Eulalia Mera Martínez was the young wife of the Latter-day Saint martyr Vicente Morales.[*] When the rifle bullets from the Zapatista firing squad coursed her husband’s body and that of her cousin Rafael Monroy on July 17, 1915, in San Marcos, Hidalgo, seventeen-year-old Eulalia was six months pregnant with a daughter she would name Raquel. Forcibly confined to the Monroy compound by the Zapatista commandant, General Reyes Molina, Eulalia was terrified as she heard the shots ring out. She had little doubt that her husband had just been unjustly executed.

It was a dangerous time in San Marcos during the civil war of 1910–17 (especially after 1914), which Mexicans call “the Revolution.” The place frequently became a dueling ground for opposing forces whose control and revenge-taking sometimes alternated weekly. The whole land remained convulsed for years as the country suffered coups, countercoups, assassinations, and counterassassinations. Moreover, the persecution of Latter-day Saints in San Marcos continued. In Mexico as a whole, more than a million souls perished in war hostilities, revenge-taking, and the ravages of starvation, disease, and despair that accompanied the conflict.[1]

On Eulalia’s way to the cemetery in nearby Tula de Allende with her husband’s and cousin’s bodies, several townspeople shouted out to her and her aunt Jesusita, “See, this is what you get for being Mormons” and “You knew the people hated you, why didn’t you just leave?”[2] Happily, in recent decades such identity-loathing has no longer appeared to be widespread.

Around 1912, fifteen-year-old Eulalia came under the protective care of her widowed aunt Jesusita Mera Vda. de Monroy at the Monroy compound in San Marcos, Hidalgo. She had been with relatives in nearby Tula de Allende. The records I have seen and the family memories I have inventoried do not disclose if Jesusita’s brother, the father of Eulalia, had died, what may have happened to her mother, or if some tragedy had befallen the family that left Eulalia an orphan. What is nearly certain is that the extended Mera family was impoverished, a plight that probably would have befallen Jesusita had she not married José Jesús Silvano Monroy Vera, who came from relatively comfortable economic circumstances.[3]

The Mera family was from El Arenal in the state of Hidalgo, where members of Eulalia’s extended family continued to live. Some members also lived in nearby villages as a consequence of marriages and the passage of time. A few had moved to Tula de Allende. One family connection may have been in Santiago Tezontlale, about twenty-five miles northeast of El Arenal. Eulalia chose to live in Santiago later in life and ultimately died there in 1985 at the age of eighty-eight. Her presence there may simply have been due to her subsequent marriage to Felipe Peña, who was from that area and with whom she had several children.[4]

Whatever the circumstances, Eulalia was a troubled young woman beyond the cusp of pubescence when Jesusita took her niece in to raise her as one of her own, as she had done with others. Eulalia had an unschooled bucolic culture, and her possessions were little more than the clothes she was wearing.

Jesusita quickly addressed the clothing issue at the weekly street market and from her daughters’ wardrobes. She tackled the cultural issues with a heavy dose of teaching. She addressed the literacy deficit with intensive schooling, aided no doubt by her daughters Guadalupe and Jovita, who counted among their accomplishments the ability to play Jesusita’s piano and to compose and recite poetry in public.

As a single mother in San Marcos, Eulalia raised Raquel with the sustaining warmth and sustenance that Jesusita provided and within the supporting social fabric of Church members. They all banded tightly together in the face of the onslaught that had seen their branch president, Rafael Monroy, and his counselor, Vicente Morales, gunned down.

By 1919, with life more or less stabilized, the inhabitants of the Monroy compound tried to find their way through life again. One effort dealt with old family animosities with Jesusita’s deceased husband’s sisters living in El Arenal. The sisters had never forgiven Jesusita for having become a Latter-day Saint. However, in recent years there had been a reconciliation of sorts between Jesusita and her in-laws. That offered Jesusita’s daughter Jovita and Eulalia a new opportunity.

For several years, Jovita had suffered from crippling arthritis and had to use crutches much of the time. She finally decided she wanted to get out of the house for a time. Eulalia could help her, and Jesusita would facilitate this diversion by watching after Eulalia’s daughter, Raquel. With Eulalia’s help, Jovita would make a trip to see her paternal aunts and renew some aspect of the family’s former solidarity. Her aunts would assist her in exercising her joints, thereby improving her mobility.

Jovita and Eulalia were gone about three months (from around late August to late November 1919).[5] In the meantime, Bernabé Parra,[6] who had resigned as branch president in San Marcos, had found employment with the Mexican Light and Power Company and was working on a project near El Arenal (see the vignette herein on Trinidad Hernandez). He and Jovita had feelings for each other, but the war, the privation, Bernabé’s leaving San Marcos, and Jovita’s debilitating illness all had worked against anything coming to fruition, at least for a time.[7]

What did occur near El Arenal was a furtive union between Bernabé and Eulalia. Amid the heartache of the times, Parra’s youth and desperate loneliness, Eulalia’s tender age in widowhood, Jovita’s illness, and the prevailing local rural culture that hardly registered disapproval, Eulalia and the otherwise Latter-day Saint stalwart Bernabé Parra produced an out-of-wedlock child whom Eulalia named Elena Parra Mera.[8] Jesusita was furious but took the child in and gave her sustenance, education, and security, just as she had done for numerous others.

With life’s difficult problematics front and center, Eulalia nevertheless worked hard to make the best of her circumstances and to pass on to the following generations the ideals she had shared with her martyred husband, Vicente Morales. Indeed, through her progeny conceived with her husband Vicente and furtively with her friend Bernabé Parra, Eulalia turned an otherwise nondescript life into one of lasting consequence. Her daughter Raquel served a mission. Raquel’s daughter Josefina Saunders Morales also served a mission and married in the Church (to Benito Villalobos). As of 2012, twenty-four full-time missionaries, two Area Seventies, a mission president, a stake president and three counselors, three bishops, and ten stake and ward Young Women and Primary presidents had followed, not to mention thirteen children then attending the Church’s Benemérito boarding school in Mexico City. Generations in the Church trace some of their genes to Eulalia through her daughters Raquel and Elena.

Church members in San Marcos note that Eulalia was a woman of courage despite her trauma and sorrow and a life that was never easy. They see that through her children she has left a gospel mark that continues to this day.

Notes

[*] I draw some of the material for this vignette from my book Martyrs in Mexico: A Mormon Story of Revolution and Redemption (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018), 11–12, 13, 30, 32, 97, 99, 123n37, and 156. I thank Sharman Gill for critiquing an earlier draft of this vignette.

[1] See Robert McCaa, University of Minnesota Population Center, “Missing Millions: The Human Cost of the Mexican Revolution,” http://users.pop.umn.edu/~rmccaa/missmill/mxrev.htm.

[2] Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 76.

[3] See Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 4.

[4] See Guadalupe Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio restaurado al pueblo de San Marcos, Tula de Allende, estado de Hidalgo,” 47, transcribed typescript by Minerva Monroy.

[5] See Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio restaurado,” 47.

[6] For discussion of Bernabé Parra’s controversial yet consequential life in the Church, see the vignette herein titled “Trinidad Hernandez”; see also Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 30, 32, 77, 79, 89, 91–101, 108–10, 113–19, 131–36.

[7] Parra later married Jovita. See Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 96–99.

[8] Elena Parra Mera’s birth occurred in San Marcos in April 1921, as stated in a letter from Ruth Josefina Saunders Morales de Villalobos to LaMond Tullis, February 11, 2014. She grew up in the Monroy compound and enjoyed the educational advantages afforded all the Monroy and Mera children who had lived there.