Landscape into Legend: Tracking Lost Tribes and Crypto-Jews across New Mexican Terrain

The essay traces the “Lost Tribes of Israel” legend to the purported academic discovery of lost and hidden “crypto-Jews” in contemporary New Mexico. The essay explores perceptions and beliefs of Jewish diasporic survival and identity in folkloristic, religious, historical, and genomic contexts. Analysis exposes pseudo-ethnography and pseudoscience as the basis for New Mexican claims, influenced in part by habitual association of the regional landscape with lost, hidden, and/or “wandering” Jews

Will We Build A Wall? Fear of Mexican/Latino Immigration in U.S. History

A presidential election was won on the strength of a nativist philosophy which asserts that the U.S. must build a wall of separation with its closest neighbor to the South. The current president has voiced not only his frustration and prejudices but the nativist sentiments of the public. The emphasis on “building the wall” and the antagonism expressed towards Mexico have deepened the centuries-old sense of fear and separation felt by members of the Mexican/Latino immigrant group. Can we look at history in search of plausible explanations? This paper examines past and contemporary reasons that might explain the observable antagonism to the Mexican/Latino population in the U.S. today

The development of literary blackness in the Dominican Republic

The concept of Dominican racial identity presents a problem in the investigation of Afro-Dominican literature. While Whiteness may be the cultural and physical standard for the Dominican, people of African descent have always been the majority in the Dominican Republic. This demographic and historical reality helps explain why Afro-Dominican literature has evolved despite efforts to erase their African ancestors from official history. Nineteenth-century Dominican literature forged the definition of Dominicanness that is still accepted today. By establishing the native Indian woman as the mother of Dominican identity, the nation\u27s foundational writers gave darker Dominicans a racial background that replaced their African, and therefore, inferior past. Consequently, much of contemporary Dominican culture and history reflect the nineteenth century\u27s literary campaign of denial

The development of literary blackness in the Dominican Republic

The concept of Dominican racial identity presents a problem in the investigation of Afro-Dominican literature. While Whiteness may be the cultural and physical standard for the Dominican, people of African descent have always been the majority in the Dominican Republic. This demographic and historical reality helps explain why Afro-Dominican literature has evolved despite efforts to erase their African ancestors from official history. Nineteenth-century Dominican literature forged the definition of Dominicanness that is still accepted today. By establishing the native Indian woman as the mother of Dominican identity, the nation\u27s foundational writers gave darker Dominicans a racial background that replaced their African, and therefore, inferior past. Consequently, much of contemporary Dominican culture and history reflect the nineteenth century\u27s literary campaign of denial

From “Greater America” to America’s Music: Gilbert Chase and the Historiography of Borders

This essay considers the hotly debated U.S. border and its relationship to music historiography vis-à-vis the unconventional career of Gilbert Chase (1906-92), the first U.S. musicologist to take seriously the music of the Spanish-speaking world. I draw on his papers, housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, to suggest that little-known facts of Chase’s scholarly perspectives can give us food for thought in the fraught present. Central here are two visions of “American music,” both rooted in politics. One, the concept of “Greater America,” dates from the 1920s through World War II and informed Chase’s scholarly vision early on. Another vision, one that effectively reinforced U.S. superpower status, grew out of the Cold War. Paradoxically, it is Greater America, which Chase abruptly abandoned—as did U.S. society at large—that holds out the greatest promise today

Interpreting Spain\u27s Jewish Past: Jewish Heritage Tourism and the Politics of History

This honors project explores Jewish heritage tourism in twenty-first-century Spain and how the politics of historiography permeate all aspects of the tourism experience. It argues that Jewish heritage sites in Spain are deeply entrenched in global, centuries-long historiographical debates about Spanish empire, nationalism and legacy. This, in turn, has shaped decisions about which Jewish spaces Spanish entities preserve for future generations and how Spanish entities represent present-day Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. To demonstrate the reach of academia beyond the classroom, I use on-site signage, heritage management initiatives, and souvenirs to trace the influence of historiographical narratives, like Spanish Black and White Legend, in the heritage tourism sphere