A New Map: The Archive of Luis de Carvajal, Retold
Wed 5/6 • 12PM - 1PM PDT
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, and the figure of Luis has served as a canonical center—a nostalgic origin point for the history of Jews’ arrival in the Americas. 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. What historical narratives does a rhetoric of nostalgia, purity, and victimhood preclude? Rachel Kaufman reenters Luis de Carvajal’s famous memoir to complicate the story of Jews in the Americas. Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA and a recipient of the 2025-26 Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Research Fellowship at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Her work explores diasporic memory, transmission, and violence and argues for the power of poetry as historical method.