LA HERENCIALa Herencia was founded by Santa Fe native, Ana Pacheco, in 1994 in response to the rapid decline of the Spanish language, Hispanic culture and history in New Mexico. The quarterly publication provides information on culture and history with articles written by local historians. The editorial consists of oral history, Spanish language and Southwestern literature, book reviews, poetry, recipes, myths and other forms of folklore retold with documentary photographs and illustrations. Current issues and trends are also covered. La Herencia is the only publication of its kind documenting the oral history of people in the New Mexico and throughout the Southwest. Founded in 1994 |
ANA PACHECOA native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ana Pacheco is the founder and publisher of La Herencia magazine. She’s the daughter of Jesús Pacheco and Natalie Ortiz. Both families have been in Santa Fe since at least the 17th century. Natalie Ortiz was a direct descendant of don Diego de Vargas. Don Gaspar Street in Santa Fe is named after Natalie’s great-great grandfather, Don Gaspar Ortiz. The Ortiz Room at the Santa Fe Hilton Hotel and Ortiz Street located in the plaza area are named in honor of Eleanor and Beatrice Ortiz, Natalie’s aunt and grandmother, respectively. The busy thoroughfare Pacheco Street is named after Ana’s great-great grandfather Jose de la Cruz Pacheco. Ana Pacheco began her publishing career in 1979 in New York. She has held various positions with entertainment, Hispanic and financial service publications. Ms. Pacheco returned to Santa Fe in 1991 after living in New York for fifteen years. Pacheco served on the Board of Directors for the National Hispanic Cultural Center for the state of New Mexico for seven years. She hosted a weekly Hispanic radio show for Citadel for three years and is currently on the Wells Fargo Community Advisory Board. Pacheco is a 2007 recipient of the New Mexico Community Foundation Luminaria award for her leadership and contribution to the state of New Mexico. In September 2006 in Denver, Colorado, Pacheco was awarded two national awards by the National Association of Press Women. The first award, in the inspirational book category, as the author of Saints & Seasons: A Guide to New Mexico’s Most Popular Saints. The second award, in the history category, was for editing, Albuquerque Feliz Cumpleaños: Three Centuries to Remember. Pacheco is also the 2004 recipient of the Governor's Award for outstanding women of New Mexico. She also received an award from PEN New Mexico in 2004 for her efforts to preserve Hispanic culture, history and language. PEN New Mexico is the state's affiliate of the largest international professional association of writers, editors, and translators. To commemorate La Herencia’s Ten-Year anniversary in 2004, Pacheco published Las Comidas de los Abuelos.. The cookbook contains 128 pages and features an index of the 490 authentic New Mexico recipes. In December 2004 Pacheco published ¡Concha!: The Authorized Biography of Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Matriarch of a Three Hundred Year Old New Mexico Legacy written by Kathryn M. Córdova. In June 2005 Pacheco’s company published Albuquerque Feliz Cumpleaños: Three Centuries to Remember written by Nasario García and Richard McCord, to commemorate Albuquerque’s Tri-centennial. In November 2005 Pacheco wrote and published Saints & Seasons: A Guide to New Mexico’s Most Popular Saints. |
here’s been quite a hullabaloo over the
advent of do-it-yourself DNA kits
recently.
Every major media outlet seems
to have latched onto them, from CBS, whose
program 60 Minutes documented people’s
African lineage, to the New York Times, which
reported that the Spanish, the Portuguese, the
Italians and even the French are all clamoring
to give cheek swabs of their DNA to lay claim
to being descendants of Christopher
Columbus. So, in that vein, La Herencia has
jumped on the DNA bandwagon. At the
urging of my friend Archie Perea, I ordered
three DNA kits this past summer from the
National Geographic’s Web site at
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
genographic/index.html and became part
of their Genographic Project.
Through Perea’s participation, he found that his genetic origins stem from the priestly gene of Leviticus and the House of Aaron. What prompted me to research my family’s DNA was to put to rest once and for all the theory that I’ve been hearing since I started publishing La Herencia in 1994: that my family was of Sephardic-Jewish ancestry. You may be wondering, as many members of my own family have, what genetics has to do with religion. According to Dr. Stanley Hordes, adjunct research professor at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, "Judaism is not a race or culture; it is the belief in the tenets of Judaism. These religious and cultural beliefs are what make you a Jew no matter how you were born." He adds, "Culture is not transmitted through genes. It is transmitted orally through stories and beliefs passed on by generations."
Hordes is the author of To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, published in 2005 by Columbia University Press. It’s now in its fifth printing, and the publisher is considering offering a Spanish-language edition. Hordes is currently at work on a new book on the Crypto-Jews of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, which will be published between 2011 and 2012. As he explains, "The Hispanic Caribbean has many similarities with New Mexico; historically; both were administratively remote during the Spanish Inquisition from the mainstream of Mexico City, Lima, Peru and Cartagena, Colombia, where the government did have courts of Inquisition. In New Mexico and the Caribbean there were no formal tribunals of the Inquisition." Once the book on the Crypto- Jews of the Caribbean is completed, Hordes hopes to write one on the Crypto-Jewish population in the Philippines, another Spanish enclave of heritage and history.
Crypto-Jew is today’s preferred nomenclature for the people who settled in New Mexico and other parts of Latin America during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Four hundred years ago, the people of Jewish ancestry who came to New Mexico hid their religious beliefs and practices. Hence the word crypto, meaning "mysterious, obscure or having a hidden meaning." Back then it was a crime to be Jewish, and the Spanish Crown ardently worked at expunging the secret practice of Judaism. These secret Jews were forced to flee to the far reaches of the Spanish empire, including New Mexico.
According to Hordes, "The naming of newborns with Jewish names like Moisés, Ezekiel, Esther and Ruth didn’t come back into use in New Mexico until the late 1840s, when the American occupation took place. Until then it was illegal to be a Jew, but the resurgence of these Old Testament names is a strong indicator of the Jewish tradition being passed from one generation to another."
So what is DNA? As explained by the Oxford American College Dictionary, DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, a selfreplicating material present in all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes. It is a threadlike structure of nucleic acids and protein found in the nucleus of most living cells and is the carrier of genetic information. A haplogroup is a cluster of different genetic markers that help to define one’s genetic origin.
My own DNA results indicate that my father’s family is definitely of Jewish origin. I wasn’t able to ascertain the maternal Jewish link of either the Pacheco or Ortiz sides of my family. It’s all very confusing to me since I’m a novice in the field of genetics, but from the information that National Geographic provided, I was able to comprehend that the Y chromosome, which all males carry, is the linchpin in determining one’s DNA. The Y chromosome is passed directly from father to son, unchanged from generation to generation.
When I undertook this project, I figured that the best route to take was a DNA cheek swab from my father, Jesús Pacheco, who will be 87 on Jan. 13, and my aunt Beatriz Ortiz, the only surviving member of my mother’s family, who turned 83 this past July. Sure enough, my father’s DNA has the J2 marker indicative of Jewish origin. According to the information provided by National Geographic, members of haplogroup J2 carry the following Ychromosome markers: M168, M89, M304 and M172. Today, descendants of this line appear in the highest frequencies in the Middle East, North Africa and Ethiopia, and at a much lower frequency in Europe, observed exclusively in the Mediterranean. Approximately 20 percent of the males in southern Italy carry the marker, along with 10 percent of the men in southern Spain.
Ancestors of the J2 haplogroup began their journey around 8500 B.C. in ancient towns such as Jericho, known then as Tell el-Sultan. This haplogroup, along with haplogroup J, is found at a combined frequency of about 30 percent among Jewish individuals.
The patriarch of haplogroup J2 descended from the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. He was born between 15,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a region that extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. Today the region includes all or part of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
In fact, Hordes informed me that he found that Pacheco, although not uniquely Jewish, was a common surname of Sephardic origin. In his research, he found that the book Diccionario Sefaradi de Sobrenombres, published in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contained a citation of a famous Jew with the surname of Pacheco who had worked for the sultan of Morocco and also served as the ambassador to the Hague in the Netherlands in 1604.
It was harder trying to determine the Jewish connection on the maternal line of either the Pacheco or Ortiz family, since only males possess both the Y and X chromosome and I didn’t have a male on either side of my family on whom I could perform the DNA test. Both of my maternal family lines of Pacheco and Ortiz belong to the haplogroup C, whose ancestral homeland was in East Africa some 159,000 to 170,000 years ago. Their descendants were among the first modern humans to enter the Americas via the Bering land bridge. The haplogroup genetic markers include: 16223T, 16298C, 16325C and 16327T. The only different marker on my Pacheco maternal side was 16295T.
Given the numerous surnames on both my father’s and mother’s sides of the family, it’s safe to assume that Sephardic Jewish roots exist on both sides. Indeed, the surnames Ortiz, Rodríguez, García, Córdova and Martínez, which run in my family, are listed as names of people who were victims of the Mexican Inquistion (La Herencia 1996, Volume 12). In fact, Ortiz could be derived from or, which in Hebrew means "light." Genealogist and La Herencia columnist José Antonio Esquibel wrote of my family’s genealogy in the fall 2005 issue. If you’re interested in reviewing the article to see if you have any ancestral ties to my family, please go to: www.herencia.com/bios/pachecolegacy.html.
In unearthing the DNA boneyard, I’m sure that you’ll find, as I have, that many of the biblical names in the family are important clues to your origins. I’m sure you’ll also find, as I did, that your family is a colorful patchwork of cultural identity. My father says that one of his grandmothers "way back when" was from Ireland, with the surname Murphy, while I have discovered that on the Ortiz side of the family I’m the illegitimate great-great-granddaughter of Herbert Enos, an Ashkenazi Jew from Wisconsin. Enosor enoshis Hebrew for "mortal man." Enos is also listed in the Gospel of Luke and in other biblical genealogies. Herbert Enos was a colonel who fought alongside Kit Carson during the Civil War.
What does this exercise in DNAmean for me? Not much, really. Like my parents and their parents before them, I have found great comfort in Catholicism and the lives of the saints. But on the other hand, now I understand why I prefer going to mass on Saturdays. And now I don’t feel so guilty about being such a lousy Catholic!
