Amy Reed-Sandoval, Dept. of Philosophy, UNLV—¡Mami sí es mexicana!, my then-four-year-old daughter shouted, tears in her eyes. I was trying to explain that while she and her father are Mexican, I am not. She seemed stunned by my words. Why would I deny all the ways in which Mexican culture is part of our familial life, from the language we speak at home, to the foods we eat, to our relationship to Mexico itself? I have had somewhat similar conversations with certain Mexican friends and family who say that yes, I am gringa, but really, I am Mexican. In such cases it feels wrong to agree that I am Mexican—but also wrong to stubbornly insist that I am not. Such conversations bring to my mind the words of ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, who was born in Costa Rica but eventually moved to Mexico and began to self-identity as Mexican. When asked how she could be Mexican if she was born in Costa Rica, Vargas famously replied: “we Mexicans are born wherever we want to be born!”

Such ethnoracial “boundary-crossings,” so to speak, are rendered all but unintelligible by biological conceptions of race that remain pervasive in many popular and academic contexts. As Osagie K. Obasogie explains, “the scientific method was used during the nineteenth century to … move away from purely religious or cultural explanations to frame racial differences and disparities as objectively knowable and measurable products of nature” (2013, p. 10). Within this biologistic paradigm, people whose senses of self may be shaped by their immersion in ethnoracial communities to which they lack the “right kind” of biological connection can only be viewed as mistaken, or even fraudulent.

Contra such a biologistic view, I explore in this paper how at least some ethnoracial identities may be socially molded and even altered over time. To do this, I shall draw upon yet another personal experience: my conversion to Judaism. While conversion to Judaism entails a distinctive change in one’s religious identity, it also brings about membership in an ethnoreligious community of which both the “ethnic” and “religious” components are nebulous. As Rebecca Alpert writes, “we Jews have always understood ourselves to be a people, a religion, a nation, an ethnicity, and/or some combination thereof. This complex group definition has caused some confusion about how much who we are is about biology and how much is about culture” (Alpert, 2007, p. 29). Adding to the “complexity” is the fact that when one converts to Judaism, they are understood to become a full member of this community, without qualification.

In exploring the question of ethnoracial identity change, I shall limit my analysis to cases in which one is actually claimed as a member by a “different” ethnoracial group. My argument is not that I (nor Chavela Vargas, for that matter) have “converted” to an ethnic Mexican identity. Jewish conversion rituals are clearly defined by Jews themselves, and such “identity conversion” does not currently exist for most other ethnoracial identities. With these qualifications in mind, I shall explore the following questions: (1) Can conversion to Judaism provide resources for understanding other types of apparent ethnoracial identity conversion? (2) Could conversion to Judaism serve a possible model for other cases of ethnoracial identity conversion?