Regions
Nuevo Reino de León
No region of Mexico is as closely tied to the converso story as the northeast. In 1579, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva obtained a royal charter granting him the right to colonize and govern a vast territory encompassing the present-day states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila. Carvajal was a converso — and he knew it. The Nuevo Reino de León was not merely a colonial enterprise: it was a project to establish a community beyond the Inquisition's reach.
The persecution and discrimination that conversos faced in the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal after the 1492 expulsion drove many to cross the Atlantic. The New World offered distance: the farther from the viceregal capital, the weaker the arm of the Holy Office. Monterrey and Saltillo, founded within this territory, became destinations for families seeking to rebuild their lives without the constant surveillance they suffered in Europe.
Carvajal's fall — arrested by the inquisitors, dead in prison — did not erase what he had planted. The families he brought took deep root. Surnames like Treviño, De la Garza, Cantú, and González, ubiquitous in northeastern Mexico today, trace their presence in the region to those first colonizers.
Mexico City
Mexico City was the center of colonial power — and therefore the center of persecution. The Tribunal of the Holy Office was formally established in 1571, but vigilance against judaizantes began much earlier: the first public execution involving crypto-Jews occurred as early as 1528, just seven years after the fall of Tenochtitlan.
Paradoxically, the capital was also the heart of converso life. Portuguese and Spanish merchants of Jewish origin built economic networks that sustained entire communities. Mexico City was the node where trade routes connecting Veracruz to Acapulco, the Atlantic to the Pacific, Europe to Asia all crossed. Conversos controlled key links in that commerce.
Despite having the Holy Office just blocks away, the capital's crypto-Jews developed elaborate systems of communication and clandestine religious practice. They gathered in private homes to observe Shabbat, maintained kinship networks stretching back to Portugal, and organized communal life behind a facade of Christian orthodoxy. That double life — public in the church, private in the home — defined the converso experience in the viceregal capital for over two centuries.
Los Altos de Jalisco
Los Altos de Jalisco is perhaps the region where Sephardic heritage manifests in the most unexpected way. For centuries, this area of western Mexico was considered simply criolla — fair-skinned, conservative in customs, deeply Catholic. Recent genetic studies have revealed that this identity is more complex than the traditional narrative suggested.
DNA analysis has identified genetic markers in the alteño population that match those of Jewish populations of Iberian origin. Haplogroups present in mitochondrial DNA lineages (maternal line) and Y-chromosome lineages (paternal line) show a clear connection to the Sephardim expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. These are not statistical coincidences: they are patterns pointing to shared ancestry.
Genealogical evidence reinforces what the DNA suggests. Many of the region's surnames — Pérez, López, Hernández, García — can trace their origin to converso families who settled in Los Altos seeking distance from the Inquisition. Through genealogical research, some families have been able to connect their lineages directly to Sephardic ancestors.
There is also a cultural trace. Some families in Los Altos have maintained customs and traditions whose roots point to Sephardic practices: from dietary habits to funerary rituals that do not fit the surrounding Catholic orthodoxy. What for generations was explained as "family customs" is beginning to find an older and deeper explanation.
Veracruz
Everything began at the port. Veracruz was the gateway to the viceroyalty for conversos crossing the Atlantic from Portugal and Spain. Along with Campeche, it was the arrival point for European immigrants; Acapulco served as an alternative entry for those coming from Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Conversos who managed to disembark at Veracruz faced the first filter: inquisitorial surveillance at the port itself.
That surveillance was real but porous. Many conversos obtained fraudulent certificates of blood purity and disembarked disguised as Old Christians. Once on land, they vanished into the trade routes connecting the coast to the interior.
One detail reveals the constant tension: in 1641, Inquisitor Fernando de Mezquita wrote from Veracruz to his brother Luis de Amezquita in Mexico City, alerting him to rumors of a Portuguese ship that had arrived at the Canary Islands with 150 soldiers aboard and might continue its voyage to New Spain. The inquisitorial anxiety over every ship that touched port was not paranoia — it was a reflection of a flow of conversos they could not stop.
The northern frontier
The logic was simple: the farther from the center, the safer. Spanish and Portuguese crypto-Jews who sought to practice their faith in secret understood that the territorial vastness of New Spain was their greatest ally. The northern provinces — remote, sparsely populated, difficult to administer — offered exactly what they needed: distance from the inquisitorial arm.
Zacatecas was a key stop on this northward migration. The mines attracted all types of colonists, and among them a significant community of crypto-Jews has been documented. When inquisitorial pressure reached Zacatecas as well, many moved even farther north, always seeking the next frontier.
One episode reveals the desperation of that flight. When the inquisitors arrested Governor Carvajal in 1590, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa — his second-in-command — organized an illegal expedition northward. It was not an enterprise of conquest: it was an exodus. Castaño and his followers sought to establish a settlement remote enough to fall beyond the Holy Office's reach.
The most northern province, New Mexico, became the last refuge. Thousands of miles from Mexico City, in a territory where viceregal authority was more nominal than real, families of converso origin settled and built communities that maintained Jewish customs — sometimes no longer knowing where those customs came from — for centuries.