La Pared de los Crypto-Jews

I’m sitting in Café Catedral (or Catedral Café, I’m not sure) in Little Village, trying to work. Two cops are sitting by the window, at a table that stands on a platform a foot above the floor. It is a pedestal, almost. They are Latino, and since they work in the area, it’s almost certain that they speak Spanish. Yet, when they talk to the waiter, also Latino and with an accent that shows he is a native Spanish speaker, they speak English, telling him that it is good the place exists because it is taking the place of a Starbuck’s. “It’s not corporate,” says one of the cops.

Across the table from me, Laura is working on her BA, I’m not sure which one, she has two. But, it’s either the one about coffee, and efforts of Starbucks and others to be “responsible,” and what it is about coffee that makes people care about fair trade, or it’s the one about NAFTA and the effects on immigration. Either way, it is bizarrely relevant in this place with tables that look like copper but are actually plastic.

The cops’ radios have been chattering but I can’t hear them anymore because “Barbie Girl” just came on. Yes, “Barbie Girl”.

“Stanger than Fiction” was filmed here, which was the first movie Laura and I went to while actually dating. There are pictures in various places of Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the owners, I assume.

Also, there are more crosses than I’ve ever seen in the same place before, and images of the Virgin Mary. One area is labled “El Rincon de los Solterones”, I think, and one is “La Pared de las Virgenes”: the Wall of the Virgins. There’s Mary painted on wood, Mary with child, Mary on pedestals, several on pedestals hung on the wall.

Then, in front of the Wall of Virgins, there’s a menorah. Unmistakable: a Shamash, and 8 candles. I don’t know if it’s because of some PC thing. But I like to think it’s not. I like to think it’s a symbol of the crypto-Jews.

While it sounds a bit like they’re secret agents, in reality the crypto-Jews are a group of people, mainly Latino, who secretly practice Judaism while pretending to be Catholic. At least, they used to be pretending, the ones who fled Spain during the Inquisition, leaving for the New World.

But, the parents didn’t always tell the kids that they were in fact Jews. So now a fair number of people who consider themselves Catholic, some priests even, are discovering that their weird familial traditions, not eating pork, lighting a menorah, lighting candles on Friday night, that these aren’t just familial traditions, they’re extant artifacts of their family’s Judaism. You can get a DNA test done now that looks for traces of genes that are more prevalent among Jews.

Anyway, I’m really hoping this menorah, a hanukiah really, that’s standing here right in front of the Blessed Virgin with Christ Child, is really a key to some long twisted identity, a story of intrigue and suspense, of hiding in the attic like Anne Frank, of secret messages and ceremonies conducted in silent darkness.

But it’s probably just a PC thing.