• A need to revise definitions for Minimum Race/Ethnicity Reporting Categories to identify and include Sephardic Bnei Anusim Jews from Puerto Rico.
• The word indigenous refers to anything that is native to a particular geographical region. This includes people, cultures, languages, or species of plants or animals.
• Indigenous Peoples can be identified according to certain characteristics:
• Most importantly, they self-identify as Indigenous Peoples.
• They share an ancestral link with those who inhabited a country or region before they were colonized or before other peoples became dominant.
• They have a strong link to particular territories and the surrounding natural resources.
• They have distinct social, economic or political systems, which they are resolved to maintain and reproduce.
• They have a DISTINCT LANGUAGE, CULTURE and BELIEFS.
• They are politically and socially marginalized.
• Puerto Rico, officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a self-governing Caribbean archipelago and island organized as an unincorporated territory of the United States under the designation of commonwealth.
• In July 1898, near the end of the Spanish-American War, U.S. forces launched an invasion of Puerto Rico, the 108-mile-long, 40-mile-wide island that was one of Spain’s two principal possessions in the Caribbean.
• In the 125 years since U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the U.S. government has controlled the island militarily, politically and economically – with no end in sight or, for Puerto Rico, a clear path to statehood.
• The Jewish immigration to Puerto Rico began in the 15th century with the arrival of the anusim (variously called conversos, Crypto-Jews, Secret Jews or marranos) who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage. An open Jewish community did not flourish in the colony because Judaism was prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition. However, many migrated to mountainous parts of the island, far from the central power of San Juan, and continued to self-identify as Jews and practice Crypto-Judaism.
• Sephardic Bnei Anusim "Children [of the] coerced [converted] Spanish [Jews]) is a modern term which is used to define the contemporary Christian descendants of an estimated quarter of a million 15th-century Sephardic Jews who were coerced or forced to convert to Catholicism during the 14th and 15th centuries in Spain and Portugal.