A Jew and a Mexican walk into a bar…
By Crystal Ramirez, Latina Voices
My parents married in 1985, fusing together an interracial, but more importantly, an inter-religious marriage. My mother, an American born Jewish woman disappointed her family when she married my father, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Their disappointment ceased, once I was born, causing me to be the only mixed child from both sides of family. While the race lines were broken down, the religion barriers remained.
Interracial marriages are more accepted, today, but Latino parents still aren’t fully comfortable with their child or children marrying someone of a different religious background. The Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project conducted research and found that one in four new Hispanic marriages in 2010 were interracial or interethnic. While 84 percent of Latino parents were supportive of this, only 63 percent were supportive when it came down to their child marrying someone of different religious beliefs. It gathered this information through a 2011 national phone survey of 1,220 Latinos.
My parents met through a mutual friend and began to date without thinking of any complications. When they did get married they had to go through an extensive questioning process by immigration. It appeared my mother was marrying my father so he could get his papers. It looked this way to her parents too and they did not support her decision. My father’s parents were not too accepting either. They didn’t want him to marry a “guera” who came from a well-off Jewish family.
My mother, who studied Hebrew for five years and was the first woman in her family to be bat-mitvahed, never pushed the religion she was so proud of. She always told me I should be the one to choose what I wanted to believe in.
My father, who passed away when I was five-years-old was born a Catholic and never had the chance to see his family covert to Christianity.
The choice was mine, supposedly, but it was my grandmothers from both sides who weighed in on what choice that should be.
Both brought me to the church and the synagogue. When I would sit in Sunday class, only taught in Spanish, I would tell them I was Jewish, not knowing exactly what that was or even what the differences between both religions were.
I was naïve and I remember wanting to wear a cross around my neck. Not for any religious significance but because it was trendy in the 90′s.
I was about eight years old and vividly remember walking through the mall with my maternal great aunt and her asking me what I wanted as a present. I told her a cross.
She replied, “Uh, are you kidding me? Don’t make me throw up.”
I was astonished with her disgust and that memory has lasted for nearly two decades. To this day, I have never dared to wear a cross.
Growing up with two different religions was difficult and confusing. It was something I really couldn’t understand until I was older. My mother celebrated and put up decorations for both Christmas andChanukah because she never wanted me to feel different from the other children.
The gifts were the best part. How could any kid deny eight days of gifts and Christmas morning? It was the religious part I had no clue about.
Researching Jesus Christ really sealed the deal for me. Learning that he had been born Jewish and learning more about the holy land really helped guide me towards Judaism.
By the time I reached high school my mind had been fully made up that I would follow the Jewish religion. When I reached college, I was reciting prayers with my mother in Hebrew.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a very religious person. I haven’t attended synagogue in years, and I can’t read or write Hebrew, but I do have my own relationship with God and that is fine with me.
This article was first published in Latina Voices.
Crystal Ramirez is a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago. She is studying journalism with a focus on public affairs.
Twitter: @crystalclrnews
