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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

New Mexico Hispanic culture is quite different from a lot of the rest of the US. And the rural areas were very isolated for a long time. So it has some other interesting historical Spanish cultural variants. A couple:

The Penitentes, an ascetic Catholic group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penitentes_(New_Mexico)

The Crypto-Jews, usually thought to be a hundreds-years-old vestige of Judaism fleeing the Inquisition. The truth is probably more complicated. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/mistake...

New Mexico is also home to a bunch of different Native American languages and cultures, many of which did not have the trauma of being forced to move to new land and thus have a different relationship with their history.

(This post feels clumsy of me, apologies if as an outsider I mis-characterized something.)

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We also have Genizaros (a kind of Spanish corruption of the word Janissary). They're descended from Native American slaves who were freed by the Spanish in exchange for settling on frontier outposts.

New Mexico's a strange place. Technically "New" Mexico is older than regular Mexico by over two centuries in that New Mexico earned its name as early as 1563.

Just a heads up: "crypto Jew" is also an antisemitic buzz word, which is why I suspect the linked article says "hidden" instead.

That is getting so tiring. How are normal people supposed to navigate in this world where normal words[1] and expressions are constantly being re-analyzed as fascist dogwhistles?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism

My general impression, possibly out of ignorance, has been that there have always been lots of these and people (read: me) were just unaware of them. Some, like this (and "88" on usernames) are sometimes (often?) legitimate but have also been used as dog whistles... and fascism stains everything it touches.

Indeed, it's the fascists and bigots who appropriate words and employ ever shifting rhetoric to avoid being labeled as fascists or bigots and to try and conflate their ideology with as many pre-existing ideas as possible who are to blame for this linguistic treadmill, and not the people who point out that dog whistles are real.

In the same way security researchers are not responsible for security vulnerabilities, but may take heat for pointing them out.

That being said, just because they try to appropriate the terms doesn't mean it has to work. They can be reappropriated back to their original meaning.

The vast majority of it is just to rustle the jimmies of people who use terms like fascist. The more butthurt people get about it the more you'll see it happen. They're not actually fascist dog whistles. It's them signaling to each other that they're not one of you.

That is not true. They use these terms among themselves to denote things. Their opposition is not intended audience at all.

Moreover, when unopposed, nazi and antisemitism do not die out. Instead, they get stronger and larger in numbers. It is an actual ideology and those who believe it are actively trying to spread it.

I heard crypto-jew as insult to pro-jew (read anti-anti-semitic) fairly frequently and did not heard it in any other context.

It is not "reanalyzed" as such. It is that antisemitic use it as such.

Same way you navigate everything else, by paying attention and making frequent and small adjustments as you acquire new information? You chose a good metaphor: selecting a straight line and expecting not to deviate from it is not "navigation" in any useful sense.

ugh thanks for the warning, I'd forgotten about the hate speech. No doubt they use "hidden Jew" hatefully too.

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