faiths and associated culinary traditions clandestinely. Although historian Stanley Hordes and sociologist Tomás Atencio have referred to these people as crypto-Jews, their colleague Juan Estevan Arellano has suggested that there may have been crypto-Muslims among the earliest “Spanish” colonists of New Mexico, as well.
The descendants of these original Spanish-speaking inhabitants still reside in the remote uplands of northern New Mexico, where they remain quick to distinguish themselves from recent Mexican immigrants in language, appearance, and custom. Curiously, among the culinary customs that many of these Hispanos juxtapose with those of more recent immigrants from Mexico is their abhorrence of pork and their predilection for lamb, as well as their breaking of fasts with capirotada (bread pudding) and pan de semita (a bread made with bran, sesame, or nuts, originally unleavened but today also leavened). They do not see such observances practiced among the Spanish-speaking newcomers to the arid, windswept reaches of the Rio Arriba, and for good reason.
We now know that many of the descendants of those original “Spanish” and “Portuguese” inhabitants of New Mexico, when genetically fingerprinted, test positive for Semitic roots, Sephardic Jewish, Arabic, or both. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Hordes, Atencio, and Arellano, we are able to confirm that both bloodlines and cultural practices of Semitic communities from the Middle East reached one of their most remote outposts in northern New Mexico during their worldwide diaspora. The crypto-Jews, crypto-Muslims, and true conversos had arrived at “the ends of the earth” in 1591, less than a hundred years after the Great Colónoscopy of the New World had begun.10
But let us return to consider that recipe-catching folklorist Cleofas Jaramillo. The surname Jaramillo, like many others in northern New Mexico, such as Robledo, Martinez, Gómez, Oñate, Salas, and Medina, now appears to be one that was commonly attached to Jewish or Muslim families escaping to less populated areas of the Americas to avoid the Mexican Inquisition. Genealogical and historical evidence suggest that among the first sheepherders, garbanzo bean growers, and spice traders in New Mexico were crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims who outwardly behaved as conversos in their Catholic-dominated communities but maintained many of the religious and culinary traditions of Sephardic Jews, Arabs, and Moors within the confines of their homes.
When Cleofas Jaramillo visited with her brother’s neighbors in the Rio Arriba village of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, in 1938, she was ostensibly collecting nineteenth-century Hispanic culinary traditions. But both the direct and indirect roots of their cultural and culinary practices can be traced far deeper than that. The Arabic, Sephardic Jewish, and even Phoenician influences on “Spanish” cuisines were centuries if not millennia old, perhaps dating back to the twelfth century BCE in Spain. Given the status of historical research during her career, it would not have been possible for Cleofas Jaramillo or anyone else of her upbringing during that era to extricate those Arabic and Sephardic subtleties from other influences on the culinary traditions of New Mexico, Mexico, or even Spain itself.
Perhaps that inextricability is due in part to certain advances in the Spanish culinary arts initiated by the Phoenicians, who arrived in Cádiz, Spain, around 1100 BCE. These arts became even more deeply indebted to Persian and Arabic influences in 822 CE, when an enigmatic figure named Ziryab arrived in Córdoba, Spain. As we will discover later, Ziryab not only revolutionized Spanish farming and cookery but also sent Spanish table manners, seasonal dress, and chamber music on altogether fresh trajectories. Of course, one of his principal contributions to Spanish cuisine was the delicate mixing of rather pungent, aromatic spices in a manner already popular in the courts and kitchens of Damascus and Baghdad.
In the late 1970s in Santa Fe, I had the good fortune to walk down a side street into a marketplace then known as Roybal’s General Store. There, among hundreds of bags and bins of culinary and medicinal spices, I found the same herbs that Cleofas Jaramillo had earlier recorded in her recipes for lamb and garbanzo stew. Roybal’s store reminded me in many ways of the stores that my Lebanese uncles first tended when they arrived in America, for they were much like spice stands in the souks of Lebanon and Syria. Some of the spices there, such as cumin and coriander seeds, had clearly been transplanted from the Mediterranean landscapes of the Middle East and North Africa. But was the Roybal family that ran the store aware that its own roots may have extended back to Ignacio Roybal of Galicia, Spain, who married a crypto-Jew by the name of Francisca Gómez Robledo in Santa Fe in 1694?
A half century after Cleofas Jaramillo recorded a recipe that was a dead ringer for an Arabic or Sephardic Jewish one—and a quarter century after I first bought Middle Eastern spices in Roybal’s General Store—many New Mexican Hispanics began to acknowledge a secret long held within their families: that they had maintained Jewish or Muslim customs, including food taboos and formulas for mixing spices, sometimes without being able to put a name on them, in an unbroken chain that reached across centuries.
It was at the end of that line—one that had reached across the Atlantic Ocean into the New World—that the pervasiveness of the Arab and Jewish spice-trading legacy had been revealed to me. This discovery does not diminish the culinary contributions made by many other cultures along the line, and it may in fact enhance their significance.
It is a long way from Muscat, Mecca, Mar’ib, Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, or Alexandria to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and Xi’an and Quanzhou in China at one end and Arroyo Hondo, Santa Fe, and Taos, New Mexico, on the other. And yet, around the time of the 9/11 disasters in 2001, I decided that I needed to trace the story of how Arabs and Jews had both collaborated and competed for centuries in the spice trade from one end of the earth to the other. I sensed that such a journey would tell me much about who we have been, where we have gone wrong (or stayed steady), and what we have become through the process of globalization. If that were correct, my journey would also shed light on the cryptic and unheralded influences now found in virtually every cuisine on the planet. Some of those influences clearly delighted those who shared recipes and ingredients with one another, but such exchanges rarely occurred on a level playing field; most were ushered in through the processes of culinary imperialism.
Although aromatic herbs, gummy exudates from thorny trees, and roots extracted from dry desert soils are among this story’s many characters, the story line is more about imperialist politics and the hegemonic economics of cross-cultural exchange than it is about plants. It is perhaps a parable about the origins and consequences of globalization and a morality play that may help us to discern the difference between what Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini calls “virtuous globalization” and its more capitalistic, conniving, and crass counterparts.
Of course, most spices embody the essence of mobility—high value in its most featherweight forms—and so this tale is inherently a cross-cultural odyssey, one that will take us to the far reaches of the earth.
And yet, there is another kind of moral to this story, one that forces us to recognize that for centuries, if not millennia, many communities of Arabs and Jews worked collaboratively to move spices all the way across their known worlds. This is not to pretend that they did not compete economically or suffer atrocities at the hands of each other in certain places at certain times, but it also does not ignore long periods of the coexistence that Américo Castro first labeled convivencia in the late 1940s. Although this term has been used in a rather romantic and naïve manner in the last decade by some social scientists, what has become clear is that the comingling of Jewish and Muslim cultural traditions did occur peaceably at times, while at other times it was an uneasy if not ugly truce at best.11 In a historical moment when both Arab Muslims and Sephardic Jews are among the most maligned peoples in the world, and the subject of a rising frequency of hate crimes, it would do well for the rest of humanity to acknowledge our collective debt to these peoples, however complex and conflicted that legacy may be. (Whether or not you “like” globalization is an altogether different issue; perhaps for us, it is the equivalent of asking a fish whether it “likes” water.) More important, perhaps, it is time that we remember the elements of convivencia, such as cross-cultural civility, that showed what humans are capable of, rather than assuming that we must
