Latin Jews seek belonging in communities where they don’t feel welcome

JTA – Ziggy Valdez, a nonbinary Mexican Jew studying to become a rabbi, was born in Illinois and grew up moving around the country as the child of a Navy father, always attached to a Reform synagogue. 

Valdez, who uses they/them pronouns, has Mexican roots on both sides of the family and has been “physically brown since birth”, but Latinidad and Chicano identity weren’t an active part of family life. Their father worked in the Navy, which according to Valdez was the biggest barrier between them and the Jewish world. They grew up with Ashkenazi traditions, even when it meant driving an hour from the base where they were stationed at the time to the synagogue. 

Valdez went to 10 different schools between preschool and senior year of high school. In many, they often felt excluded. 

“The kids at school who were also from Mexican families that were not Jewish, and at some points in my adolescence, told me I wasn’t actually Mexican because I was Jewish and not Catholic,” Valdez told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). “At times, my identity as Mexican felt like a source of shame for my family,” Valdez said. 

The family would occasionally spend Christmas Day in Bakersfield, California, with Valdez’s abuelo, or grandfather, where he would “cook the best mole ever made, including fresh tortillas”. But other than that they did not participate in Mexican culture. 

Valdez heard about Jewtina y Co, a national community of Latin Jews. After moving to Los Angeles two years ago, they joined the educators’ cohort of Jewtina’s Puentes national leadership fellowship, which has alumni across six cohorts, according to Violeta Stolpen, Jewtina y Co’s director of operations. 

“We were given the time and space to sit with that miracle of an experience, to be in a room with each other talking about the loneliness of growing up a Latin Jew, and being grateful that, thanks to Jewtina, we weren’t alone anymore,” Valdez told JTA. 

Jewtina y Co. was founded during Latin Heritage Month in 2019 by Analucía Lopezrevoredo, a Peruvian Jew who moved to California with her family when she was five years old. A sociologist by training, she grew up surrounded by vibrant Latin and Jewish communities and began calling herself a Jewtina early on. 

The idea of Jewtina crystallised in 2018, when she applied for a fellowship focused on global Jewry. “It started with a question I had carried since childhood: Where do people like me get to be whole?” she told JTA. It is a way for Jewish immigrants from Latin America in the US to express their conflicting and overlapping Jewish and Latino identities publicly. Its members are mixed-couple children of Latin American descent, Latin immigrants who converted to Judaism, Latin Americans who were adopted into an American family, and many more shades of Jewish Latinhood. 

Lopezrevoredo calls Jewtina part of a Jewish and Latin diaspora, which comes with its own identity challenges. Latino communities in the US are heavily Catholic, so there is little space in these immigrant enclaves for members of other faiths. Latino Jews feel excluded from Mexican, Peruvian, and other communities. But there is also discrimination of Jewtina members from Latin American Jewish communities. US-based demographic categories, such as Latinos and Jews, can create exclusionary identities that don’t fit neatly with complex migration paths. 

“There is no single Latin Jewish experience,” Lopezrevoredo said, “just as there is no single Jewish one. But one experience we hear again and again is the feeling of having to explain oneself.” 

No national study has measured the size or demographic makeup of the Latin Jewish community in the US, according to Jewtina y Co’s director of research and evaluation, David McCarty-Caplan, who holds a PhD in social work. The closest estimate comes from “American Jewish Population Estimates 2020: Summary & Highlights”, a 2021 report by Brandeis University’s American Jewish Population Project. It found that about 6% of the 7.6 million Jewish adults in the US identify as Hispanic. 

To make Latin Jews more visible and better understood, McCarty-Caplan is developing a national study of Latin Jewish community and identity in the US. The partners are Brandeis University’s Initiative on the Jews of the Americas and its Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, along with Universidad Hebraica in Mexico. He said it will be the first study of its kind. 

McCarty-Caplan says he has felt deeply disconnected from his Latino origins and out of place in predominantly white Jewish spaces. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and adopted at three months old by a white American Jewish family. In 2019, he met founder Lopezrevoredo in a Jews of Colour cohort of Bend the Arc’s Selah Leadership Fellowship. That’s where he learned about her work with Jewtina y Co. 

“It felt like meeting her, and finding Jewtina, was the first time I felt fully seen and valued as a Latino, a Jew, and an adoptee all at once,” he said. 

Members of Jewtina y Co. are often a mixture of identities. Founding member and director of education Kimberly Dueñas’s mother is an Ashkenazi Jew born and raised in Los Angeles, with family roots in Ukraine and Poland. Her father was born and raised in El Salvador, in a rural farming community. Through his side, she has converso Sephardic Jewish – a convert to Christianity or a descendant thereof – and Indigenous Mesoamerican ancestry. He met Dueñas’s mother at a Passover seder in Orange County, California, where Dueñas grew up. 

“I know personally what it’s like to feel like I have to choose which identity to lead with,” said Dueñas who facilitates Puentes. 

According to Stolpen, the organisation ran 58 programmes in 2025, 43 in person, and 15 online, with 2 367 participants. So far in 2026, it has held 47 programmes and events with more than 1 200 participants, according to McCarty-Caplan. 

The organisation faces a harder climate than the one it was born into. When Jewtina y Co. emerged in 2019 and 2020, McCarty-Caplan said there was a surge of support for groups working with multiracial Jewish communities. That support has receded since the beginning of US President Donald Trump’s second term. Since “the events in Israel-Palestine on 7 October, significant attention and resources have moved away from supporting organisations like Jewtina,” he added, referring to the war launched in 2023 after Hamas raided communities inside Israel. 

The events of 7 October also changed things for Jewtina y Co.’s members. “Many Latin Jews have encountered antisemitism in spaces where they once felt cultural or political kinship,” Lopezrevoredo said, “while also entering Jewish spaces where conversations about race, immigration, Latin America, or the diversity of Jewish experience can feel constrained.” 

Dueñas said one of the organisation’s biggest challenges is responding in real time to what its community needs. “We are navigating fear around immigration, ICE [ Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids, and deportation within our Latino communities, while also experiencing the rise of antisemitism and the ripple effects of the war in Israel and Palestine within our Jewish communities,” she told JTA. 

Jewtina y Co. has responded with spaces for processing, healing, and spiritual support, along with mental health resources, rabbinic wisdom, and Know Your Rights programming. 

“A Jewish family can carry memories of Poland, Syria, Turkey, or Morocco, become deeply Argentinean, Mexican, Brazilian, or Cuban over generations, and later become Latino in the United States,” Lopezrevoredo said. “None of those layers cancels the others.”