In 1598, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, New Mexico became Spain's northernmost New World colony. The censures of the Catholic Church reached all the way to Santa Fe, where in the mid-1660s, Dona Teresa Aguilera y Roche, the wife of New Mexico governor Bernardo Lopez de Mendizabal, came under the Inquisition's scrutiny. She and her husband were tried in Mexico City for the crime of judaizante, the practice of Jewish rituals. Using the handwritten briefs that Dona Teresa prepared for her defense, as well as depositions by servants, ethnohistorian Frances Levine paints a...
In 1598, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, New Mexico became Spain's northernmost New World colony. The censures of the Catholic Church...
