The Converso Legacy Archives

The Converso Legacy Archives (CLA) represents a targeted effort to gather, organize, and preserve materials pertaining to judeoconverso descent claimants in the American Southwest, the wider U.S., and non-U.S. communities with direct formative influence, such as Mexico and Portugal. As records not of a closely concentrated group, but a sprawling population connected by shared features of identity and historical consciousness, CLA functions as both a community archives and an identity archives. Together, the individual collections that comprise CLA reflect a social history at once highly complex and contested among scholars.

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CLA’s chronological scope spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when claimants to converso descent—and academic studies of alleged converso descent in others—first appeared as a self-aware category and grew into an international, highly publicized demographic in their own right. Well represented among them is a subset who describe specific ancestors, and sometimes themselves, as “crypto-Jews” or transmitters of beliefs, customs, and/or family lore with a putatively crypto-Jewish origin. Persons in any of the above groups may refer to themselves with the widespread term “bnei anusim” (Hb. “children of the coerced”) or simply “anusim,” often imputing coercion to alleged converso ancestors. Besides persons who have identified as actual, probable, or possible descendants of early modern Iberian Jews and conversos, CLA also aims to collect records from scholars, organizations, and media focused on them.

Founded in January 2024, CLA quickly grew into a collaborative effort with the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives (SRCA) in Santa Fe. Phase I of the project (January–November 2024) focused on gathering a substantial body of inaugural collections and securing SRCA as a permanent repository, with New Mexico State University serving as a temporary surrogate. At this time, SCJS donated its complete archives to the project in support of this goal. Other collections assembled, owned, and donated by longtime SCJS members and affiliates, such as Nan Rubin, Arthur Benveniste, and Dolores Sloan, also contributed to CLA’s early development and strengthened the case for its viability. Jewish historical societies and outreach organizations like Kulanu aided the effort with copies of their flagship publications. In August, SCJS co-founder Stanley Hordes enlarged CLA still further with his rich collection of primary sources, research notes, genealogies, and other materials. On November 19, 2024, the New Mexico State Commission of Public Records voted unanimously to establish CLA as a body of archival collections with an institutional home at SRCA. This decisive step also empowered scholars, converso descent claimants, and others to contribute their own materials independently without further Commission approval.

Phase II (January–November 2025) saw CLA’s wider publicization and continued growth as collections were pre-processed throughout the year for final transfer. Small-grant support from the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society, the Department of History at New Mexico State University, and the university’s College of Arts and Sciences funded the purchase of archival supplies, pre-processing labor, and travel for speaking events to present CLA to the academic and non-specialist public. Especially notable among the new collections at this time was Joseph Lovett’s two-hour documentary, Children of the Inquisition (2019), the most extensive account on film of modern descent claimants as an international population. In months following Lovett’s passing in July, CLA acquired rights to the film, numerous documents relating to it, and a wealth of unedited film footage amounting to some 20 terabytes. On December 7, 2025, CLA’s pre-processed inaugural collections made their way north from Las Cruces to Santa Fe, where they may now be found.

Judeoconversos—often referred to in period sources as “New Christians” (Sp. cristianos nuevos, Pt. cristãos-novos)—acquired both labels from their status as Iberian Jewish converts to Catholicism, whether voluntary or coerced. (The extended process of mass conversion involved a wide spectrum spanning both poles.) Most underwent conversion during the sharp rise in anti-Jewish bigotry, violence, and policy that swept the peninsula’s kingdoms over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, culminating in the Reconquista, the establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the expulsion of non-converting Jews from Spain and (more gradually) Portugal. Variously assimilated and expatriate conversos alike established far-flung enclaves throughout Christian Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the Americas.

Ties of ethnic lineage, kinship, trade, and administrative “purity of blood” (Sp. limpieza de sangre) statutes forged among Western conversos a new, quasi-racialized concept of social identity—the “nation” (Pt. nação, Sp. nación)—mingling Jews of Iberian stock, Judaicized conversos (called “New Jews” by modern scholars), earnest New Christians, code-switching pragmatists, and a majority about whom our best evidence shows rather less transparent identities. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the nação’s decay left in its place a small population, mostly of now-normative Jews, whose sense of Jewishness continued to go hand in hand with Iberian-ness. Likewise, for the historically Catholic populaces of Spain and Portugal, Jews’ and conversos’ absorption into the national makeup, colored with romantic narratives of a bygone Iberian “Golden Age,” took on new life within both countries’ literary and political landscapes in the nineteenth century.

Modern claimants to converso and crypto-Jewish descent have revealed a more surprising form in which the links between Jewish, Christian, and Iberian historical consciousness endure. Beginning with the very faintest hints at the dawn of the twentieth century, and spreading significantly since the 1970s, claimants to converso descent have grown into a small but intriguing demographic in several countries. Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, the U.S., and others have all witnessed the appearance of such claimants. Many other persons, without going so far as to claim descent, have suspected or investigated the possibility of conversos in their roots and may or may not explore Judaism (and/or Messianic Judaism) as part of that inquiry. Through all of these manifestations, the premodern converso phenomenon comes more fully into view as a social history with a living legacy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture, imagination, and identity formation. It is in acknowledgement of and response to this inheritance that the Converso Legacy Archives has been so named.

It is to be hoped that individuals newly informed of CLA will see value in adding their own oral histories, family materials, research notes, periodicals, films, objects, and other valuable records to a community archives they can call their own. New collections are always most welcome and deeply appreciated. If you would like to discuss the possibility of donating materials under your ownership, please prepare a basic inventory of your materials and contact Archives Division Director Jonathan Pringle to inquire. Inquiries may also be sent by mail:

New Mexico State Records and Archives
1205 Camino Carlos Rey
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507

Finding aids (in progress) for collections within the Converso Legacy Archives (Identifier 2025-023) may be found via the button above or by searching New Mexico Archives Online.