I grew up Hispanic in South Texas in the 1950s. I left the Catholic religion about 15 years ago because it wasn't meeting my needs and I never felt comfortable with it. Religion had always been a topic of discussion and I remember hearing a lot of arguments about it. My mother's family had been Catholic but for the most part are now Protestant. My mom and dad are Catholic. My sister and I attended parochial school when we were young. She and her family remained close to the Church.

My discovery of a hidden ancestry began when I intentionally mentioned to my cousin Olga that I had left the Catholic Church, to get some sort of reaction, knowing it would get back to my parents. Sometime later the topic of religion came up again with Olga and she said my mother's youngest brother Noe had told her a family secret: We were descended from German Jews. Later I asked Tio Noe for more information. He was then in his early 60s, and he told me he recalled his mom (my grandmother Maria) asking for a family meeting in the kitchen when he was about 15 years old. She announced to everyone she was descended from German Jews. Since then I've tried to ask my mother if she remembered the meeting, but she refused to talk to me about it then, and has maintained her silence to this very day.

As a child my guelita (abuelita) -- as I called my grandmother -- would cook chicken soup, a recipe I couldn't find in a Mexican cookbook. Her soup, just a broth really, was made with the chicken feet. The empanadas we ate in my mom's family were made of sweet potatoes or yams, never from the meat that other Latin Americans used. We'd have corn tamales and although my father's family made them out of venison and pork, and the whole family would eat them, I never saw ham served at my mother's family table. Other foods we ate from time to time were leche quemada (creme caramel made from goat milk), pan de semita (semitic bread) and flour tortillas (unleavened flat bread), that the Jewish American Archives* identify as having Sephardic origins.

I vacationed in Germany for the first time in 1971, and again in 1973. I realized that German chicken soup came closest to tasting like my grandmother's soup. I noticed that Germans referred to their pet cats as Mik-mik, and I remembered my grandmother called her tomcat "Mique." I looked up "Mique" in the Spanish-English dictionary but never found it.

When I came to Washington, I met people who presumed that I was Jewish. I laughed and said, "No, I'm Hispanic and Catholic. Why do you ask?" They responded that I had a Jewish nose. I didn't know what that meant. I barely knew what a Jew was, or a Star of David. I knew that I'd seen six-pointed stars on Christmas trees in southern Texas. Ritual Slaughter

It was spring at my Uncle Juan's ranch. I was about 15 years old. My grandfather Rosendo asked that I help him slaughter a calf. I cringed at the thought. I'd seen slaughters before; there had been a lot of noise. But I couldn't say no. My grandfather asked that I pet the calf, and hold it lying down, and calm it. The animal got very quiet, and he tied its front and hind legs after about 20 minutes. He cut a slit at the throat. The blood wasn't pumping out, it was seeping out. The animal kicked briefly but it was all very peaceful. And the animal just went to sleep. We didn't say a prayer, but we talked about how we had to take the animal's life to eat. It was only just recently that I read in the Jewish American chronicles about other Hispanic Americans who had also witnessed a Jewish ritual slaughter. The experience was not as disturbing as I had expected. My grandfather was very gentle. I get upset because now I realize the significance of that moment and how evasive the truth has been. I thought it was something Hispanics grew up with. I'd seen other slaughters with rifles, and the animals so frightened, squealing. But my grandfather was very humane. I never imagined it was something related to Judaism. Later I found out that his profession had been that of a butcher when he was younger. He was retired when I knew him, and spent much of his time gardening, beautiful gardens with fig and orange trees. Traces of Another Ritual

When I was around 25 years old, I traveled to New York to visit a girlfriend at Christmas time. We talked of marriage, but nothing ever came of it. My mother was curious and asked, "What's happening with that woman in New York? I told her that she wanted me to get a circumcision. My mother blurted out, "Did I scar you?" I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "It's a custom with my mother's family to cut some of the skin off the male organ." She did say how many days it was after birth, but I don't remember. I asked her what they did with the skin and she said they buried it. She, my grandmother, and another woman buried the skin in the back yard, and placed a stone over it to identify it. The circumcision was done in such a way as to hide it. No one would know it had been done unless you look closely. It left only a tiny, hidden scar, really just a gesture.

Last winter I joined the DC Jewish Community Center nearby, and signed up for a session of classes regarding the "Lost Tribes of Israel" and other displaced Jews. I met Jonina Duker and became familiar with "Kulanu," an organization that helps find lost and dispersed remnants of the Jewish people, and aids those who want to join the community. They provided me with copies of "Sephardim in America," Special Edition, American Jewish Archives Records from 1992. On the list of suspected names of Jews submitted to conversion in Spain I found my family names: Gonzalez, Perez, Garcia and Lopez, the names of families persecuted by the Inquisition in Mexico in the 16th century. I found the names of my uncles: Adan, Jose, and Noe, and I discovered that Maria (my grandmother's name, my mother's name, and my older aunt's name whom we called "Tete").is a translation of the name Miriam.

I devoured books about my people's history: Howard M. Sachar's Farewell Espana--The World of the Sephardim Remembered; Frances Hernandez's Sephardim in America --The Secret Jews of the Southwest; David M. Gitlitz's Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of Crypto-Jews; Cecil Roth's A History of the Marranos; and Trudi Alexy's The Mezuzah and the Madonna's Foot.

I learned that during the Crusades, Jews were expelled and massacred as early as 1189-90 from the German Rhineland, 1290 from England, and 1307 from France. They were allowed to enter Aragon that same year. The Papal Inquisition was established in Aragon in 1238. By 1391, there were riots in Seville and other Andalusian cities and Jewish businesses and neighborhoods were destroyed and many were forced to convert. They were expelled from Cologne in 1424 and Mainz in 1462. In 1449, there were riots in Toledo and Ciudad Real, and conversos were persecuted in Cordoba. By 1478, Pope Sixtus IV had established the Castilian Inquisition. The Castilian Cortes prohibited relations between Jews and conversos in 1480. In 1492, Granada was captured by the Christians, ending the 800-year war of reconquest. The Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabela of Castile, felt Muslims and Jews were a threat to the monarchy, and on March 31 of that year they issued the "Edict of Expulsion," giving the Jews four months to settle their affairs and depart or convert. Jews were barred from taking anything of value with them except what they could carry. A tremendous wealth of Jewish art, jewels, gold, and property went to the Catholic Church.

According to one chronicler, by the mid-16th century, 25 percent of the Spaniards living in Mexico City were Jews, and if "New Christians" (i.e., conversos) were counted, Jews would have outnumbered Catholics. By the mid-17th century there were 15 synagogues in Mexico City and about a dozen more scattered throughout New Spain. In the beginning, as in Spain, Jews were treated with tolerance and many rose to high positions, married nobility and attained great wealth, but when they grew too open about who they were and how they worshipped God, the Inquisition crossed the Atlantic and in 1571 continued its work in Mexico City.

From the American Jewish Archives I learned that in the 1570s, the governor of the New Kingdom of Nuevo Leon, the prominent merchant Luis de Carvajal de la Cueva, was tried for Judaizing and died in prison as a converso, sometime between 1589 and 96. Nearly 200 other souls were tortured for confessions, tried for Judaizing and "relaxed," (garroted, mutilated or burned at the stake) as late as 1736 in Peru. As a result of this persecution, conversos migrated in large numbers to the unpopulated northern frontier territories. Secret Jews, wishing to continue with their lives in the New World, fled to the remote regions of northern New Spain, the vast territory of Nuevo Leon and the lands claimed by New Spain that now constitute the southwestern United States, parts or all of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California. Most of my family is in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, or in southwest Texas.

Sometime between 1907 and 1909, Mexican revolutionaries confiscated the Gonzalez maize crop to feed their armies. My guelita told how the soldiers came on mounted horses, how they forced their way into the large family home and pointed a rifle at her 14-year-old belly. A feisty young woman; she stood up to them, but after they left, her family feared for their lives. Her husband and her mother fled with her from Agua Leguas, Nuevo Leon. Later, enroute to Texas on a mule-driven wagon, my great-grandmother, Mama Lola, had her first encounter with a steam locomotive. Frightened, she jumped off the wagon and hysterically ran in the opposite direction fearing the train would follow! Mama Lola died in Texas a few days before my first uncle was born. My grandparents returned to Mexico several times thereafter. My grandmother described how they would wade or swim across the Rio Grande on a galvanized washing tub and on one occasion the tub overturned in the muddy river and she saved her husband's life.

I'm a very spiritual person, and I believe in God, in a superior being. I believe in doing good and helping others on a daily basis. In the early '80s, I would go to Mass at lunch time practically every day during the work week. But I came to feel the Church no longer met my needs, and over a five-year period I managed to wean myself away from the Catholicism. I've seen how people live in Third World countries, and I've witnessed dismal sights -- children prostituting themselves in the streets, mother and children sitting in mud and squalor begging for coins -- and I've thought, "Why can't something be done? Why don't they make an effort to avoid pregnancy? Why is the Catholic Church so against abortion and family planning amid such misery?" I've also found it very disturbing that the Church has seemed so self-serving in backing dictatorial governments in Latin America and other parts of the world. I'm resentful of the Spanish Inquisition.

It's Been a Great Shock

My family didn't mean to hurt me by not telling me the dreaded family secret sooner. But every time I learn something else about our Jewish past, something I'd always thought was "Mexican-American" or "Spanish," I feel as if a rug has been pulled out from under me. With every new fact I learn, I feel I have to brace myself for a fall. It's been a great shock. There's resentment at not having been told the truth until I was 43 years old. Anger, because leaving a religion (Catholicism, this time) was a very painful experience, no less so than being forced to do so. Had I been told about my ancestry sooner, I might have had different perceptions about religion and perhaps wouldn't have suffered as much spiritually as I did and continue to do. It's too soon now, but conversion is not out of the question.

The Catholics and the Protestants don't get along, and as a child it affected me. I don't have a yellow parchment or amulet that was passed down through the generations to show any historical connection. I just have knowledge, oral traditions passed down from generation to generation, and the semblance of past traditions that I now realize are not "Mexican-American" nor "Spanish," but Jewish. I feel humbled.