. The real moradas were austere places that made do with many fewer icons and accoutrements than are presented here. The theatrical struggle between good and evil, sin and grace, could be enacted on the bare platforms of men’s bodies. When Shonnie and Iona were little girls, they started to cry during a ceremony in the San Francisco morada, even though the rites by then were much toned-down. A devil of some sort jumped out of the dark, spinning his matraca. Marianne swore never to take her girls there again. This was not long before the family became Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Downstairs into the light again, taking a couple of deep breaths. What used to be a convent-school sits a little farther along the plaza: El Convento. To enter, you pass through a courtyard-style stucco wall. The brief, unattached wall is an architectural gesture, which cannot actually have defended the modesty of the virgins inside, but the building itself could have. The two-story adobe convento squats on its site like a fortress. It has massive, double-hung windows and a blocky mansard roof with thick shingles and a belfry. The first occupants were the Sisters of Mercy, who lived upstairs. Downstairs, the nuns taught parochial students drawn from Culebra; for a long time Mercy Academy served as the only high school in the county. Day and night, El Convento is almost exhilaratingly gloomy. Today the Sangre de Cristo Parish operates it as a bed-and-breakfast.

  Immediately on entering, the tone is set by a tall painting of Saint Cajetan. A sixteenth-century Italian reformer, Cajetan cofounded the Theatine religious order. Seeking poverty and purity, the Theatine monks were part of the movement to tighten moral standards and inject new zeal into the Catholic Church in response to Martin Luther’s shocking and heretical challenge. From Italy the Theatines spread to Spain and to missions in the New World and the Far East. Though the order, in the global Catholic dominion, has waned over the centuries and is a minor one at present, the Theatines still manage the spiritual care of Hispanic Catholics in a few dioceses of Colorado. The Sangre de Cristo Parish is run by Theatines, hence the honoring of Cajetan. The priests and brothers live in the rectory across the street.

  Cajetan, with black beard and habit, posing before a dun-colored sky, rolls up his eyes to a hovering dove, ignoring the guest who has put down his bags in the hall. No help is forthcoming, no staff except across the street. Other artworks and churchy photographs, which emerge gradually from the dark wood paneling, may try the nonbeliever. El Greco and Francisco Ribalta would be right at home in El Convento, while Velázquez and Goya might prefer to look for something a little brighter. To be fair, once you settle in, there’s nothing grisly or scary about your high-ceilinged room; some barbed wire around one of the santos, that’s about as far as it goes.

  Say your prayers and go to sleep. Meditating on Christ’s wounds, Spain’s artists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries depicted his Passion with all the naturalism they could muster. The Protestants of the Reformation countries condemned such images as idolatry. But the mystical Catholics of the Counter-Reformation were striving to experience his suffering body to body, through which they might be joined to him soul to soul. Is
that their ghosts you hear coming home from the morada? Or just innocent creaks in the hall?

  Harry Ostrer came to stay once at El Convento. It sounds unlikely but it’s true. When he came in and set down his suitcase, he surveyed Saint Cajetan cautiously. He had been forewarned about the intensely Catholic atmosphere of the place.

  You know, he said after settling in, we all used to be Sephardim.

  The Sephardim are the Jews of the Mediterranean basin. It will be recalled that Jews dispersed about the Mediterranean following their expulsion from Jerusalem in the first century CE. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Italy, an offshoot occurred. The Jews who begat the Ashkenazi population and Harry’s family went north to France and Germany. The Hebrew traders and travelers who continued west to the Iberian Peninsula, going by way of North Africa, became the founders of the Sephardic branch of Jewry. Sepharad was the name in the Hebrew Bible for a place of uncertain location. To the Jewish migrants, Sepharad seemed to be just that place. The Romans called it Hispania (Spain).

  During the Middle Ages, the Sephardim were the world’s largest and most prosperous tribe of Jews. From this population came Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Moses Montefiore, Emma Lazarus, Pierre Mendès-France, Benjamin Disraeli, and Jacques Derrida, not all of them practicing Jews. The Sephardim, though today they are outnumbered and outshined by the Ashkenazim, object to the too-easy conflation of Ashkenazi and Jewish, as the previous chapter has done. Mizrahi Jews, who traditionally lived farther east, might rightly voice the same complaint. But this is about long-ago Sephardim and their lost branch in Spain: the late-medieval, freshly minted, sorely missed New Christian branch of Jews, which included Tomás de Torquemada, organizer of the Spanish Inquisition; Saint Teresa of Avila, the hard-headed Catholic mystic; possibly Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. And many more—down to the family of Shonnie Medina.

  To resume the story of Sepharad: Ironically, the best thing that happened to the Jews while they were living in Sepharad was that the Muslims from North Africa seized Spain during the eighth century. Prior to the Arab conquest, Christians in Spain had forcibly baptized Jews, among other punishments; under the Moors’ rule the persecutions and forced conversions ceased. Jews and Christians not only were tolerated but also were allowed to thrive as long as they paid taxes and refrained from proselytizing. Cosmopolitan Sephardic Jews spoke Arabic, wrote poetry, and contributed their learning to Moorish libraries. Beside the Great Mosque of Córdoba they strolled among the orange trees and felt safe. Jewish people today look back on this as a golden time, rivaling the era of the First Temple.

  Golden ages end, insofar as the Jews are concerned, not with a whimper but with a crusade. As the Muslim emirs, starting in the eleventh century, gave up ground on the Iberian Peninsula to Catholic princes and their armies, hostility to Jews increased. Initially the Sephardim suffered collateral damage in the crossfire between the two warring powers. Subsequently, in the territories where Catholicism was reestablished, Spanish priests, backed by riotous mobs, demanded that Jews and Moors convert. Tens of thousands complied, under pain of death.

  After 1450, the Spanish kingdoms became less concerned with forcibly converting Jews than with ensuring that the prior conversions had been sincere. This was the motive for establishing the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition’s principal targets were crypto-Jews—Jews who claimed to have converted but continued to practice their beliefs in private. No doubt the crypto-Jews were just a minority of the conversos, a small minority, but they were tied to the genuine converts through family and business, and they communicated with the Jews in the ghettos who had not converted. Such Spaniards led double lives. Secretly they lit candles and cleansed themselves and their clothing on Friday nights before Shabbat, then they showed up for Mass on Sunday like everyone else. For eating pork, when by rights they shouldn’t, they became known as Marranos (swine). The Inquisition sought to root them out, this fifth column, by torture and the stake if necessary, since it was a capital offense for a Christian to backslide and be a Judaizer. If convicted, the crypto-Jews were given a chance to kiss the Cross, after which they would be garroted. If they refused the crucifix, they’d die more slowly by burning.

  Race and blood fueled the campaign. Fifteenth-century Spain instituted limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statutes, not unlike the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. The conversos and their descendants were deemed New Christians; Old Christians were the Spaniards whose racial heritage was pure. The Old Christian looked through the shellac of conversion and perceived a racial stain. Barred from municipal positions and guild memberships, some of the New Christians fudged their genealogies in order to demonstrate that their blood was free of foreign taint. Others bought certificates or bribed their way to Spanish purity, and still others married into it, until the Church blocked marriage between conversos and Old Christians. The Inquisition therefore became expert at examining the pedigrees of prominent citizens.

  In 1492 the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, having united Spain, drove the last of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. The country’s wobbly identity needed to be consolidated, so the Crown lowered the boom on the remaining Jews. According to decree, all Jews who had not or would not convert to Christianity were to be expelled from Spain. The royal Inquisition enforced the order. As many as 100,000 Sephardim converted, and as many as 150,000 departed, first for Portugal, which offered them sanctuary for a few years, and then for more distant parts of the world. The Jewish people once again were dispersed and weeping. The Moors faced the same choice shortly afterward.

  Also in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail, which has led to speculation that he might have been a crypto-Jew or had reason to fear the Inquisition. Columbus is known to have had New Christians on his voyage. But then ethnic mixing in Spain had been going on for so long that in any historical collection of Spaniards, as on ships to the New World, you can uncover the genealogical tracks of Jews.

  Historians have teased out code words for Jewishness from ostensibly Christian texts, Cervantes’s Don Quixote being primary material. For starters, La Mancha, the name of the knight’s home province, means stain or spot, possibly a playful allusion to the hero’s (or the author’s) race. Additionally, it is pointed out, Cervantes’s father was a doctor (medieval physicians often were Jewish); his mother may possibly have been from converso stock; Don Quixote’s library is publicly burned (i.e., to expunge the People of the Book?); the accounts in the novel of priests, penitents, and the Catholic Church are unfailingly ironical, if not snide. Finally, why is it that whenever Sancho Panza refers to himself as an Old Christian—he seems to pat himself on the back for his religious lineage—why does the knight never say anything in return?

  The double consciousness and zigzagging identities of the conversos are the focus of the postmodern historian, rather than their anguished need to worship. For the Spanish Inquisition, the persistence of Judaizing, decades after a family’s conversion, confirmed that there was a biological imperative to being Jewish. In one sense the medieval authorities were right about the special nature of converso blood. In a 2008 study titled “The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula,” a group of Spanish, Israeli, and British researchers looked for tracks of the conversos by examining the Y chromosomes of more than a thousand male inhabitants of Spain and Portugal. The Y chromosome of males is convenient for ancestry studies because, handed down from father to son, it barely changes over the centuries. The Y chromosome provides a narrow, very distant view of a man’s past. According to the study, contemporary Iberians evince, as a group, 20 percent Jewish ancestry.

  Put another way, if you assembled a crowd in Toledo, a city in La Mancha, and pulled out the DNA of a typical Toledan, there’s a one-in-five probability that he would carry Sephardic ancestral markers. Understand that there’s no single definitive marker on the Y chromosom
e that proves Sephardic ancestry. The calculation of 20 percent was based on genetic frequencies drawn from collections of people. Previously, scientists had taken Jews of proven Sephardic stock, most of whom were living outside of Spain, and from these descendants of exiles came a DNA standard, a baseline Sephardic formula, that was used in the new study. The Sephardic markers found in the test subjects were compared with the DNA of the parental stock of Iberia, which was assumed to be Basque. By the way, besides their quotient of Sephardic blood, Spanish and Portuguese men are 10 percent Moorish, according to the study.

  Although you may not uncover the breast-cancer mutation 185delAG in your random sample of Toledo, 185delAG, as noted, is nearly surefire proof of Jewish ancestry (a broader, older category than Sephardic). Sepharad was the mutation’s westernmost stopping place in Europe after its carriers migrated from Judea. The 185delAG marker does illuminate the individual, one part of him or her, unlike the probabilistic markers used in the Iberian ancestry study. Less insular than the Ashkenazi tribe of Jews, the Sephardim do not appear to have built up the same prevalence of the wandering mutation. The frequency is impossible to know for sure, since genetic and medical research is limited for this group in comparison with the Ashkenazim. Not numerous anywhere since their great exodus in 1492, Sephardim are widely scattered about the globe. However, one fact about the gene in Spain is revealing. In a 2003 survey of breast-cancer mutations affecting four hundred high-risk families, 185delAG topped the list of the BRCA1 mutations. This finding meshes with the Sephardic ancestry work.

  Dogs bark at night in the yards around El Convento. The dogs start around 10 p.m., knowing one another well. It is a ruminative, conversational barking that lasts until midnight, the sound seeping in from the tall, heavy windows. One animal seems to take the melody, the others the contrapuntal parts. Declaiming, dreaming about the beautiful shepherd and the rabid dog. In the dualistic landscape of Culebra, a human being must pass between good and evil, light and dark, treachery and faith. Who knew, when the dog was let into the corral, that it had gone mad?