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The Early Years
1874-1945
F. Lamond Tullis, "The Early Years: 1874-1945," in Grass Roots in Mexico: Stories of Pioneering Latter-Day Saints (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book), 1‒28.
The prelude to the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico began in Salt Lake City in 1874, two years before President Brigham Young sent a missionary/
The Church had no appropriate translators for the Spanish language, and Young knew no one who had more than a smattering of Spanish-language ability. Moreover, being monolingual, he appears to have underestimated the degree of skill required to undertake, let alone finish, such a task. He nevertheless ordered that it be done, for the translation would be needed for possible use in Mexico.
At the same time, many Saints in Utah Territory, and the Church itself, were under severe duress from the US federal government. Should the Saints be required to flee again, they would need a place to go. Mexico beckoned.
The First Completed Spanish Translation of the Book of Mormon
Pursuant to his interest in Mexico, Young charged Daniel W. Jones and Henry Brizzee to study Spanish, to somehow get the Book of Mormon translated, and to prepare themselves for a mission to Mexico.[1] He told them about his desire to extend the Church’s proselyting work there and to gather information about possible colonization sites in the country for English-speaking Latter-day Saints. Evangelizing outreaches had always been part of the Church’s institutional fabric, and finding new places to live in which to exercise their religion freely had become one of the Latter-day Saints’ existential imperatives.
Brizzee was born in Massachusetts in 1826 and apparently later resided in or around Nauvoo, Illinois. Before joining the general exodus of Latter-day Saints from that city in 1846, he was recruited to join the Mormon Battalion in its trek to California in 1846–47. Apparently, during that journey or while later residing in California, he began to learn a little conversational Spanish, which he improved upon somewhat in subsequent years.
Jones was born in Missouri in 1830 and orphaned there at age twelve. He joined a group of volunteers in 1847 to fight in the Mexican–American War. While still in the West, he had a life-threatening accident with his pistol when it self-discharged, putting a slug through his groin and thigh. His companions left him in the Latter-day Saint settlement of Provo, where the Saints cared for him as he gradually recuperated. He soon joined the faith and married one of its daughters (Harriet Emily Colton). He later distinguished himself in the rescue of the Willie and Martin handcart companies that were stranded on the plains of Wyoming. Somewhere along life’s pathways, Jones learned a little conversational Spanish, perhaps during his activities in the Mexican–American War.
Brigham Young heard that Brizzee and Jones both spoke Spanish. Apparently, they were the only ones he knew of who could. Alarmed as to what they could do to translate the Book of Mormon, the two men seemed stupefied when Young told them of their charge. Their Spanish-language capabilities, such as they were—Brizzee’s embryonic, Jones’s of the genre of a military encampment—were no match for the task of translating the Church’s sacred text. Jones and Brizzee knew it, even though Young did not appear to fully appreciate that fact.
Into this conundrum walked thirty-year-old Melitón González Trejo, a well-educated, economically well-off Spaniard fresh from the Philippines, where he had been garrisoned with the Spanish military. He had become contemplative about life’s philosophical imponderables and had been praying for answers to his increasingly difficult religious questions. He also fell desperately ill. In that condition, he had a dream that he would find answers to his life’s struggles by going to Salt Lake City and talking with the Latter-day Saints, or “Mormons.”[2]
Shortly after arriving in Salt Lake City in the early spring of 1875, Trejo was walking the streets looking for someone to talk to when he happened upon Brizzee. For his part, Brizzee had been wondering how he and Jones were going to comply with President Young’s request to have the Book of Mormon and other documents translated into Spanish.[3] Maybe Trejo would be their key. Jones and Brizzee promptly alerted Brigham Young of Brizzee’s “find.”
Trejo could read but not speak English. Brizzee introduced the Spaniard to a “Brother Blanchard,” a convert to the Church whose mother tongue was French but who could also deal with Spanish given that he was a teacher of Romance languages. As had Brizzee, he also gave Trejo a warmhearted embrace.[4] Blanchard was able to teach the Spaniard about key aspects of what they simply called “The Gospel.” In time Trejo became a baptized Latter-day Saint.
Whether by Blanchard’s initiative[5] or that of Brizzee and Jones,[6] Trejo met Brigham Young. The Church President was not long in enlisting the Spaniard’s services in translating the documents he had asked Brizzee and Jones to prepare.[7] Trejo was a Spanish Bible reader, and with his working knowledge of written English he would have no more than acceptable trouble taking the Book of Mormon’s sometimes complex prose into the intricate verb conjugations and pronoun forms of scriptural Spanish.
Absent Trejo’s appearance on the scene, or someone like him—educated, Spanish as a first language, a Bible reader with religious commitment—the Book of Mormon would not have been translated by 1875, and perhaps not until very much later. Brizzee and Jones were convinced that Trejo’s presence was a miracle.
For an undisclosed reason, Brizzee had an argument with President Young and withdrew from the translation project. Trejo and Jones eventually completed the translation. (They had worked from the 1852 edition of the Book of Mormon, whose chapter and verse numberings differ from the 1981 edition.)[8] Then Brigham Young put Jones through a pragmatic proof process, pronounced the translation acceptable, and authorized the printing by subscription of fifteen hundred copies of select passages from the Book of Mormon (Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón) to be made ready to take to Mexico. How the copies got there is a worthy story of its own, which includes paying attention to Young’s colonization interests in Mexico.
The 1876 Missionary/
With fifteen hundred copies of the Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón in hand, in early autumn of 1875 Brigham Young called five other men—Helaman Pratt, James Z. Stewart, Anthony W. Ivins, Robert H. Smith, and Ammon M. Tenney—to accompany Daniel Jones to Mexico. Jones also decided to take his teenaged son, Wiley, with him. Only two of the missionaries—Jones and Tenney—spoke any Spanish (see the vignette on Tenney in part 2 of this volume). Although Trejo was not included in this first effort, he would later play a prominent role in the expansion of the Church in Mexico, particularly in accompanying Apostle Moses Thatcher in a follow-up mission to Mexico City in 1879.
It must have been an unnerving experience. Just before the missionaries were to take a train to California (possible since 1869) and from there a steamer to Mexico’s west coast, Brigham Young contacted them. Would they mind traveling by horseback, he asked, and going not to California and Mexico City as planned, but south through Arizona to the Mexican state of Sonora? Young asked them to look for places to settle along the way and to teach the gospel to Native Americans they would encounter. Combined exploration, preaching, and colonization had worked in Utah Territory; now the Church would try it in Mexico. The missionaries quickly altered their plans. From then on, they saw their roles as explorers as well as missionaries. They loaded up their thirty horses and pack mules with provisions and their precious translated literature and commenced a journey that took them around twenty-five hundred miles—all by horseback![9]
A bound translation exhibited in fifteen hundred copies ready to go was only part of the issue at hand. Would Mexico let the Book of Mormon in Spanish, not to mention any missionaries carrying it, into the country? In 1876 it was barely possible. Before 1870, it would have been hazardous but perhaps doable if one had armed means of protection in some rural areas where the alliance of Catholic priests and hacendados (large landowners) prevailed with a hostile intensity. Before 1865, it would have been quite improbable for missionaries to enter the country despite the nation’s reform laws enacted between 1855 and 1861.
All things considered, 1876 was a propitious time in the history of Mexico for the Book of Mormon to enter the country without encountering widespread pushback, even covert and overt officially authorized violence against those who carried it. This moment coalesced around the person of then Mexican president Benito Juárez and his progressive economic and political reforms—La Reforma.[10] Thanks to these reforms, the door of opportunity was open and in 1876 Young’s associates were ready to walk through it. Even with La Reforma they encountered plenty of resistance in some rural areas, although they had widespread acceptance in others.
On this remarkable ten-month journey, the missionaries/
The mailings proved to have a propitious outcome. Copies of the translated selections from the Book of Mormon landed in the hands of two of Mexico’s prominent philosophers and politicians—Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. Rhodakanaty wrote to Church leaders in Salt Lake City requesting (actually, demanding) that missionaries be sent to Mexico. When they arrived, Altamirano, who also had written to the Church in Utah Territory, was immensely helpful to them.
Apostle Moses Thatcher’s 1879 Mission to Central Mexico[11]
In November 1879, then acting Church president John Taylor (Brigham Young had died in 1877) sent Apostle Moses Thatcher and traveling companions James Z. Stewart and Melitón González Trejo (the Book of Mormon’s translator) to Mexico City[12] to meet with Plotino Rhodakanaty (1828–ca. 1890), the Greek-Austrian émigré[13] who had received a copy of Trozos Selectos via the Mexican postal system. They met with Rhodakanaty and also Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834–93), who also had received a copy and had written to the Church in Utah Territory.
Altamirano was likely the greatest of Mexico’s nineteenth-century novelists.[14] He was a Chontal-speaking Mayan who learned Spanish at around age fifteen and mastered its literary elegance as no other Mexican for his time. What he understood to be the Book of Mormon’s promises to people of his native background clearly intrigued him. He had a warm and extended association with Thatcher and provided at least one letter of introduction for the latter’s work in Puebla.
Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty, Thatcher’s other contact in Mexico, was propagating the European socialist/
Rhodakanaty was a man of considerable interest in Mexico. Many Mexicans consider him to be the intellectual father of their country’s agrarian and syndicalist movements as well as ideas on freedom and liberty that were direct intellectual precursors of the Mexican revolution of 1910–17.[16] He used his copy of the Trozos Selectos in some of the classes he was teaching at the time and invited philosophically minded people to attend study groups in his home wherein he convinced at least six that the “mystical” content of the book gave evidence of a true Christianity. He told his students that the book was true.[17]
Thatcher and his companions were elated with Rhodakanaty and his friends. It took only four days after arriving in Mexico City for Thatcher to become convinced that Rhodakanaty and one of his associates should be baptized, which happened on November 20, 1879. Thatcher baptized and confirmed Rhodakanaty and Silviano Arteaga members of the Church. Three days later Melitón González Trejo baptized six others and the elders confirmed them. The missionaries ordained three men to the Melchizedek Priesthood and one to the Aaronic Priesthood. Thatcher organized a branch of the Church and set Rhodakanaty apart to preside over it, with Silviano Arteaga and José Ybarola as his counselors.[18]
Events thereafter unfolded quickly and subsequently decayed nearly as rapidly. From the seclusion of an upper floor in his hotel, on January 25, 1880, Thatcher dedicated Mexico for the preaching of the restored gospel, especially to those whom he viewed as being poor and downtrodden.[19]
Thatcher’s enthusiasm for proselyting in Mexico soon crashed when the missionaries were unable to attract more than a handful of people to the Church from around Mexico City (they had a better response in the outlying rural villages), a matter doubly accentuated when Rhodakanaty and most of his friends cooled and pulled away from the Church. By 1881 this ex-member was writing articles in socialist newspapers in Mexico City against the faith into which he so ardently had sought baptism and ordination to the priesthood.
In the meantime, colonization continued to be on Thatcher’s mind. The notoriety of Thatcher’s being in Mexico came to the attention of Emilio Biebuyck, an influential Belgian living in Mexico[20] who had been in Utah Territory three times and apparently had met Brigham Young. Biebuyck currently had a large colonization contract with the Mexican government, which conceded free public lands in any Mexican state and gave monetary and tax incentives to productive colonizers. This peaked Thatcher’s interest to no end. Biebuyck was highly solicitous, and he came with all the official grant documents in hand proving that he was a legitimate actor in the government’s massive colonization business of the time that sought foreigners to help modernize and industrialize Mexico.
In my mind’s eye, I see Thatcher tingling with excitement, so much so that scarcely two months since organizing the first branch in Mexico and before Rhodakanaty and others departed, the apostle determined to lay the whole matter regarding Biebuyck’s exhilarating proposal before President Taylor and the Council of the Twelve Apostles. Thatcher considered that colonization could be an instrument of temporal salvation for some of the English-speaking and future Mexican Saints of the Church.
Church leaders declined Biebuyck’s offer and also took occasion to reject any participation in Rhodakanaty’s United Order efforts. Thatcher returned to Mexico dispirited and pessimistic,[21] made doubly so by hearing from his missionary companions about how unsuccessful their proselyting had been in Mexico City during his multimonth absence, necessitating that they move their missionary efforts to surrounding rural areas where they had been more successful.
Confronted with all these setbacks, Thatcher began to think that perhaps a formal Old Testament–like supplication to the Lord would reverse the plummeting and jump-start the missionary work again. His proffered solution seemed radical. It was to ascend the magnificently imposing volcano Popocatépetl, about forty-five miles southeast of Mexico City, hold a conference of the Church there, and offer a mighty prayer to the Lord. Thatcher had already dedicated Mexico to the preaching of the gospel (in the upper room of the Hotel Iturbide). Now he wanted to add some emphasis to the matter. Perhaps something akin to a second dedicatory prayer would help. The supplication he gave on April 6, 1881, at the volcano’s summit as well as the conference he held on the way up at the Pico del Fraile (a prominent rock outcropping) have become legendary grist in the history of the Church in Mexico.[22] The missionaries’ proselyting success in the rural villages improved, and subsequent missionaries carried on with marginal success after Thatcher returned to Utah Territory in 1881.
Anglo-European Latter-day Saint Colonists in Chihuahua and Sonora
While Anglo-European Latter-day Saints were busy in central Mexico proselyting, baptizing, organizing branches of the Church, and teaching increasing numbers of Mexicans who were responding to their invitation to join the new faith, some Latter-day Saints in Utah and Arizona territories were engaging in cat-and-mouse defensive maneuvers with US federal marshals. Republicans in the United States had settled the country’s civil war by emancipating Blacks from slavery and keeping the Union together. They were now attacking what they considered the second barbaric custom of the time—polygamous marriages among Latter-day Saints in the western territories.[23] United States federal officials and the political elite of the time were beyond intent on exerting their authority over the newly acquired lands and the social customs of those who inhabited them.
By 1882 the US marshals and the laws that legitimized their efforts were clearly on the ascendancy.[24] President Chester A. Arthur signed the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act into law in March[25] (to be followed in 1887 by President Grover Cleveland’s signing the maximally harsh Edmunds-Tucker Act).[26] Some polygamous men had already been rounded up and sent to federal prison in Detroit and the territorial penitentiary in Salt Lake City.[27]
Hundreds of polygamous families began to think about uprooting their lives and seeking refuge where they would be safe. Apostle Moses Thatcher was at the forefront in the search for a safe haven beyond the prying clutches of the US federal government. He and many of his like-minded colleagues looked to Mexican Territory for relief.[28] By late February 1885, wagon trains of Latter-day Saints from Arizona Territory were on their way into Mexico.
The political obstacles and social hostility were substantial. Some of the Mexican local elite considered such an influx of Latter-day Saints into their country to be an existential threat to their way of life. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1885 the Church was able to secure title to a new homeland for its English-speaking exiles—a 75,000-acre tract of land (117 square miles; larger than Washington, DC) in the Corrales Basin of Chihuahua that encompasses the Latter-day Saint flagship town of present-day Colonia Juárez.[29] The Latter-day Saints there then purchased additional lands on behalf of the Church, including 60,000 acres of timberland in the Sierra Madres. Individual Saints acquired extensive supplementary tracts where they established additional colonies.[30]
Although the colonies were bound to each other socially (and to some extent economically) and were not too far apart, travel among them was frequently difficult because of poor roads and rough terrain. The mountain colonies in particular were isolated. Yet within several years of their founding, all the colonies became economically integrated, trading in the goods, produce, and materials that each produced best. With irrigation (some of the projects followed an ancient canal), farming and associated industries flourished in the plateau colonies of Juárez and Dublán. The mountain colonies of Cave Valley, Pacheco, García, and Chuichupa were all situated in timbered areas of pine and oak. The mountain meadows were excellent for cattle grazing, and soon cattle and timber industries existed side by side. Moreover, the semitropical Sonoran colonies of Oaxaca and Morelos, situated on the Bavispe River (a tributary of the Yaqui, which empties into the Pacific), yielded valuable produce.
The self-selection of some of the Church’s most able families to participate in these colonization efforts virtually assured that the communities would become well organized, purposeful, and solid. Indeed, between 1885 and 1895 six of the Church’s Twelve Apostles lived in the colonies, most of them in Juárez. Having fled the western territories of the United States, the colonists wanted one thing—to preserve their families intact. For a time, they had the leaders and the practical skills to do so.
Then there was a casualty when the Church had to withdraw its missionaries from central Mexico and abandon its members who lived there.
The Reopening of the Mexican Mission in 1901
Between 1889 and 1901, the Church fell on hard times in central Mexico. In 1876 there had been a promising if not halting launch of proselyting efforts, which Brigham Young had initiated with Melitón González Trejo’s translation of the Book of Mormon (Trozos Selectos), followed by Young’s sending missionaries on horseback into northern Mexico. Three years later, the Church followed up with Apostle Moses Thatcher’s on-site residence in 1879–81 in Mexico City while he presided over the Mexican Mission. However, by 1889 the missionary steam in central Mexico was exhausted. The Church’s political troubles with the US government in the Utah and Arizona territories over polygamy and self-governance forced all the Anglo-European missionaries then serving in central Mexico either to withdraw from the country entirely or to retreat to the refuge of their northern Mexican colonies. The Anglo-European missionaries were absent from central Mexico for a dozen years. In the meantime, Latter-day Saint immigrants from the Utah and Arizona territories continued to pour into the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora to secure their own well-being in nine eventual colonies.
Meanwhile, some Mexican members of the Church in central Mexico did their best to keep their faith intact. Many were successful. However, the eventual attrition rate was understandably high, fostered in part by festering disappointment among some members who had attempted to colonize among the Anglo-European Latter-day Saints in Mexico’s northern states. In the wake of it all, some members of the Church in central Mexico drifted to other faiths, and others, not knowing what to do, retreated into the inner sanctums of their bewildered souls with some hoping against hope that the missionaries would return.
In 1901 they did return, pushed by several Anglo-American leaders and missionaries who were bewildered if not embarrassed by the Church’s abandonment of its flock in central Mexico. One such leader was Anthony W. Ivins, president of the Juárez stake headquartered in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua in the settlement they called Colonia Juárez. Ivins had been with Daniel W. Jones on the 1876 horseback journey that took the Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón to Mexico, and he later served as a missionary and mission president there (see the vignette on Anthony W. Ivins in part 2). Another was Ammon M. Tenney, who also had been part of that early journey into Mexico (see his vignette in part 2).
The new missionary effort was important to Church authorities, and doubly so to Ivins and Tenney, who accompanied Apostle John Henry Smith to Mexico City to see how many of the original members had remained with the Church and how they had fared. Ivins continued to rekindle his memory about the Latter-day Saints he had known during his missionary days in the early 1880s. He grew increasingly anxious to see those members again.[31]
The trio found a number of members, and they paid visits to Porfirio Díaz, then Mexico’s strongman president. Thereafter, Ivins and Apostle Smith returned to their homes, leaving Tenney in central Mexico to see what he could do to revive the Church there.
In the meantime, Anglo-European Latter-day Saints living in their colonies in northern Mexico, knowing they were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Chihuahuan state politics, tried to cover all their political bases, one of which was Don Porfirio, whose good offices the Church’s leaders courted. Federal protection against state politicians, proffered for whatever reason, was a strategic policy pursuit.
Looking through the chronology of Tenney’s efforts in Mexico, one marvels at the energy and commitment this man brought to his assignment.[32] He visited every place where he thought Latter-day Saints might be living. He and others, especially Rey L. Pratt (grandson of Parley P. Pratt), who arrived in 1907 to serve a twenty-three-year stint as mission president, worked assiduously not only to stabilize the Church’s branches in central Mexico but to prepare its members to be leaders in their own right and not have to depend on foreign missionaries for direction.
All these efforts were successful not only in reclaiming many lost members but also in adding new ones to the Church. Many joined. In the fourteen months during which Tenney headed the mission, 175 baptisms were performed, and by 1911 membership in central Mexico had risen to over 1,000. New areas were opened, new branches organized, and proselyting expanded to include new peoples in new climates.[33]
Within months an existential threat pressed against these Latter-day Saint accomplishments in Mexico, both among ethnic Mexican members in central Mexico and Anglo-American ones in the northern colonies: the Mexican civil war.
The Latter-day Saints in Mexico Face a Civil War (1910–17)
By 1910 there were thousands of members of the Church in Mexico. The Anglo-European members were living in the northern colonies in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, while the ethnic Mexican members resided mostly in central Mexico within a couple hundred miles of Mexico City. Both groups had experienced turbulent times: the northern members with the US government, the central members from twelve years of abandonment (1889–1901).
Between 1901 and 1910, both groups prospered. The northern members sank economic, educational, and political (but not interethnic social) roots in their adopted land. They developed an economic surplus and the will to invest some of it on behalf of the Church. Numerous young as well as mature members from the colonies served missions in central Mexico. For their part, the members there generally worked diligently to improve their literacy, their cohesion and solidarity, their economic well-being, and their service outreach to one another. From their relatively poorer circumstances, they were nevertheless also sending missionaries from their respective congregations to other places in Mexico.
What might have seemed routine goings-on among all Latter-day Saints in Mexico clouded their fragility in a larger national dialogue: what was to become of Mexico? With the indigenous population either ignored or suppressed, income inequality off the charts and reminiscent of feudal times,[34] much of the nation’s economic wherewithal in the hands of foreigners, and seething popular resentment poised to become a national social if not political tsunami, what would happen to the Latter-day Saints? No matter how one views a civil war or its outcome, the process for everyone tends not to be benevolent or benign. The scimitar would soon fall upon all the Latter-day Saints in Mexico.
The Revolution, against which all of Mexico’s other revolutions pale in comparison, exploded during the last years of the regime of Porfirio Díaz and his close advisors, the científicos, whose reign and ideology legitimized and enforced a tortured witness of others’ humiliation in Mexico, a celebration, some opined, of the logical outcome of social Darwinism.[35] Heirs of the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, whose “order and progress” motto still adorns the national flag of Brazil, the científicos of the porfiriato were idealists who thought they could save Mexican society for themselves by using the social sciences uncorrupted by metaphysics and theology. The political consequence was an acid of discontent that ate at Mexico’s social fabric and lit a million bonfires of anger whose smoke wafted across the nation.
The northern Latter-day Saints had three liabilities: First, they were relatively prosperous and, although many of them had Mexican citizenship, were culturally Anglo-European and quickly on the road to becoming Anglo-American. Beyond that, US foreign policy of the time also hurt the northern members. Third, the “neutrality issue” was a problem. Remaining neutral, as the Latter-day Saints had been counseled, became an increasingly delicate task as first federal and then revolutionary forces swarmed around the colonies, each claiming to be the “law” that the Latter-day Saints must obey and the taxing authority to which they must bow.[36]
By July of 1912, the Revolution had reached into every colony the Saints had settled in northern Mexico. Insurgents laid waste to some colonies and somewhat spared others. Latter-day Saints evacuated to Texas and New Mexico by any way they could. Although they expected to return to Mexico shortly and reclaim their lands and whatever property they could, most of the northern members eventually reconciled themselves to their losses. Those who eventually did return found the next decade full of trying experiences as the civil war continued to unfold.[37]
While the civil war imposed stupefying burdens on Church members in Mexico’s north, it also eventually dislocated, frightened, hurt, wounded, or killed many other members in central Mexico. By August of 1911, the Revolution had spread to all parts of the nation, although for a time central Mexico was perhaps quietest even though some members in the Puebla area had numerous frights as the insurgent forces of Emiliano Zapata continued to grow.[38]
As Mexican federal authority crumbled before the eyes of startled diplomats, anxious foreign businessmen, and alarmed moneyed Mexicans, the Latter-day Saints’ situation in central Mexico became more confusing and desperate. Like other civilians, the Mexican members were afflicted not so much by bullet and cannon as by disease, hunger, and exposure.[39] The Anglo-European missionaries, still in central Mexico as of April 1912, suffered few if any of those circumstances. Nevertheless, because of the xenophobic nature of some of the combatants, such as the Zapatistas, the missionaries knew they could become targets for assassination. In early September of 1913, the Anglo-European missionaries and President Rey L. Pratt and his family evacuated to Veracruz and from there took a steamer north.
There were many casualties among the Latter-day Saints, the most famous probably being Rafael Monroy and Vicente Morales, who were martyred (see their vignettes in part 2).[40] In the wake of these executions and the general pandemic in all the villages where the Church had congregations, a stellar fact emerged: the Saints in central Mexico were alone once again even though Pratt tried to keep contact with them by letter from his exile in the United States. However, this time the members were better prepared to be alone. Many of Mexico’s Saints had become leaders in their own right and would work to ameliorate conditions among the members and try to keep the Church functioning.
As the Revolution quieted down in many parts, in November 1917 President Pratt received permission to return to Mexico and follow up on his efforts to help the Church’s members. Earlier he had persuaded Church leaders to send money for some of the Mexican Saints, but no one was sure whether the funds arrived. Now Pratt returned to Mexico to see who had survived and under what conditions. Upon arriving and reconnoitering the branches, he quickly saw that many Latter-day Saints, especially children, had died from exposure and disease. Pratt’s reception told him two more things: the members had tried to keep the Church together, and they were overjoyed to see their mission president again.
Pratt noticed that one member, Isaías Juárez (see his vignette in part 2), had become an important and widely respected leader among the Latter-day Saints in central Mexico.[41] He had an aura about him, one of bedrock authority and spiritual grit that accompanied him on his journey to becoming a formidable force for the Church in Mexico. He held much of the Church together as he ministered to the Saints during post–civil war dislocations fraught with more fighting (e.g., the Cristero War, 1926–29, or what Mexicans call la cristiada)[42] and subsequent internal schismatic disagreements among some Church members.
Abandonment, Conventions, and Schisms: The Church Struggles[43]
Pragmatic turmoil in Utah over polygamy (1880–90), political chaos in Mexico during its civil war (1910–17), and the Catholic Church’s Cristero Rebellion (1926–29) that occasioned the expulsion of all foreign clerics from Mexican soil created periods of isolation of Mexican Latter-day Saints from their leaders in Utah. Separated and left alone during these times, many Mexican members were appointed to replace foreign missionaries and fill the resulting leadership voids in their respective congregations.
This did not mean a complete absence of attention during the two wars. From his forced exile in the United States, President Pratt (mission president in Mexico from 1907 to 1931) carried on a voluminous correspondence with the local leaders he had appointed to direct Church matters in his absence. The Mexican leaders did tolerably well in keeping their faith alive and the Church functioning.[44] The Mexicans had much affection for Pratt, some of it bordering on hero regard, which lifted their prospects and pushed them to energetically follow his advice and instructions that periodically arrived by mail from the United States.
Local leadership development among the Latter-day Saints in Mexico resulted not only out of necessity because of the wars but also because Pratt wanted it that way. In 1924, just prior to the Cristero Rebellion, he learned he would soon leave Mexico for Argentina for a year to assist in opening the Church’s mission there.[45] In preparation, and knowing that a replacement mission president would not be appointed to administer the mission during his absence, he conscientiously fostered Mexican ecclesiastical leadership, selecting and authorizing Mexican members to lead and care for all the Church’s branches in central Mexico. Observers reported that these leaders functioned so well that the Anglo-European missionaries from their northern Mexican colonies and the United States that Pratt had left on the scene during his Argentinian sojourn could spend all their time proselyting new members rather than administering the branches.[46] For the most part, Mexican leadership operated in a way that Pratt considered encouraging, even satisfying,[47] despite a few of his missionaries creating problems in his absence.[48]
During the periods of isolation, and responding energetically to Pratt’s dedication to developing local leadership among both men and women at all other times, the Mexican Saints constructed meetinghouses, sent out missionaries, expanded their membership in mostly rural communities, tendered attention to the members’ economic conditions, and addressed questions of literacy and health among them. Franklin S. Harris, president of Brigham Young University, visited Mexico in 1930 as the Cristero War drew to a close and commented that in his wide travels as a scientist and educator he had never met a better group of Latter-day Saints than those in Mexico.[49]
But then a seismic emotional cataclysm destabilized the Saints in central Mexico. On April 14, 1931, following an operation for intestinal rupture, Pratt—mission president since 1907, member of the First Council of the Seventy since 1925, and husband of Mary Stark Pratt and father of fourteen children—abruptly died. He was fifty-three years old. There were no antibiotics, and as sepsis set in there was no possibility of recovery. The Latter-day Saints in Mexico were devastated. They joined Pratt’s family in mourning their loss. For them, Pratt was family too.
During the long span of years in which Pratt fostered local leadership development and saw it successfully work during the wars and at other times, Mexico was undergoing periods of nationalism and increasing ethnic pride. Members were not only proud to be Latter-day Saints but also to be Mexicans, to have an opportunity to face their future with hope and dignity in their own homeland.
After a lengthy delay following Pratt’s death, a new mission president, Antoine R. Ivins, was appointed for Mexico. Sparks began to fly. Mexican members felt the new president disregarded them. Then they viewed Ivins’s successor, Harold W. Pratt, as stripping away their leadership opportunities as he reorganized the branches and placed newly arrived missionaries in charge of them. Some of the members met in what history has called the “first” and “second” conventions to draft letters to the authorities in Salt Lake City to explain why they were so devastated. The Church did not respond for a long time, and when it did it was, from the Mexicans’ perspective, to chastise them. Some people felt the resulting strain to be more severe than they could bear. A schism was in the making. It became concretized in another convention of bewilderment and protest—the Third Convention.[50] Abel Páez, a man of considerable talent and oratorical skills who earlier had served an impressive mission for the Church—part of it in the United States—organized it.
The Third Convention’s attendees and members sympathetic to it represented about a third of the Church’s membership in central Mexico at the time. They called the organization that emerged from the convention “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Third Convention” and referred to themselves as “Conventionists” (conventionistas). The dissident group formally existed as a separatist church from 1936 to 1946.
The vast majority of Third Conventionists had no doctrinal complaints regarding how their faith was unfolding in Mexico. They just did not like some of their Anglo-European mission presidents or how some of the faith’s General Authorities were thought to disregard them. Dissidents had recoiled at being treated, as they viewed it, as second-class citizens in the Church. By withdrawing en masse from mainline congregations, they forcefully informed Church leaders about their profound discontent. At the same time, they always referred to President George Albert Smith as their prophet too.[51] In ten years most of them would return to the Church’s fold.
A few dissidents never reconciled themselves to the mainline Church. Some of these in their organized groups were derivatives of the Third Convention, and some were individuals, such as Daniel Mejía, who simply pursued their own congregational interests.[52] The most recognized and influential of these was Margarito Bautista, who first aligned himself with the Third Convention and then, excommunicated from that group, formed his own forever-dissident church community in Ozumba.[53]
Isolation, nationalism, and ethnic pride were not enough to stage a dissident movement among disaffected souls. It needed something else. That something was the perceived insensitivity of some Anglo-European Latter-day Saints toward Mexican members who had growing feelings of self-worth and competence and who were infused with nationalistic sentiments. Ethnic tensions were ignited, and the strain was sufficient to break the bonds of the Church’s unity in Mexico.
Thus the Third Convention continued without Margarito Bautista, polygamy (which Bautista advanced), a vision of an economic or social utopia, or any other doctrine radically outside the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As if to underline their intention to remain organizationally pure, the Conventionists not only called themselves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Third Convention, but they organized Sunday Schools, conducted sacrament meetings, established Mutual Improvement Associations (the Church’s youth organization at the time), and functioned very much like normal Latter-day Saint congregations. Like the mainline Church, they blessed infants, baptized children, ordained men to the priesthood,[54] and sent their young women and men on proselyting missions after they had been trained in the art of public speaking.[55]
Aside from the above-mentioned programs, Conventionists launched an ambitious building program.[56] Donating land, labor, and capital, they constructed at least six new meetinghouses and, in accordance with Latter-day Saint custom, dedicated them to their Lord.[57]
The Third Convention also produced some religious literature—for example, a magazine entitled El Sendero Lamanita (The Lamanite path), which contained articles such as “How the Gospel Came to Mexico,” “The Blessed Gentiles about Which the Scriptures Speak,” and reports of various convention conferences and activities.[58] Apolonio B. Arzate edited El Sendero Lamanita. The Third Convention also published a report of events leading to the group’s establishment—a lengthy, highly defensive document prepared expressly for the mainline Church’s General Authorities that contained transcripts of letters, minutes of various official meetings, and other materials.[59]
Learning English was another Third Convention–sponsored project. Offhand this seems strange since Conventionists were openly nationalistic. However, impatient with the slow pace of Salt Lake City’s translation work, they wanted to be able to read more than the thirty (out of 136) sections of the Doctrine and Covenants that had been translated under Antoine R. Ivins’s presidency, and some Conventionists wanted to read and study Apostle James E. Talmage’s Articles of Faith[60] and Jesus the Christ,[61] both noncanonical but nevertheless classic fundamental works read by many English-speaking, religiously curious Latter-day Saints whose education included at least a high school diploma.[62] The influence of the relatively well-read Margarito is implied here. The Church did not publish a Spanish translation of these pivotal works for studious Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints until 1980.
Abel Páez excelled as the Third-Convention president, getting to know the names and concerns of almost every member. He worked diligently for his people and they reciprocated in kind, with convention members trusting him and accepting his judgments with uncommon confidence. In the early years, before internal leadership struggles began, Páez and the Third Convention came to be synonymous. In fact, mainline Church members called the dissidents the “Abel Páez Third Convention group.”[63] The convention continued to operate for ten years, from April 1936 to May 1946, growing alongside mainline Church groups.
While mainline members did not have an ethnic Mexican mission president, they nevertheless did receive considerable material and organizational help from Salt Lake City, with Harold Pratt working as hard as he could on their behalf. In later years, a new mission president, Arwell W. Pierce, shared many of these things with the convention.[64] Thus both mainline and dissident Latter-day Saints grew in stature and organization, parallel in sentiment and structure but passionately divided over who the Mexican Mission president should be.
All this parallel activity—mainline Latter-day Saints on the one hand and the Conventionists on the other—came to an end in 1946. It’s a grand story that unfolds in the next chapter.
Notes
[1] A possible first attempt to translate the Book of Mormon into Spanish may have occurred sometime between 1852 and 1857 following Parley P. Pratt’s return to Salt Lake City from his abortive 1851 mission to Chile. See F. LaMond Tullis, “California and Chile in 1851 as Experienced by the Mormon Apostle Parley P. Pratt,” Southern California Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Fall 1985), 291–307. Translation was Pratt’s goal, and he affirmed that he would personally work to achieve it, studying “that language until I am prepared to translate the Book of Mormon.” Parley P. Pratt, “Report of His Mission to Chile,” October 31, 1852, transcribed by Lajean Purcell Carruth, April 29, 2013, https://
[2] Eduardo Balderas, “How the Scriptures Came to Be Translated into Spanish,” Ensign, September 1972, 28; Edres Barney Eastern Arizona Museum and Historical Society, “First Translator of the Book of Mormon,” July 13, 2019, https://
[3] See K. E. Duke, “Melitón González Trejo: Translator of the Book of Mormon into Spanish,” Improvement Era, October 1956, 714.
[4] “The Spiritual Impact of Learning about Melitón Trejo and the First Translation of the Book of Mormon in Spanish,” February 2019. Reviewer’s copy of article proposed for Brigham Young University’s Religious Educator journal, in my possession.
[5] See B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1957), 5:575.
[6] See F. LaMond Tullis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 18.
[7] See Duke, “Melitón González Trejo,” 714.
[8] Matthew G. Geilman, “Taking the Gospel to the Lamanites: Doctrinal Foundations for Establishing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2011), 54–57.
[9] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 14–30.
[10] La Reforma was a veritable revolution in the norms of social and political control in Mexico, rupturing, for a time, the power of the Catholic Church to dictate the form and substance of religious expression and acceptable social stratification in the country. Absent La Reforma, or something like it, Latter-day Saint missionaries would not have been permitted to enter Mexico. Brigham Young seemed fully aware that he had a “window of opportunity” and needed to move fast to take advantage of it. The literature on La Reforma and Benito Juárez is vast. English readers will find helpful observations in Fernando Rogelio Gómez Páez, Benito Juárez and the Mormon Connection of the 19th Century (Mexico City: Museo de Historia del Mormonismo en México, 2007), and James D. Atwater and Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Out from Under: Benito Juárez and the Struggle for Mexican Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). See also Brian Hammett, Juárez (New York: Longman, 1994).
[11] See LaMond Tullis, “Apostle Moses Thatcher and Mormon Colonization in Mexico, 1879–1901,” Journal of Mormon History 45, no. 4 (October 2019): 38–57.
[12] See Mexican Mission manuscript history and historical reports, 1874–1977, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 15 and 23, 1879.
[13] Fernando Gómez and his staff at the Museum of Mormon History in México have done extensive research on Rhodakanaty’s connection to nineteenth-century European utopian socialism. The staff has produced evidence strongly suggesting that through Rhodakanaty even Karl Marx received a copy of the Book of Mormon. However, Marx could see no practical utility in the “Mormon Bible” and cast it aside. For a sample of the museum’s printed work, see the following: Sergio Pagaza Castillo, “Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty: Primer miembro de la Iglesia en México” (ca. 2002), and Raymundo Gómez González y Sergio Pagaza Castillo, El águila Mormón o el anarquista Cristiano: Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty, primer miembro de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Días en México (1995). They have other works in progress on this subject. See also Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 14–30; Bill Smith and Jared M. Tamez, “Plotino C. Rhodakanaty: Mormonism’s Greek Austrian Mexican Socialist,” in Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands, ed. Jason H. Dormady and Jared M. Tamez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 55–71; and Carlos Illades, Rhodakanaty y la Formación del Pensamiento Socialista en México (Mexico City: Anthropos and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2002), especially chap. 5.
[14] Good biographical sources on Altamirano in Spanish and English are Juan R. Campuzano, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: Constructor de la nacionalidad y creador de la literatura mexicana (México: Federación Editorial Mexicana, 1986); Chris N. Nacci, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970); and Vicente Fuentes Díaz, Ignacio M. Altamirano: Triunfo y viacrucis de un escritor liberal (México: Casa Altamirano, 1988). On Altamirano’s connection with Latter-day Saints, see Daniel W. Jones, Forty Years among the Indians: A True Yet Thrilling Narrative of the Author’s Experience among the Natives (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1890), 279. The Altamirano connection was also emphasized by Agrícol Lozano Herrera in my interview with him in Mexico City on May 31, 1975. See also F. LaMond Tullis, “Early Mormon Exploration and Missionary Activities in Mexico,” Brigham Young University Studies 22, no. 3 (Summer 1982), 289–310. Moses Thatcher recounts his visit with Altamirano in his journal entry of February 1, 1880; see Moses Thatcher Sr. papers, 1866–1923, Special Collections and Archives Division, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (hereafter Thatcher, journal). See also Geilman, “Taking the Gospel to the Lamanites,” 88.
[15] See Illades, Rhodakanaty y la Formación del Pensamiento Socialista.
[16] See, e.g., John M. Hart, “Agrarian Precursors of the Mexican Revolution: The Development of an Ideology,” The Americas 29, no. 2 (October 1972): 131–50.
[17] See Plotino C. Rhodakanaty letter, Mexico City, Mexico, Church History Library. This letter, written in Spanish and dated December 15, 1878, is addressed to the “Most illustrious and revered President and Apostles of ‘the Christian Church of the Latter-day Saints’” and is signed by Plotino C. Rhodakanaty, Domingo Mejía, Miguel Enríquez, Félix Rodríguez, Darío F. Fernández, José Cleofas G., and Luís G. Rabíe.
[18] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 34–36.
[19] See Thatcher, journal January 25, 1880. For further discussion, see Geilman, “Taking the Gospel to the Lamanites,” 100–101. Since the moment he arrived in Mexico, Thatcher had been thinking about the exploited poor in the country. See, e.g., Moses Thatcher to William P. Preston, cited in Kenneth W. Godfrey, “Moses Thatcher and Mormon Beginnings in Mexico,” BYU Studies Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1999): 141. Thatcher may well have dedicated Mexico a second time during his arduous ascent of Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano. See Thatcher, journal, April 4–6, 1881; Geilman, “Taking the Gospel to the Lamanites,” 108–20; and Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 41– 42.
[20] Biebuyck’s prowess with the Porfirio Díaz government regarding international shipping is attested in José C. Valadés, El porfirismo: Historia de un régimen (Mexico D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), note 89.
[21] Moses Thatcher to Harriet A. Preston (his sister), June 25, 1881, Oleson Collection, Special Collections and Archives Division, Merrill-Cazier Library. See Godfrey, “Moses Thatcher and Mormon Beginnings in Mexico,” 143.
[22] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 60–65.
[23] See Barbara Jones Brown, “The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the Rise and Demise of Mormon Polygamy in Mexico,” in Dormady and Tamez, Just South of Zion, 23–38.
[24] See Brown, “1910 Mexican Revolution,” 23–38.
[25] The US Supreme Court affirmed the durability of this law. See the review in “The Anti-Polygamy Law: Its Constitutionality Upheld by the Supreme Court, New York Times, March 24, 1885, 3.
[26] The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 can be found in its entirety at https://
[27] See Timothy G. Merrill, “Felons of Faith: Prison Experiences of Mormon Polygamists in the Nineteenth Century,” Selections from the Religious Education Student Symposium, 2005 (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 99–114; and Stan Larson, ed., Prisoner for Polygamy: The Memoirs and Letters of Rudger Clawson at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, 1884–87 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
[28] The following several pages draw from Tullis, “Apostle Moses Thatcher and Mormon Colonization in Mexico.”
[29] See LaVon Brown Whetten, Colonia Juarez: Commemorating 125 Years of the Mormon Colonies in Mexico (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010), 16.
[30] See Whetten, Colonia Juarez, 16.
[31] Some of the information here and on the next page is taken from Mexican Mission manuscript history.
[32] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 73–86.
[33] See the manuscript history of the Mexican Mission titled “La Misión Mexicana, 2011,” Church History Library.
[34] “Gini coefficients” are now used as a measure of inequality in a country, but they are a relatively recent statistical device. By this standard, after a revolution and numerous efforts at social and economic reform, Mexico, with a Gini coefficient of 45.9 in 2018 (https://
[35] For a short bibliographical discussion, see Peter Bowler, “Social Darwinism,” Oxford Bibliographies, last modified May 26, 2016, http://
[36] The Latter-day Saints were counseled to be “neutral,” but that did not hold for some of their neighbors not of the faith. See the anecdote about P. H. Carlin in “Las Colonias—The Mormon Colonies in Mexico,” http://
[37] See Fred E. Woods, Finding Refuge in El Paso: The 1912 Mormon Exodus from Mexico (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2012); and Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 87–108.
[38] One of the best general works on Emiliano Zapata is still John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). On Venustiano Carranza, see Douglas Richmond, Venustiano Carranza’s Nationalist Struggle, 1893–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Linda B. Hall has written an eminently readable and informative work on Álvaro Obregón (Alvaro Obregon: Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911–1920 [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981]); and Jim Tuck has captured the colorful Pancho Villa in his Pancho Villa and John Reed: Two Faces of Romantic Revolution (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). Considerable revisionist literature has come out on the Mexican Revolution and the roles each of the above protagonists played in it. See Barry Carr’s bibliographical discussion “Recent Regional Studies of the Mexican Revolution,” Latin American Research Review 15, no. 1 (1980): 3–14. Illustrative of some of the regional work are James C. Carey, The Mexican Revolution in Yucatan, 1915–1924 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984); and Victor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, ed., La revolución en Oaxaca, 1900–1930 (Oaxaca, Mexico: Escuela Naval Militar y Calzada Porfirio Díaz, Instituto de Administración de Oaxaca, 1985). A helpful bibliographical review is Adrián A. Bantjes, “The Mexican Revolution,” in A Companion to Latin American History, ed. Thomas H. Holloway (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2011), chap. 19.
[39] See Mexican Mission manuscript history, November 16, 1917. The carnage is discussed in Douglas W. Richmond and Sam W. Haynes, The Mexican Revolution: Conflict and Consolidation, 1910–1940 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013).
[40] See Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 51–71.
[41] See F. LaMond Tullis, “Los Primeros: Mexico’s Pioneer Saints,” Ensign, July 1997.
[42] See Jean A. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State, 1926–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[43] Besides the sources cited in the notes below, this section draws on F. LaMond Tullis, “A Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints: Arwell L. Pierce and the Third Convention,” BYU Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1997): 127–57; Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, chaps. 5 and 6; Agrícol Lozano Herrera, Historia del Mormonismo en México (Mexico City: Editorial Zarahemla, 1983); and sundry documents and interviews the author acquired and had in Mexico during his 2011–13 residence there.
[44] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico; the index entries under “Pratt, Rey L.”; and Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 37–39.
[45] Helpful background information is available from “The South American Mission,” Ensign, February 1975. See also “South America, the Church in,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 3:1392–1400, https://
[46] See William Walser interview, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1973, Church History Library, 23.
[47] For how this transition worked in the San Marcos Branch, see Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 33–50.
[48] While Pratt was in Argentina, he became aware that the Mexican government was deporting some of his missionaries and that others were breaking one or another mission rule. He communicated both his awareness and concern to his family by letter under date of April 20, 1926, as reported in his journal under that date. See Rey L. Pratt papers, 1901–1959, Church History Library (hereafter Pratt, journal).
[49] See Pratt, journal, November 30, 1930.
[50] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 137–68.
[51] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 97.
[52] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 92, 100–101.
[53] The Church excommunicated Abel Páez and seven others in May 1937 (see Mexican Mission manuscript history, May 6–8, 1937). Within a couple of years, Abel Páez excommunicated his uncle Margarito Bautista from the Third Convention, largely over polygamy issues. The best insight into Bautista’s ideological persuasions and the driving force behind his dissidence, first from the mainline Church and thereafter from the Third Convention, is Elisa Eastwood Pulido, The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Another fine piece is Stuart Parker, “Queso y gusanos: The Cosmos of Indigenous Mormon Intellectual Margarito Bautista,” in Dormady and Tamez, Just South of Zion, 111–25.
[54] The blessing certificate of Virgilio Aguilar Páez, dated November 13, 1938, and prepared by the Third Convention, reads as follows: “BENDICIÓN DE NIÑOS, Expedido por la Tercera Convención, Rama de Atlautla Mexico. El presente certifica que el niño Virgilio Aguilar ha sido bendecido en la Iglesia de Jesu Cristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días de la Misión Mexicana el dia 13 del mes de Noviembre de 1938 por el Anciano Felipe Barragán.” It was signed by Abel Páez as president and Othón Espinoza as secretary. The logo is of Temple Square, Salt Lake City. Gordon Irving made a copy of the certificate available to me.
[55] See Julio García Velázquez interview, Mexico City, D.F. Mexico, 1974, Church History Library, 92.
[56] See Eran A. Call interviews, Provo, Utah, 1973 August 16–30, Church History Library.
[57] See Call interviews.
[58] A few copies of El Sendero Lamanita are available in the archives now located near the Mexico City temple. For a discussion of the meaning of Sendero to the Third Convention, see Harold Brown interviews, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1973 October, Church History Library.
[59] See García Velázquez interview. A copy of the report, Informe general de la Tercera Convención, is in the Church History Library archives and in its regional depository in Mexico City.
[60] Toward the close of the nineteenth century, James E. Talmage, president of the University of Utah, began delivering a series of lectures about the Church’s Articles of Faith that Joseph Smith had written. In 1890 Talmage compiled these lectures in book form and had them entered in the Library of Congress. Later, in 1899, the Church published it. Since then the book has gone through at least forty-one Church-sponsored editions and three early copyrights (1913 by Joseph F. Smith, 1924 by Heber J. Grant, 1949 by George Albert Smith). The twenty-eighth edition shows the following: James E. Talmage, one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, A Study of the Articles of Faith: Being a Consideration of the Principal Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 28th ed. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1949). In recent years numerous commercial publishers have issued their own versions of Talmage’s book (e.g., Deseret Book, Shadow Mountain, Signature Books, Nabu Press, The Perfect Library, Kessinger Publishing, Currant Bush Press, Covenant Communications). James Harris, ed., The Essential James E. Talmage (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), offers a stunning treatise that examines not only the foundational doctrines of the Church as Talmage interpreted them but also some of the pushback he experienced in his interpretive effort and with his later book, Jesus the Christ.
[61] James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ: A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to the Holy Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern was originally published in 1915 by the Deseret News Press. Numerous editions followed, the tenth appearing in 1931.
[62] See Julio García Velázquez interview.
[63] See Mexican Mission manuscript history, quarter ending November 30, 1942.
[64] See generally Tullis, “Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints.”
