Portuguese merchant families migrated to New Spain (colonial Mexico) in the early 1600s when the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united from 1580 to 1640. At the beginning of the 1640s, immediately after Portugal successfully rebelled and gained independence from Spain, the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico began to arrest and try en-mass a group of these now wealthy Portuguese merchants living in Mexico whom it suspected of secretly practicing Judaism. By 1642 there were 200 individuals being tried, most of them languishing in the secret prisons of the tribunal. Over the course of the 1640s the secret trials continued and culminated in a final public Gran auto de fe (act of faith) on April 11, 1649, in which the sentences of the accused were announced. In the most egregious cases secular authorities executed the convicted. This dissertation examines the lives of three of these crypto-Jewish families.

The dissertation first considers the institutional history of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico from its founding in 1571 to the 1640s. It examines the procedures and personalities of the tribunal throughout these trials based on correspondence between the tribunal and its superior court in Madrid Spain, the Suprema. The dissertation presents detailed case studies of three family clusters, the Enriquez Mendez and the Leon Jaramillo, both of which immigrated originally from Portugal, to Spain and then to colonial Mexico. The third cluster is a smaller family led by a single mother, Ana Enriquez, who along with her daughter Isabel immigrated from Spain to colonial Mexico and became part of the merchant elite described above.

All members of these three families were tried during this period, but had very different circumstances. In all three families, however, there was a generational divide between the generation of those who emigrated and continued to faithfully practice their Judaism, and the next generation of their children, who did not practice Judaism as readily. Furthermore, those children identified more closely with the multi-ethnic setting and the Hispanic Christianity they found in colonial Mexico.

The sources about these families consisted of archival material, especially the Inquisition trials in which the witness depositions of the accused and of other witnesses describe not only the religion of these families, but their day-to-day lives as well. I have used archival material from Inquisition, financial, and other legal records found at archives in The United States, Spain, and Mexico.