María Jesús Mera Pérez de Monroy, known locally as “Jesusita” and whose great-great-grandchildren call her tatarabuela mamá Jesusita,[1] joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1913, turned her home into a meeting place for fellow Church members, entertained foreign Latter-day Saint mission presidents and sundry visitors in her compound, buried her martyred son Rafael, and fought back depression as a consequence of his execution. She recovered and soon turned to what she had always done with the strength, vigor, and love that had characterized her life—nurture those around her with food, shelter, security, education, culture, and, after 1913, religious persuasion. The beneficiaries included not only her immediate family but also nieces, granddaughters, the widow of the martyred Vicente Morales and her child, her son’s widow and child, her blind brother and his family, and at least one “stray” infant dropped at her doorstop, tethered to a bottle of tequila.[2] She gave temporary shelter and succor to members of the Church displaced by Mexico’s civil war of 1910–17. She told mission president Rey L. Pratt, “I will never renounce my faith and I will never give up.” Plenty of people tried to force her hand otherwise. They failed.

María Jesús Mera Pérez de Monroy, known as Jesusita, mother of Rafael Monroy Mera, ca. 1911. Photo courtesy of Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Jesusita came from impoverished parents who worked on various ranchos in the state of Hidalgo, north of present-day San Marcos. Because of her family’s penurious condition and her need to work to help bring bread to the family table, she was unable to attend any school until age thirteen, when she finally entered first grade at a rural school within walking distance from her home. There she began a vigorous lifelong project to remediate her illiteracy and enrich her education. She was keen to study whenever she had a chance, and through the years she became respectably self-taught. Although she always claimed not to know how to read or write well,[3] she became a comparatively literate woman, one of the best in her rural age demographic.

In her teens, Jesusita and her romantic friend, José Silvano de Jesús Monroy (“Don Jesús”), around ten years her senior, decided to make a life together on the ranch where Monroy was then working as a hacienda administrator. Later their arrangement, which eventually produced thirteen children, was solemnized with a formal marriage.[4]

As children began to arrive in their home, Jesusita and Don Jesús wondered how best to give their little ones an opportunity to become literate. Don Jesús was keen on this; he came from a family that had worked arduously for two generations to acquire an education and through that to try to rise above the toil of ordinary rural life.

The couple moved to El Arenal, a small settlement in Hidalgo where Don Jesús’s sister had an appointment as the area’s only schoolteacher. She taught all the children in El Arenal and even some young adults who were willing to work to become literate, and she and Monroy family members in the area gave extensive educational help to the young ones in their extended family and even to some of the older ones too. Thus Jesusita’s five surviving children all learned to read and write. She made sure that her granddaughter Amalia, who came to her home in 1918 as an illiterate twelve-year-old orphan named Gerarda, also acquired the requisite skills.

After Don Jesús died on January 25, 1903,[5] Jesusita and her children eventually moved to San Marcos, Hidalgo. Her three daughters (Jovita, Guadalupe, and Natalia) and two sons (Rafael and Pablo, who died in his twenties) acquired remunerative employment in the area as teachers and government and ranch administrators. They constructed a house, literally a compound, on the outskirts of San Marcos and established a store nearby. Life was comfortable; there were parties, music, literary events, dances, and frequent trips to Mexico City to provision their store. Then missionary W. Ernest Young and several rotating companions began to visit the family. The unmarried Monroy young women (Jovita and Guadalupe) were fascinated, their brother Rafael was interested, and Jesusita was perplexed, even alarmed.

Jesusita was dismayed at what she interpreted as her daughters’ attraction to rudiments of the Latter-day Saint message if not to the missionaries themselves. She prayed that the Americans would cease coming to San Marcos.[6] She did not want her daughters tied to foreigners, especially Americans, whose image still suffered in Mexico after US troops sacked Veracruz and stormed the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, which they succeeded in capturing in September of 1847.[7]

Jesusita’s reservations notwithstanding, the two sisters and their brother Rafael persisted in their interest in the Church. They visited a district conference in San Pedro Mártir, where mission president Rey L. Pratt mesmerized them with his eloquence and the Spirit testified, they said, to the truthfulness of his words. They continued their studies of the new religion and were soon baptized, an event that occurred on June 11, 1913, in a nearby river under the secluded ambience of an enormous cypress tree whose branches gently shrouded the water. Thereafter Jesusita was won over too, and a few weeks later she was baptized, as were several other family members living in the Monroy compound as well as her married daughter, Natalia, who resided in a neighboring community with her American husband, Roy Van McVey.

Missionary Earnest W. young (in the back) baptized Rafael Monroy Mera and his sisters Jovita and María Guadalupe, in San Marcos, Hidalgo, on June 11, 1913. LaMond Tullis archive.

Among Latter-day Saint converts of the time, the Monroy family was unusual because its members were comfortably situated in a nascent rural middle class that elsewhere, with a few notable exceptions, tended to eschew the Latter-day Saint message. Like the early Latter-day Saints in Great Britain, most Mexican converts of the time were what some people called the dregs or the deplorables of society. But in time many converts, including their descendants, became not only stalwarts in the faith but also boundless contributors to their communities’ development. The Monroys just had a head start.

Abandoning Catholic traditions, or in some instances a community’s subsequent Protestant leanings, to embrace the Latter-day Saint faith imperiled a family’s social standing. While such apprehension for this new faith was a problem across all social classes, its gravity increased for Church members of prominent social standing.

Jesusita’s four baptized children—all that she had left from the thirteen she had borne—were educated and accomplished. The three sisters were acquainted with a few of the literary and philosophical treatises circulating in Mexico at the time. They enjoyed parlor music, and Guadalupe and Jovita even performed it on Jesusita’s piano. Rafael had worked as a hacienda administrator and now ran the family’s ranch and store. The Monroys frequently traveled to Mexico City and its environs to provision their store and to enjoy the lights, sounds, and ambience of a relatively large city. They had domestic servants, they employed laborers, they consorted with foreigners (especially Americans), and they were politically well connected. But now they were Latter-day Saints, and that complicated their lives greatly. Then Mexico’s civil war descended upon them. For a time, they felt utterly destroyed.

As the turbulence and carnage of the civil war drew closer to central Mexico, mission president Rey L. Pratt and all the Anglo-European missionaries serving with him received evacuation orders from the US Embassy. They left posthaste. Beforehand, however, Pratt ordained Jesusita’s son Rafael an elder and set him apart as the first branch president in San Marcos just seventy-nine days after his baptism.

The Monroys were now without their American friends. But they were not alone. Other members from nearby villages came from time to time to give them instructions. Moreover, they had their sacred texts and other literature, which they consulted frequently. Jesusita likely used some of it to continue her literacy campaign among those living in the Monroy compound or working as servants and field hands on her family’s properties.

Jesusita had her Cipriano de Valera Bible,[8] an 1886 translation of the Book of Mormon,[9] and a 1912 Latter-day Saint hymnbook containing the texts, but no musical scores, to twenty-three hymns. However, the hymnbook did have cross-references to English hymnals that indicated which music was to accompany the verses.[10] Jesusita had a few missionary pamphlets and Parley P. Pratt’s A Voice of Warning in Spanish. The family had neither the Doctrine and Covenants nor the Pearl of Great Price, two of the faith’s four canonical works that were yet to be translated into Spanish in any form.[11] They had no handbooks on Church administration or policies[12] and no lesson manuals for any auxiliary organization. They were on their own. Jesusita made a strong contribution to turning these challenges into a vibrant and faith-affirming developmental experience for her family and other Latter-day Saint congregants.

Characteristically, Jesusita set the tone of life for her family and many other Latter-day Saint members. When her daughters were sad about being shunned by their normal groups of friends, she consoled the young women and gave them courage. She graciously accepted help and teachings from Latter-day Saint priesthood holders occasionally visiting from elsewhere. When village-wide rumormongering began against her family, she stood her ground and encouraged others to do the same. When war refugees from Latter-day Saint congregations elsewhere showed up looking for help, she assisted them in multiple ways, even to the point of hiding some in her chicken coop when insurgents were nearby. When the occupying Zapatista forces threatened her personal safety and ransacked the family store on multiple occasions as well as forcibly entering her family compound, she stood frightened but resolute. But then, for a short while, she broke. The execution of her son was almost too much for her to bear. Jesusita’s fortitude notwithstanding, when her son Rafael and his friend Vicente Morales were hung by the neck to the point of unconsciousness several times and then gunned down by a Zapatista firing squad, she crashed. She had reached her limit. From her jailed confinement on the evening of the executions, Jesusita’s daughter Guadalupe had called out, “Mother! You are as a feather in the wind, alone, dragged along by your pain. All of your children are prisoners.”[13] Jesusita could do nothing. Not permitted to see her offspring, she had left them food, returned to her home, and wept in despair. By morning, July 18, 1915, her son and Vicente Morales were dead.

Jesusita had gathered other Latter-day Saint women into her compound. Most of their men were in hiding because their lives were at stake. Someone suggested the women kneel in prayer to seek solace in and guidance from their Lord and to petition him for help. What to do? Where to turn? Should they flee to the United States (a thought Jesusita had entertained for some time)? How could they deal with their grief and shock? Who could or would help them? How could they protect themselves from village enemies who seemed not only to be everywhere but also to have the support of a factional wing of an occupying rebel army?

One gossipmonger who had goaded the Zapatistas to violence toward the Latter-day Saints over a fictive arms cache that Rafael allegedly had hidden in the family’s store made it seem like the community’s reaction to the new religion—the shunning, the persecution, the multiple sackings of Jesusita’s store and Rafael’s ranch, a violation of the Monroy compound, the executions, and then the new threats—was just what the members deserved. Having fervently adopted a new faith, the Saints had lost the local social connections that might have moderated the Zapatistas. In addition, circumstances dictated that neither the alleged arms cache nor the Latter-day Saints’ faith could fade from center stage. The matter of an arms cache had become an existential commitment for the Zapatistas. Their commander did not want to be wrong about the matter. Hence his multiple orders to his soldiers to ransack the store again and again and start taking apart the Monroy compound itself if necessary until the cache, which never existed, was found.

Just as the women ended their prayer for God’s guidance, they heard the butt of a rifle pounding the thick wooden door to the Monroy compound. The women, jolted once again by an unrestrained assault on their privacy if not their safety, shrieked in alarm, rightly suspecting that the racket was not heralding a messenger from their Lord in answer to their just-uttered supplication.

A new contingent of Zapatista soldiers presented an order to search the house again—for the third (and not the last) time. Marching to rumormongering extremes, many locals had added to the story that the Monroys had a munitions dump in their house by accusing them of storing another faction’s uniforms and currency. Thus the soldiers, were they denied permission to enter, would be obligated to enter by force and imprison the women, the officer said.

Jesusita and her sister members appeared to believe that the soldiers had come to dishonor and perhaps kill them. However, this time the combatants seemed almost apologetic, courteously taking off their sombreros when entering the salon where Rafael’s and Vicente’s cadavers were laid out.[14]

Two days later another insurgent contingent arrived, the above-mentioned one having failed to find what their commander by now accepted as an article of faith: the Monroys must be hiding arms and munitions. Jesusita reproved them. “We have nothing to give you! You have unjustly killed my son and you have refused to believe that we are not Carrancistas! The hate among the people [that you are listening to] is because we are not Catholics. We believe in the true doctrine of our Savior Jesus Christ and this is the principal cause of this libelous slander.”[15]

Jesusita was on dangerous ground. Criticizing Zapatistas who temporarily held the plaza might not be forgivable. Nevertheless, her resolve was absolute while she declared that she cherished her religion more than her life. Her fury was unrestrained. In all these onslaughts against the Monroys, the soldiers did not physically hurt the Latter-day Saint women. They seemed to satisfy their vengeance in taking the life of Rafael and Vicente. Shortly thereafter, the Carrancista militias returned to San Marcos and the Zapatistas ran for their own lives. Vengeance was not a hallmark of just one wing of combatants in the Mexican civil war.

After Jesusita had buried her son and Vicente, she became desperate to leave San Marcos and go anywhere—if not the United States, then somewhere else in Mexico. But then that desire subsided, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion. As her daughter Guadalupe expressed, “To live under oppression among this people [in San Marcos] would not be possible. To leave the gospel to be able to live in peace with our people would be more impossible. No, no, we would prefer to die, as did my brother, rather than deny the testimony we had received.”[16]

Jesusita laid down her life in 1937 knowing she had participated in something much larger than herself, the veracity of which she remained convinced until the end of her days. Her numerous descendants in the Church are now in the seventh generation and are scattered widely.[17] One descendant family has even written to me from Arkansas.

Having led a worthy life now honored by hundreds, perhaps thousands, María Jesús Mera Pérez de Monroy—Jesusita—became the epitome of a pioneer Latter-day Saint matriarch in any land. Mexico was blessed to have her.

Notes

For this vignette I draw from LaMond Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico: A Mormon Story of Revolution and Redemption (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018), 1–84.

[1] Letter from Minerva Montoya Monroy to LaMond Tullis, January 28, 2019, in my possession.

[2] María Guadalupe Monroy Mera, diary, 11–14, in possession of Minerva Montoya Monroy. Extracts made available, January 28, 2019.

[3] “Biografía de Mamá Jesusita Mera Narrada por Minerva Montoya Monroy,” undated typescript, five pages. Copy provided by Hugo Montoya Monroy, March 1, 2014. Minerva gleaned her information from Monroy Mera’s diary (pp. 6–7). Jesusita said that because of the family’s poor economic situation, she was unable to attend school. By this she meant she could not attend until age thirteen and likely did not stick with school for more than a year or so afterward. For that reason, she viewed herself as not being able to read well.

[4] Following the birth of the fifth of their thirteen children (five of whom survived infancy), the couple was married on June 3, 1886. Common-law unions were the norm at the time in the rural areas, in part because the fees for marriage licenses and clerical support were well beyond the economic means of most people in those areas.

[5] The date comes from Monroy Mera’s diary, 30–31.

[6] Guadalupe Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio restaurado al pueblo de San Marcos, Tula de Allende, estado de Hidalgo,” 1944, transcribed typescript by Minerva Monroy, 1999, 3, MS 23361, Church History Library. Parts of this account are also available at https://sites.google.com/site/linajemonroy/rafael-monroy-mera/como-llego-el-evangelio-restaurado-a-san-marcos and at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library in Provo, Utah.

[7] The panorama of this event in most of its particulars is sorted out in Mark Crawford, Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999).

[8] The family would have owned either the 1865 or the 1909 version of the Cipriano de Valera Spanish version of the Bible, also known as the Reina-Valera translation, which was prepared for the then-blossoming Protestant movements in Spanish-speaking countries and was, in prestige, widely regarded as the Spanish equivalent of the King James Version in English. An informative discussion that places Valera’s enormous work in historical context is found in A. Gordon Kinder, “Religious Literature as an Offensive Weapon: Cipriano de Valera’s Part in England’s War with Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 223–35. Valera’s far-reaching impact is apparent from the more than thirty-five thousand Internet entries that address some aspect of his Bible.

[9] The 1886 translation of the Book of Mormon, prepared by Melitón González Trejo and James Z. Stewart, is the first complete edition of the text published in Spanish.

[10] At the time, Mexico was the only Spanish-speaking country where Latter-day Saint missionaries were working, and the effort to create rough-text Spanish hymnals took place entirely there. In 1907 missionaries produced a twelve-hymn forerunner to the referenced 1912 version. An extensive and heavily documented treatise on this subject is John-Charles Duffy and Hugo Olaiz, “Correlated Praise: The Development of the Spanish Hymnal,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 89–113. Analogously, US Latter-day Saints had produced many “frontier poets” who wrote their poetry intending it to be set to musical scores of established hymns or songs. One example is Mary Brown Henry. See LaMond Tullis, A Search for Place: Eight Generations of Henrys and the Settlement of Utah’s Uinta Basin (Spring City, UT: Piñon Hills Publishing, 2010), 212–13.

[11] Portions of the Doctrine and Covenants were published in Spanish in the early 1930s as Revelación de los Últimos Días. The entire Doctrine and Covenants was not published in Spanish until 1948, the same year that the Pearl of Great Price was published in Spanish. Thus not until the mid-twentieth century did the Church’s entire canonical works become available to Spanish-speaking members. See Eduardo Balderas, “How the Scriptures Came to Be Translated into Spanish,” Ensign, September 1972, 29.

[12] By 1939, English speakers had access to John A. Widtsoe’s authorized work that was revised in 1954 and published as Priesthood and Church Government in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954). It was heavily abridged in 1956 and published in pamphlet form as Melchizedek Priesthood Handbook. Understandably, as late as 1956, there still were no manuals in Spanish dealing with Church administration, and the Doctrine and Covenants had been available only since 1948.

[13] Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio,” 27. Guadalupe’s anguished expression in the elegance of her own tongue reads as follows: “¡Madre mía! Vas como pluma en el aire, sola, arrastrada por tu dolor, pues todos tus hijos están presos.”

[14] See Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio,” 28–29.

[15] Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio,” 29–30.

[16] Monroy Mera, “Como llegó el evangelio,” 32.

[17] Aside from numerous Mexican states, including the Hidalgo homeland, descendants are known to live in Ohio, Florida, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Nebraska, and California. Montoya Monroy to Tullis, January 28, 2019.