A New Map: Luis de Carvajal’s Archive, Retold

Lecture by Rachel Kaufman, Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American and Jewish history, University of California, Los Angeles. Recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship

Luis de Carvajal el Mozo (the Younger) was a crypto-Jew from Benavente who traveled to New Spain in the late 1500s and was arrested and ultimately killed, alongside his mother and sisters, by the Mexican Inquisition tribunal. During his time in Mexico and in the Inquisition’s prisons, he wrote theological and mystical treatises as well as a memoir. His story has been canonized in Jewish Studies literature and in recent public memory from Mexico to the U.S. borderlands. From anthropological missions of the 1940s to debates surrounding the authenticity of those claiming crypto-Jewish descent in Mexico, Latin America, and the U.S. Southwest, the figure of Luis has served as a canonical center—a nostalgic origin point for the history of Jews’ arrival in the Americas, a reassurance for some crypto-Jews retracing their Jewish ancestry back to Sefarad, a comfort for twentieth-century Jewish scholars looking beyond the borders of Europe to find instances of Jewish survival, and a means to an often-unnuanced story of Jewish victimhood and martyrdom in Latin America.

And yet there remains a crucial story clearly visible in Luis’s writings and in the colonial archive but untold by scholars of crypto-Jewish, Jewish, or Latin American history. If reexamined, the canonized story of the Carvajal family reveals histories of mining, gendered and racialized violence, social hierarchy, and environmental change in colonial Mexico. This crypto-Jewish family’s story provides a clear example of multidirectional violence in the colonial period and of conversos’ complex position amidst various vectors of power. In between Luis’s and scholars’ rememberings and forgettings lie the fissures of colonial history—the voices of Indigenous actors, intricacies of New Spain’s labor system, and episodes of environmental destruction and adaptation amidst conquest and economic expansion. What historical narratives does a rhetoric of nostalgia, purity, and victimhood preclude? Kaufman reenters Luis de Carvajal’s famous memoir to complicate the story of Jews in the Americas.

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her work explores diasporic memory, transmission, and violence and argues for the power of poetry as historical method. Her dissertation places conversas in their colonial context in New Spain, examining global trade networks, the transatlantic slave trade, and cross-community cultural and religious exchange amongst women. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on poets.org and in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Los Angeles Review of Books, Otiyot (Ayin Press), Jabberwock Review, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, Comedia Performance, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and Colonial Latin American Review. The author of a poetry collection, Many to Remember (2021), her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Huntington Library, Clark Library, Willapa Bay AiR, and Fulbright-Hays Program.

The lecture will take place via Zoom. To register to attend, please fill out the form here 

Image: Barba, Alvaro Alonso, The First Book of the Art of Mettals, in Which is Declared the Manner of Their Generation and the Concomitants of Them. / Written in Spanish in the Year 1640. Tr. into English in the Year 1669. Translated by Edward Mountagu. London, Printed for S. Mearne, 1670.  Clark Library, TN144 .B22E*