In this thoroughly researched work, David M. Gitlitz traces the lives and fortunes of three clusters of sixteenth-century crypto-Jews in Mexico’s silver mining towns. Previous studies of sixteenth-century Mexican crypto-Jews focus on the merchant community centered in Mexico City, but here Gitlitz looks beyond Mexico’s major population center to explore how clandestine religious communities were established in the reales, the hinterland mining camps, and how they differed from those of the capital in their struggles to retain their Jewish identity in a world dominated economically by silver and religiously by the Catholic Church.
In Living in Silverado Gitlitz paints an unusually vivid portrait of the lives of Mexico’s early settlers. Unlike traditional scholarship that has focused mainly on macro issues of the silver boom, Gitlitz closely analyzes the complex workings of the haciendas that mined and refined silver, and in doing so he provides a wonderfully detailed sense of the daily experiences of Mexico’s early secret Jews.
Nonfiction
Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico
January 1, 2013
Discussion Questions
In Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico, David Gitlitz mines Inquisitional records and other surviving archival sources in Mexico and Spain to forge a detailed social history of the sixteenth-century crypto-Jews who were pioneers of silver mining in Mexico. With attention to detail, Gitlitz reconstructs the intertwined lives of these individuals — Portuguese of Spanish descent, Christians of Jewish descent — in Mexico despite interdictions against the migration from Iberia of those who were not descended from at least two generations of Christians, who generally migrated in hopes of striking it rich. Gitlitz’s microhistory sheds light on developments and transformations in silver mining practices, and the often isolated and lonely lives of crypto-Jewish individuals who cast themselves into mining. In doing so, this book reveals what on-the-ground practices of crypto-Judaism looked like, who observed or celebrated what aspects of Judaism and in what forms, what types of religious education these individuals had and from whom, and how crypto-Jewish practices varied with gender, age, and social class. Living in Silverado highlights, too, the connections that bound together crypto-Jewish miners, merchants and their families, and sheds light on how dense networks of family relationships both undergirded crypto-Jewish practices in Mexico, and ultimately exposed those practitioners to the Inquisition.
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