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The Third Convention departed organizationally but not doctrinally from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it actually thrived for most of the ten years that it stood on its own. During that time, however, life for the Mexican Saints was not easy interpersonally. After the break in 1936, relationships between mainline and Third Convention Latter-day Saints were filled with suspicion, acrimony, and, in many cases, loathing reserved for the very incarnation of evil. This separatism split extended families and even some marriages.

These antagonistic feelings remained largely unchanged until 1942, when a self-effacing and tactful diplomat, Arwell L. Pierce, began his tenure as mission president. Pierce shifted administrative gears dramatically. At the same time, attitudes about the Third Convention in the upper echelons of the Church had been changing, exemplified in part by President David O. McKay’s largely positive tour of the mission in 1943 and his decision to visit some of the Conventionists in their homes. McKay, a counselor in the First Presidency at the time, had said to Pierce, “We don’t have a divided mission; we have a big family quarrel,” adding that “you are the Abraham Lincoln who must save this union.”[1]

In hindsight, one can see that with the resolution of the schism, the Church and its members in Mexico were poised to enter a new chapter in their institutional, family, and individual lives, one characterized by consolidation and growth. Even in its abbreviated form, the story of how the schism was resolved is fascinating.

The Reunification of the Church in 1946

Let’s start with the moment of rejoicing.[2] After years of mainline Church members and Conventionists—and especially some of the women from each persuasion[3]—trying to resolve their disagreements and personal antagonisms, arrangements were made for President George Albert Smith to visit Mexico and to preside over a conference that all parties agreed could perhaps produce a happy outcome. This had been preceded by much diplomatic, pastoral, and personal outreach to ameliorate the stress and to give the Conventionists some hope of preserving their dignity.

The 1946 Mexico City Conference, held at the Church’s Ermita chapel, saw approximately twelve hundred Third Conventionists return to the mainline Church. At first, however, tension was high as the conference began. No one was sure what the prophet might say. He might speak in a con­demning tone, chastising Third Conventionists as other Church leaders had done in the past. He might point an accusing finger. He might speak down to the rebellious. Instead, he did none of this. His love and kindness soon dispelled all anxiety. The eminently accomplished Harold Brown, who translated for Smith on this conference and regional follow-up conferences, said that as the president spoke, the tension eased and people relaxed and began to smile and respond to his words. Brown remembered that occasion, and those that followed in the other branches, as extraordinary.[4]

The prophet spoke in both the morning and afternoon ses­sions of the reunification conference at Ermita, stressing the need for harmony and unity. The Third Convention choir, composed of more than eighty voices, provided the music. Smith asked Abel Páez, the convention’s leader, who sat by him on the podium, to speak to the combined congregation of mainline and Third-Convention members. Páez expressed his joy at being able to return to the Church and his happiness about the work that could now be accomplished.

Despite Smith’s being ill while in Mexico, his visit was an arresting success. People pressed in from all sides want­ing to shake his hand or just to be near him, and they were thrilled that he would sit at their table and share their food. Of course, many also wanted to receive him in their homes. He accepted the Mexicans’ hospitality graciously, as had David O. McKay three years earlier.

Following the principal reunification conference in Mexico City, President Smith and Abel Páez, along with their respective aids, journeyed together to other branches of the Church and to congregations of the convention in central Mexico to demonstrate their unity and to invite all Conventionists to return to the mainline Church, whose members were admonished to accept them with gracious love.

The first of the follow-up conferences in the outlying branches appears to have been held at Tecalco in the very heartland of the Third Convention. The success of this conference demonstrated reconciliation among leaders and a powerful overflowing interest among Conventionists across all age groups. In Tecalco hundreds of people sang, as they had done earlier at the Ermita chapel, “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet.”[5] Smith traveled with mainline and dissident authorities to other reunification conferences, including one in San Marcos, Hidalgo.[6]

In almost all of the locales, mainline Latter-day Saints and Third Convention Latter-day Saints gathered in parallel lines along the pathways leading to their respective meetinghouses to repeatedly sing to President Smith as he walked down flower petal–strewn walkways that mainliners and Third Conventionists had prepared.[7] All were immensely proud and honored to receive the man that these respective Latter-day Saints recognized as their prophet, seer, and revelator.

The Church in Mexico was mostly together again. It had been a long decade of separation, but the reunification became a testament to how boundaries of language, ancestral custom, ethnicity, and national identity can be crossed within a single faith even when nationalistic sentiments make people touchy, defensive, combative, or angry. All things considered, the reunification was a surprising outcome, one that Elisa Pulido said “defies the historical trend of growth through schism.”[8]

Arwell Pierce, making good his declared intention of continuing to develop local leadership, put people to work right away. For example, by special permission of the First Presidency, on June 19, 1946, he selected and organized a Comité de Consejo y Bienestar (literally, Advice and Well-Being Committee, an ad hoc council of advisers). Guadalupe Zárraga, Abel Páez, Bernabé Parra, Apolonio Arzate, and Isaías Juárez—strong leaders from both the mainline Church and the convention—were called to serve on this committee.[9]

Zárraga, a confidant of former mission president Harold W. Pratt, whom the latter had sent to take notes on the initial Third Convention meeting, had remained faithful to the mainline Church through the troublesome years. Bernabé Parra also had remained loyal to Church authorities even though he had been excommunicated for moral infractions unrelated to the Third Convention. He had recently been restored to full membership. Pierce had rebaptized him, and President Smith had restored his priesthood blessings.[10] Páez and Arzate were, as noted earlier, former convention leaders.

Isaías Juárez,[11] the former district president of central Mexico who for years had enthralled members with his mesmerizing oratorical skills, had become inac­tive during Harold Pratt’s tenure.[12] Blessed with remarkable leadership talents, Juárez sought other outlets to push for the vision he thought Mexico had a right to embrace.

Inevitably, this led Juárez into the political realm, a move that quickly got him exiled to Guatemala after he offended the Mexican government.[13] However, he later returned to Mexico (under conditions not likely to have been a reprieve) to help found his country’s national small-farmers’ union (Confederación Nacional Campesina).[14] That effort and his later work with a subsequent government’s agrarian department kept him traveling virtually every Sunday.[15]

All the while, Juárez had kept in close contact with many Latter-day Saints and had always remained affiliated with the mainline Church. The reunification healed wounds on many sides from the causes leading up to the schism that pushed some Latter-day Saints into a separatist organization and others to become institutionally inactive.

As different as these men were, they now came together in a new spirit of brotherhood and worked fairly harmoniously in the reunified membership of the Church. They counseled and advised the mission president, assisted in branch and district conferences, and worked to prepare Mexico for the organization of a stake.

The Advice and Well-Being Committee was aided by many other capable Saints, such as Narciso Sandoval Jiménez,[16] one of Mexico’s great missionaries who had done everything for the Church except support, Pierce excepted, the Anglo-European leaders sent to preside over it. Later in his fifties, Sandoval served still another mission for the Church.[17] Moreover, as nearly always, scores of women on both sides of the schism urged their men to solve their problems harmoniously, as brothers in the Church ought to.[18]

Of course, many problems remained following the reunification, but all of them were overshadowed by three facts: the members were together again, they shared a buoyant optimism about the future, and they labored together to resolve their difficulties.

Latter-day Saints and Education in Mexico

With the schism mostly resolved, the institutionally and emotionally reunified members could more forcefully direct their attention to other matters that concerned them. One was education. Their early concern for basic literacy eventually morphed into an intense desire for their children to become formally educated.

In the early days of the Church in Mexico, it was unusual for a rural female to have had an opportunity to learn to read and write. Historically, Mexican formal education—in its private and some of its public efforts—performed well for the children of the nation’s aristocracy and elite. For most others, despite the heroic efforts of some educators and a few politicians after Mexico’s civil war, formal education, especially in the public sector, was either nonexistent or in shambles during large swaths of the nation’s history.

In the 1950s an educational philosophy arguing that all Mexicans no matter their station in life should become literate gained traction. From Mexico’s meager educational budget, the state began to create teacher-training schools (“normal schools”) and build educational facilities in cities and towns nationwide. By the 1970s, that effort had even reached into remote rural areas where non-Spanish-speaking Amerindian populations lived (e.g., the Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Chiapas, a subject of one of the vignettes in this volume).[19] By the opening years of the twenty-first century, the Mexican state’s educational efforts had vastly improved and had become instrumental in bringing the nation’s literacy rate up to reportedly 94 percent.[20]

Before this educational transformation, the Latter-day Saint faith had been making substantial inroads into the Mexican religious landscape. Yet, becoming literate during that era remained an immense struggle for many Mexican members, and becoming formally well educated was just a dream for most.

Pushed by an awakened desire to see their children become educated, some members in San Marcos, Hidalgo, established a model private elementary school. The Church later stepped in at the elementary, junior high, high school, and teacher-training-school levels. In time the Church introduced educational programs to help young Latter-day Saint adults gain marketable skills in the developing Mexican economy and even enter university-level courses to prepare for professional and technical work. All this was done in addition to the Church’s establishing seminary and institute classes throughout the nation. In one form or another, almost everyone was talking about education.

By the mid-1980s, the public education system in Mexico that had struggled to reach into the hamlets and villages with its endeavors had greatly expanded and improved.[21] At the same time, so had the economic conditions of most Latter-day Saints, which gave them greater educational opportunities in public and private schools consistent with Mexico’s rapid development of an urbanized socioeconomic middle class. With alternative schooling now available for its members, the Church began to close down its own schools.

In 1984 the Church phased out its forty elementary schools but kept open its famed bilingual Academia Juárez junior high and high school in Chihuahua. In central Mexico the Church likewise retained its celebrated Benemérito campus with its boarding high school (preparatoria). Then, in 2013, the Church withdrew sponsorship of the high school and turned the entire Benemérito campus into a missionary training center.[22] For a while there was no end to the dismay among Benemérito students even though they and their parents could see the larger purpose the Church had in mind for the campus.

The rise of a private “Mormon school” and the establishment of “Church schools” in Mexico are among the most interesting and, from a socioeconomic standpoint, consequential sagas in the history of the Church there. Let’s looks at a few of the details: In 1944 Bernabé Parra Gutiérrez and friends in the village of San Marcos, Hidalgo, set the mold for all that followed,[23] cementing among themselves and Latter-day Saints in other congregations in central Mexico the idea that it was God’s will for them to become educated. This meant, at a minimum, acquiring the ability to read so as to study the scriptures.[24] Beginning in Bernabé and his partner Amalia Monroy’s home in 1944 with six students[25] and their salaried teacher, Luis Gutiérrez, by 1959 the “Parra School,” the first one for ethnic Mexican Latter-day Saints in central Mexico, had morphed into “the Church School” with 211 elementary students in much-enlarged educational quarters.

For more than a decade, the Parra, Monroy, Villalobos, and Montoya families of San Marcos financed much of the school’s operations, assisted by regular smaller contributions from many of the San Marcos members. Some nonmember families also sought and received admission for their children. Nominal tuition was charged.

Around 1956 the Church began to make significant financial contributions to the San Marcos school. Since 1897 the Church had funded its Juárez academy in Chihuahua mostly for English-speaking refugees from the United States and their descendants. Aware of that, members in central Mexico hoped the Church would help out with the education of their children as well. By 1956 it had begun to do so.

Bernabé Parra, formerly an illiterate but ambitious farmhand,[26] and Amalia Monroy,[27] raised by the relatively well-off Monroy family in their San Marcos compound under the tutelage of the family’s grand matriarch, Amalia’s Aunt Jesusita Mera Vda. de Monroy,[28] put the matter in motion. Parra, Monroy, and other members ultimately worked to meet the educational aspirations of hundreds of San Marcos children.

Over the next seventeen years, the Church offered periodic funding for the school and underwrote the cost of a school building on land that Parra donated in a three-way trade.[29] In 1961 the Church took on the full costs of maintenance and operations.[30]

To handle the Mexican government’s proscription of Church-sponsored schools in Mexico, Latter-day Saint authorities (principally local ones and mission representatives from the “Mormon colonies” in Chihuahua) founded the Sociedad Educativa y Cultural S.A. (Educational and Cultural Society)[31] and, modeling its efforts on the San Marcos School, and eventually with the government’s blessing, soon established, maintained, and operated thirty-nine elementary schools in Mexico for Latter-day Saint children and others who, depending on behavior and moral conduct, qualified to attend. Most of these schools operated in existing Church facilities classrooms. The elementary schools ranged in location all the way from Mexico’s farthest north (Chihuahua) to its deepest south (Tapachula, Chiapas) and into the Yucatán (Mérida).

On a sixty-acre farm tract on what was then the outskirts of Mexico City, the Church established a large educational complex containing a normal school, a laboratory elementary school, a junior high school, and a senior high school (with a gymnasium, an auditorium, and athletic fields), along with office quarters for faculty and dormitories for hundreds of students and their “dorm parents.”[32] The official campus name was “El Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas” but was popularly just called “El Benemérito.”

During the years 1960–1972 the Sociedad Educativa y Cultural employed a thousand teachers for its schools in Mexico.[33] From 1972 on through the addition of the Benemérito high school in 1976, hundreds more were engaged. Thousands of students passed through the classrooms of the elementary, junior high, senior high, and normal schools. Indeed, in 1974–75 the Benemérito campus alone had 2,803 students.[34]

As the public school system grew to meet the educational needs of Latter-day Saint children, the Church turned attention to a different critical need—the educational situation of its young adults. In many cases, missionaries returned from successful missions only to be trapped economically and unable to advance educationally. Sometimes those who had entered higher education before their missions found their opportunities closed when they returned.

In response, in 2001 Church president Gordon B. Hinckley announced the creation of the Perpetual Education Fund. He saw it as a way to provide educational opportunities to members in developing countries to lift themselves up, become more self-reliant, and be in a position to serve others by being helped themselves. By 2017, more than seventy-eight thousand students in forty countries had received loans through this program to enroll in public and private schools to pursue viable vocations. Several thousand promising Mexican students were among them.[35] Once established in their professions or work, the students are expected to repay their loans over time at a minimal rate of interest. With some notable failures, repayment tends to occur.

In February 2017, the Church announced the creation of BYU–Pathway Worldwide, a global higher-education organization. It had roots in BYU–Idaho’s Pathway program, sparked in 2009 during the presidency of Kim Clark. The operation has since expanded to more than five hundred sites in fifty countries, now serving well over sixty thousand students.

BYU–Pathway sponsors online courses and local workshops, facilitates online interaction and face-to-face gatherings, advises students, and helps them find local internships, jobs, and educational opportunities. It continues to offer financial help. As it links with local institutions of higher education, it offers the hope of an affordable way to a university education or an advanced applied arts degree.

As of 2018, fifty-four of the more than five hundred worldwide BYU–Pathway sites were operating in Mexico. Participation requires an ability in English “at the intermediate-mid level (or above) as determined by an assessment.”[36] The Church sponsors English classes and provides other assistance to help aspiring members develop sufficient language skills to enroll in BYU–Pathway.

For some aspiring students, meeting the requirements to enroll in BYU–Pathway is daunting and sometimes impossible. For them, the Church has created PathwayConnect, “a one-year educational program that prepares students for a degree program by building confidence and teaching foundational academic skills. After completing the PathwayConnect program, students can continue their education by pursuing certificates and bachelor’s degrees online through BYU–Pathway Worldwide.”[37] PathwayConnect is facilitated by worldwide virtual gatherings as a permanent part of the BYU–Pathway programs.

“Enter to Learn—Go Forth to Serve,” Brigham Young University’s stone-engraved dictum, encapsulates the thinking. Learning and serving have become a Latter-day Saint social mantra, a Mormon song of life underpinned by the Church’s theology and history. Members believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ addresses God’s children in the totality of their lives, including in their learning and their serving. Their prophet, Joseph Smith, set the educational pattern that every prophet since has built upon: Get all the education you can. By serving others, we are in the service of our God.

Growth in Convert Baptisms

The reunification of Mexico’s Church membership in 1946 heralded many new beginnings as much for the Church as an institution as for the individual members and families who composed it. Aside from education, there developed a full-scale effort to enlarge the Church’s membership through convert baptisms. The results were striking: between the years 1946 and 1961, officially reported membership grew from somewhat more than 5,300 to nearly 25,000. By 1983 the membership of record had increased to around 240,000, and by 2020 it was listed as 1,481,530.[38] Some critics argue that these figures are inflated.[39] Perhaps. But other indicators of religious activity (e.g., number of chapels and temples and the activities within) nevertheless argue for the reality of effective Church growth, even dramatic growth, in Mexico.

The emphasis on convert baptisms soon produced a corollary—how to track the numbers and give them statistical meaning. By the mid-1950s and into the 1990s, Latter-day Saint calculators at many venues worked on “productivity charts” and “comparative baptismal rates” in the Church’s increasingly worldwide missionary endeavors. They even included the dollar cost of each baptism excluding administrative expenses. In Mexico in 1976 the cost was US 75 cents per baptism; in 1979, US $6.51.[40] The tracking trend, now much modified, even included a statistic on the percentage of a country’s population that was Latter-day Saint, a statistic that still stands. Indeed, for Mexico in 2020 it is noted that one in eighty-six Mexicans, or 1.17 percent of the country’s population, is Latter-day Saint.[41]

In time, within missions this approach turned to statistically comparing missionaries—how many hours they worked each week, how many contacts with prospective members they had, how many lessons they taught, how many copies of the Book of Mormon they sold or gave away, and how many baptisms they brought about. Mission presidents tried every motivation in their quivers, including sometimes giving substantial prizes to their highest baptizing missionaries. In this array, baptismal numbers soon became the nearly exclusive criterion for assessing the Church’s effectiveness.

Missionaries in the “old” missions of Europe and the United States were frequently frustrated in their inability to “keep up” with missionaries in Latin America (and later Africa), where individual missionaries were experiencing scores of baptisms during their service,[42] some of them performed under unorthodox circumstances.[43] Indeed, in Mexico’s Hermosillo mission in 1976, the average number of baptisms for each missionary’s two-year service was 144.92![44]

Happily, insightful leaders came to realize that there are more helpful ways of assessing the effectiveness of the Church’s worldwide missionary endeavors. One of these can loosely be described as the “retention rate” of new members, which has been relatively low in Mexico. Another is the development of the Church’s institutional fabric to adequately receive thousands of new members. Baptisms still “count” in the missions, very much so, but now so does member retention, native leadership development, the establishment of wards and stakes, the erection and operation of temples and other houses of worship, and members’ temporal well-being.[45]

When the number of baptisms was basically the single-variable indicator of the Church’s expansion effectiveness, Mexico became an astonishment, especially during the 1970s.[46] However, the ingress was larger than the institutional fabric of the Church could handle, and the retention rate turned out to be quite low.[47] Nevertheless, the Church was certainly growing in reality. Stakes were being formed, buildings were being erected, temples were being established, and schools were being operated. An organization does not do that in a static membership vacuum. The “fallout rate” notwithstanding, the Church in Mexico since reunification has gained strength and is now permanently established in the country’s religious landscape.

Stakes as Indicative of the Church’s Permanence in Mexico

With the reunit­ing of the Third Convention and the mainline Church in 1946, Latter-day Saints in Mexico began to learn to work together regardless of ethnic origin or their views about it. They retained their ethnic individ­uality while experiencing considerably less conflict in their perceptions of proper Christian behavior than they had ten years earlier.

Arwell Pierce had encouraged all the reunited members, and even the Conventionists beforehand, to work for the creation of stakes (roughly comparable to dioceses)—a sign of the Church’s institutional maturity in any locale—not simply to have an ethnic Mexican mission president. A stake became the reunited members’ joint goal.

Fifteen years would pass before the newly cultivated vineyard matured; the first stake in central Mexico was not organized until 1961, sixty-six years after the 1895 creation of the Juárez stake in Chihuahua for English-speaking expatriates. To the initial dismay of some but the ultimate happiness of most, the new stake president in central Mexico was not an ethnic Mexican but rather the Mexican Anglo-European Harold Brown, born and raised in the Chihuahuan colonies like so many previous Church authorities in Mexico. By sentiment and disposition, his life was cast in the mold of Rey L. Pratt and Arwell L. Pierce. He quickly opened up leadership opportunities for the ethnic Mexican members. Brown chose Julio García, a former Conventionist leader, as his first counselor, Gonzalo Zaragoza as his second counselor, and Luis Rubalcava as clerk. All had experience in one camp or the other of the ethnic divide that earlier had defined the Church in Mexico. This was the first Spanish-speaking stake in the history of the Church.

The stake presidency reflected the feelings of brotherhood that had developed among most Latter-day Saints in Mexico. Through massive leadership training programs carried out amid grindingly difficult circumstances (including the lack of suitable literature to guide newly appointed local authorities), the new presidency worked overtime to prepare the latest generation of Mexicans to lead the Church in their country.

In 1967, when a new stake was created (the Mexico City North Stake), Latter-day Saint Mexicans’ longtime dream came true. After serving as a counselor to Harold Brown, Agrícol Lozano Herrera became the first ethnic Mexican stake president in the history of Mexico.

Lozano Herrera, born to Latter-day Saint parents in Tula, Hidalgo, was the eldest of thirteen children. After a circuitous journey of life as a bricklayer, a custodian at Mexico’s renowned Museum of Anthropology and History, and a two-term missionary for the Church, he decided to go to law school at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), one of his nation’s premier academic institutions. In due course he became the Church’s chief legal counsel in Mexico. Along the way he served as president of the Argentina Bahía Blanca Mission and as a regional representative of the Twelve Apostles in his country. After his service as stake president, Lozano served as president of the Mexico City Mexico Temple (1993–97). He wrote influential poetry and a history of the Church in Mexico. He was prepared, bold, and influential, qualities that made him, for some, controversial.[48]

Some of the controversies notwithstanding (e.g., “My way or the highway”), Lozano Herrera was critically successful in helping to build the Church institutionally to the point that additional stakes with their attendant wards and branches could be created.

It all moved exceedingly fast. Between 1967 and 1975, nine new stakes were created in Mexico City (making a total of eleven in existence by mid-1975). Then in one weekend in November 1975 the lid came off. Fifteen additional stakes were created in the city and one in Veracruz.

Elder Howard W. Hunter of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles presided over the historic event. He and his assistants set apart forty-five members of stake presidencies, which included eleven presidents who were converts. Reflecting the youthful vitality of Church membership at the time, four of the sixteen new presidents were in their twenties, five in their thirties.[49] Similar patterns prevailed among the 324 members of 96 bishoprics and 12 branch presidencies involved. At the time, more than a thousand converts per month were being baptized in Mexico City alone.[50]

Just forty-five years after this historic event, in 2020, Mexico had 222 stakes, 1,356 wards, 487 branches, 32 missions, 47 districts within those missions, 278 family history centers, and 13 highly subscribed temples[51] to embrace its 1,481,530 members of record. One must surely conclude that impressive Latter-day Saint dynamics have been afoot in Mexico over the past three-quarters of a century. Added to this is the historic moment on June 29, 1993, when the Mexican government formally registered the Church, allowing it to own property and function without extraordinary legal encumbrances.

Mexicans by birth and race now preside over almost all the stakes, wards, missions, districts, and branches, and they serve as mis­sionaries not only in Mexico but throughout the world. As of late 2014, Elder Benjamín De Hoyos, descendant of a long line of Mexican Latter-day Saint pioneers and a member of the Church’s First Quorum of the Seventy since 2005, was the Church’s Mexico Area president. He was feverishly working to learn English well.

Ethnic Mexican leader­ship, which started to come of age in the 1930s, matured. Despite intense growing pains, the Church in Mexico in 2020 was relatively stable and, in many locales, thriving even though the overall growth rate was much reduced from what it was in the 1970s. The inevitable problems along the way, including notable but isolated leadership failings, have almost all been dealt with decisively and compassionately. Amid civil war, political trauma, nationalism, and ethnic tensions that ruptured the Church for a time, Arwell L. Pierce’s acceptance of David O. McKay’s and, later, J. Reuben Clark Jr.’s mandate as the will of the Lord for Mexico has now borne legendary fruit.

Temples—Latter-day Saints’ Testament to Their Religiosity

Latter-day Saint theology drives temple worship. Active members strive to be worthy to enter their most holy edifices for sacred covenant making, which includes marriages or sealings “for eternity.” Temple worship also entails making covenants with God and with each other to link generations from earliest recorded times to the present and on into the future.[52] Thus “families can be forever” is an expansive driving aphorism among Latter-day Saints. Grandparents to the nth generation and descendants yet to be born are linked in a grand sweep of an extended family made possible by the Lord Jesus Christ.[53]

Not only is linking the present with the past and the future by covenant making important to Latter-day Saints, but their temple worship is also heavily “now” oriented. Russell M. Nelson, the Church’s current president, perhaps says it best: “Each temple is a beacon of light and hope. The temple, the House of the Lord, stands as a symbol of our faith in life after death and as a stepping stone to eternal life for us and our families. The temple is a sacred and essential part of God’s plan for our happiness, now and forever.”[54] Apostle Gary E. Stevenson adds: “You are never lost when you can see the temple. The temple will provide direction for you and your family in a world filled with chaos. It is an eternal guidepost which will help you from getting lost in the ‘mist of darkness.’”[55]

Drawing closer to the Savior is vital to Latter-day Saints. Drawing closer to their loved ones is important too. Linking themselves to each other and to God through covenant making is imperative. Unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints engage in temple building and temple attending wherever they reside in supportive numbers and the institutional fabric of the Church is strong.

In the early days of the Church in Mexico, before temples existed there, a few members from all over the country realized their temple-attending desires by traveling in chartered buses to the temple in Mesa, Arizona,[56] where Spanish-language ordinances were made available in 1945.[57] A once-in-a lifetime bus trip from, say, Chiapas to Arizona could take a couple of weeks or longer. Happily, once the Mexican Saints arrived in Mesa for temple worship, members there gave housing and sustenance to them. Some members from as far away as Guatemala and El Salvador were also making those bus trips.[58]

By their cultural inclinations and ethnic beliefs, Mexican Latter-day Saints are especially drawn to temple worship. They already have strong attachments to their ancestors, culturally exhibited in Mexico long before the Spaniards arrived there.[59] Then, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—less so now—their attachment to the ideology of “Lamanitism” has been a powerful motivator.[60] Perceiving themselves to be descendants of Book of Mormon peoples, they have seen temple worship as rightfully restoring their place in the kingdom of God.

In 2020 Mexico had thirteen operating temples (ten large ones and three smaller ones) plus an additional one under construction in Puebla. In the country’s north, temples existed in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Colonia Juárez, and Hermosillo. In the central part of the country, they were found in Monterrey, Tampico, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. In the south they existed in Veracruz, Mérida, Oaxaca City, Villahermosa, and Tuxtla Gutiérrez. In October 2021, President Russel M. Nelson announced that the Church would also construct temples in Culiacán, Querétaro, and Torreón.

At 116,642 square feet, the Mexico City Temple was the Church’s eighth largest. At 6,800 square feet, the Church’s smallest was at Colonia Juárez. This emphasizes that temples are placed and sized to meet the needs of Latter-day Saints where they live. Regardless of size, all the temples are elegant, immaculate, architecturally imposing buildings in their respective locales. Nevertheless, the importance lies not so much in the architecture as in what it embraces.

The first temple in Mexico, the one in Mexico City, was fashioned in Mayan motif on its exterior, immediately calling attention to the then-prominent concept of Lamanites in Mexican history as understood by most Latter-day Saints. Dedicated in 1983 and rededicated after renovation in 2008, the temple was again closed in early 2014 for further renovations. In 2015 it was rededicated again.

The temple was built on the sediment bed of dried-up Lake Texcoco, which the Spanish conquistadors saw in its pristine state when they invaded the “floating” Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521. The temple’s designers established foundation underpinnings through multiple steel pilings pounded into bedrock several tens of feet below the surface of the ground. In recent years, the land has been subsiding. The temple has been periodically lowered on the pilings to accommodate that shifting. The temple is also located in an area of great seismic activity. So far, seismic upgrades have preserved it from horrendous damage.

Sixteen years after the Mexico City Temple was first dedicated in 1983, the Church followed with its smallest temple worldwide (1999). It was constructed in the northern state of Chihuahua in the old English-speaking Latter-day Saint colony of Juárez. Its ordinances are conducted in Spanish as well as English. This temple became renowned as a pattern or model for small temples worldwide where temple-worship needs existed on a reduced scale.

Then in quick succession over a two-week period in 2000, eight more temples were dedicated in Mexico—Ciudad Juárez, Hermosillo Sonora, Oaxaca, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Tampico, Villahermosa, Mérida, and Veracruz. Not to pause even to catch one’s breath, the Guadalajara Mexico Temple followed in 2001 and the Monterrey Mexico Temple in 2002. Thirteen years later (2015), the Tijuana Mexico Temple was dedicated. Then in 2019 construction began on the Puebla Mexico Temple.[61]

At the same time all this temple construction was going on, the Church was erecting hundreds of meetinghouses to accommodate its active membership. The administrative, logistical, and supervisory strain was substantial, and a few isolated instances of pilfering at the jobsites and kickbacks from contractors and suppliers were noted. All this pales in comparison to the eventual outcome, which was a massive building enterprise generally conducted under the highest moral and ethical standards.

Mexicans Give Attention to Their Native American Compatriots

As discussed in appendix 1, any Latter-day Saint born as late as 1940 and raised in the Church will recall the fascination that many members, and certainly the Church as an institution, had with the potential relationship between Native Americans and Book of Mormon peoples. From the 1870s into the twenty-first century, this fascination has held firm with respect to Mexico, even to the point of Latter-day Saints assuming that most Mexicans descend from Native American peoples and therefore must surely also descend from those on Lehi’s voyage to the Americas around 600 BC. Many Mexican Church members call themselves “Lamanites,” and Anglo-American members used to refer to the “Lamanite missions” in the Western Hemisphere.[62] In the 1980s, linguists undertook translating portions of if not all of the Book of Mormon into numerous Native American languages and dialects.[63] This enthusiasm among Anglo-American members for an alleged contemporary historiography of “Lamanites” is much attenuated now (2020) but still widely prevalent in Mexico.[64]

Beginning in the 1980s, a most interesting extension of this ideology saw a missionary effort unfold in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas among Tzotzil-speaking Maya. In a few of the towns and villages and in several isolated hamlets and family settlements known only to the locals in Mexico’s southern mountains around San Cristóbal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas (which borders Guatemala), the Latter-day Saint faith has now taken root among a sub-nationality of Tzotzil-speaking Maya. More than a thousand have aligned themselves with the religion.

Tzotzil Maya would seem to be improbable converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Traditionally, they have been isolated psychologically, culturally, and physically from the larger Mexican society. For ample reason they have been highly suspicious of outsiders, which include regular Spanish-speaking Mexican nationals. Customarily, the Tzotzil speakers have had closed-corporate political and social structures, have fought the Mexican government in hand-to-hand combat, and have jealously guarded their women and girls from prying eyes. Even in 2013, signs were occasionally posted warning strangers to vacate a settlement by 9:00 p.m. or be subject to detention,[65] not by the Mexican police but rather by village elders and their young social enforcers. “Be out of here before dark” is indigenous, not Mexican national, law. Understandably, except in times of general rebellion, social order in the hierarchically organized high sierra settlements tends to prevail night and day. Until recently (post-2000), few roads served the mountainous areas, and hamlets and even villages, let alone family compounds, were accessible by footpath only.

In 2016 Tzotzil-speaking Latter-day Saints living in the Chiapas mountains walked up to five hours on Sundays to attend Church meetings in their four small but striking chapels (accessible until recently mostly by footpath) and other meetinghouses (casas de oración). Elderly men and women attended religion classes (institute) along with young adults. Teenagers met weekly for seminary classes. Those who could read the newly propagated phonetics of the Tzotzil language being taught in the public elementary schools enjoyed selections from the Book of Mormon in Tzotzil.

Latter-day Saint temple ordinances have been translated into Tzotzil. It was not unusual to see an open stake-rack pickup loaded with members aligned like vertical cordwood standing three hours for their trip to the temple in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Indeed, even before temple rites in Tzotzil were available, mountain members attended the temple dedication in March 2000 where President James E. Faust of the First Presidency personally greeted them.[66] Of the 3,316 members of the Church in attendance, at least a full pickup truck of Maya were there from Chojolhó and other areas in the municipality of Chenalhó.[67]

Navigating the mountains of Chiapas on foot, as most Tzotzil-speakers did in 2000 and many continued to do up through 2020, requires high-altitude as well as endurance conditioning. Embracing the high valley (7,200 feet) in which the Spaniards built their still-picturesque San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Sierra Madre de Chiapas rises undulatingly and serpentinely another two thousand feet to a potholed plateau of innumerable hills, hollows, and dells, and higher still to the occasional towering pinnacles of the now mostly hushed volcanoes. Hundreds, indeed, thousands of towns, hamlets, and family settlements pepper this high country, all surrounded by carefully marked fields of maize, beans, squash, and the occasional coffee or avocado tree. In these mountains the Tzotzil speakers, descendants of those who built architectural marvels such as Bonampak and Palenque, whose silenced shells yet reach to the sky, assembled their now-waning cultural and linguistic mountain retreats.

In 2016 the Tzotzil language was spoken in six generally recognized dialects[68] that have varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.[69] Altogether, these six versions of the ever-evolving Tzotzil language constitute the mother tongue of approximately 350,000 indigenous people living in the mountains surrounding San Cristóbal de las Casas and its associated valleys.[70] Perhaps 45,000 to 50,000 people speak the Chenalhó version, principally in the seventy-five-square-mile municipality (municipalidad) of Chenalhó, which encompasses a swath of territory approximately eight by ten miles, the southern border being situated approximately eighteen miles (by serpentine paved road) north of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Nevertheless, many Chenalhó-speaking families also have members living in San Cristóbal as well as Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the Chiapas state capital, and also in Mexico City. Years ago, some Tzotzil-speaking Maya even migrated to the United States.

In a few towns and villages and in several isolated hamlets and family settlements principally in the municipalities of Chenalhó, Chalchihuitán, Pantelhó, El Porvenir, and Ocosingo (Tzeltal Mayan is spoken in Ocosingo), the Church has prospered. Beginning in the early 1980s in the village of Chojolhó, the Church later expanded institutionally to six other locales and has promise of further expansion, principally among Tzotzil Maya. Nevertheless, a handful of Tzeltal-speaking Maya have also aligned themselves with the faith emanating from Utah.

How did this happen? What does it mean for the people involved and, for that matter, the Church of Jesus Christ in southern Mexico? The final vignette in this book about Agustín Gutiérrez Ruiz offers a few answers to these provocative queries.

The Whole Soul: Humanitarian Outreach, Church Welfare Services, and Self-Reliance Programs in Mexico

The theology of the Latter-day Saints argues that joy and happiness that would appeal to God are not reserved just for the next life but ought to be enjoyed in this one as well. As such, attention to life’s temporal conditions is considered essential. If such conditions are severely compromised for a long time, members suffer, religiosity declines, and religious commitment tends to waver. A first-class spiritual crisis frequently ensues, which, in the Church’s view, is the antithesis of joy and happiness.

The philosophy of joy and happiness attached to temporal as well as spiritual conditions in this life thus gives direction to the Church’s concern for the whole souls of its members. Its charities, sometimes referred to as the “Welfare Program,” are one result.

In the 1960s, significant parts of the Church’s charities began to appear in Mexico. Tailored to the specific needs of broad swaths of the members there, the efforts, which continue to evolve in all parts of the country, provided assistance with living essentials (food, clothing, housing, utilities, medical attention), with developmental needs (education and job skills), and with disaster aid.

Disaster aid, or humanitarian aid as it has been called, was extended without regard to religious affiliation, ethnic persuasion, racial identity, age, or citizenship status. Regularized welfare and developmental assistance were targeted mostly but not exclusively to Church members via the recommendations of their respective bishops.

PBS Utah had this to say in 2016: “There may be other charities that are larger or more helpful, but the welfare tradition within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints must be one of the world’s best. . . . The program supplies food, clothes, and all kinds of care to those in need—Mormon or not. The relief is always free, and the men and women who do the work—growers, packers, distributors, and caregivers—are all volunteers.”[71]

The Church is not keen on simply giving handouts to its members in temporal distress but rather, in addition to such assistance, building long-term educational and skill levels and economic opportunities so that Latter-day Saints can take care of themselves if at all possible. Attitudes and points of view are addressed so that members are motivated to want to engage in long-term personal development to address their needs if they can. If successful, they then are able not only to care for themselves and their dependents but also to help others who may be stuck in temporal distress in areas of employment, food, clothing, health, housing, family relations, and even psychological well-being. All of this is thought to enhance members’ joy, happiness, and religiosity. Over the years, initiatives have increased in Mexico to address some of these matters.

The Church’s humanitarian aid tendered in times of disaster exemplifies how some of the Church’s charities work in Mexico. Humanitarian aid, extended to all, including those not of the Latter-day Saint faith, is not meant as a substitute for achieving long-term self-reliance. It addresses immediate disaster relief needs resulting from earthquakes, wildfires, floods, diseases, insurrections, wars, and so forth.[72] As Elder Paul B. Pieper, president of the Mexico Area of the Church, expressed in the immediate aftermath of a devastating 8.2 magnitude earthquake in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas in southern Mexico on September 7, 2017, the intent is “not only [to] rebuild the city but also to rebuild souls.” Three Latter-day Saints were among the ninety people killed as the devastation unfolded.[73]

The Church’s aid went to people indiscriminately. Ten thousand boxes of food, 300 tents, and 5,000 hygiene kits were sent to Oaxaca and another 5,000 food boxes to Chiapas. A week earlier, the Church donated 4,500 boxes of food and 2,500 hygiene kits following Tropical Storm Lidia, which heavily damaged the Baja California Peninsula, leaving four dead and several missing. The Church partners with other organizations in these large-scale relief efforts, including Catholic Charities, so that its on-site distribution goes to the neediest.[74]

Before the Humanitarian Fund existed (inaugurated in 1985),[75] two of the Church’s early efforts to help improve the temporal well-being of its members in Mexico entailed three thrusts: education (discussed earlier), public health, and economic well-being. In discussing the latter two in and around San Marcos, Hidalgo, and then in areas near Torreón, Coahuila, I will focus on the immediate and long-term health and economic conditions of both the Church’s members and some nonmembers in matters of self-reliance, activities that continue in Mexico as of this writing (2020).

The Church’s health services program gained traction in San Marcos with the Church school there.[76] Less than a decade after the Church assumed funding for the school, it launched a complementary agricultural and health services missionary program (1973) that Dr. James O. Mason and his associates, Mary Ellen Edmunds and Edward L. Soper, had put together.[77] With respect to public health, someone had noticed that in San Marcos and environs (as elsewhere in Mexico among some Latter-day Saints at the time) prenatal and postnatal care for mothers and infants were concerns, with infant morbidity and childhood mortality rates at alarmingly high levels.

The concern was not just with infants and children. In 1972 many people in San Marcos, young and old, had died from typhoid fever. Moreover, a disease called sarna (transmitted by a small insect) caused “purple eruptions in the skin, like boils, which eventually could become fatal.”[78] Lori Smith, a health services missionary, noted: “Other major concerns were diarrhea, gripa [also called gripe, flu], stomach pains, fevers and diabetes. Many sisters and investigators were also interested in prenatal, infant and child care.”[79] The health services missionaries gained enthusiastic traction.

How to carry this out? In San Marcos and the surrounding region, the health services missionaries selected young female members from each of the Church’s branches and trained them as assistants. Then the missionaries traveled weekly from village to village, met with their assistants to learn of appointments set with interested people, and went about the task of improving the health of the members and their friends. In 1975 I visited a Relief Society meeting in Santiago Tezontlale where the sisters were vigorously pursuing tasks that the health services missionaries and their assistant had taught them about avoiding and curing diaper rash.

During the 1970s considerable enthusiasm for health services existed among Latter-day Saints and their friends in the state of Hidalgo. In some of the meetings, scores of people—mostly women—showed up. Never mind that some of them were illiterate; they could speak and hear and learn orally. In fact, they must have, because in a few years public health indicators among Church members in the area improved greatly.

Another notable illustration involving welfare services missionaries occurred in the Bermejillo branch near Torreón. The branch was established in 1972 and held its first meetings in a rented casa de oración). The setting was rural and agricultural, even more so than in the San Marcos area. The economy was mostly semi-subsistence.

In 1975, as in the San Marcos area, the welfare and health services missionaries visited the branch on a weekly basis and, on a teaching level, concentrated on personal hygiene and nutrition. In the years that followed, assistance was given in planting and caring for gardens (and protecting them from rogue animals) and figuring out how to store what was produced. These efforts enjoyed the blessing and assistance of the remarkable Castañeda family, one of whose members, Julián, was then serving as the branch president.

The members constructed privies, installed a flush toilet, deployed showers, piped in potable water after first learning to sanitize filtered ditchwater with three drops of chlorine per quart, tidied up and painted dwellings, and learned about balanced nutrition. The death rate among children dropped from around 40 percent to 10 percent.[80]

As the branch grew and prospered, members secured land and participated in building a chapel on it. Construction began in 1978. The Church’s presiding bishop at the time, Victor L. Brown, concluded that “the principles of love, service, work, self-reliance, consecration, and stewardship are all evident in the accomplishments of the branch in Bermejillo. Indeed, these members are well on their way to establishing the ideal of Zion.”[81]

In time, as Church membership in Mexico became more urbanized, the need for agricultural, health, and welfare services missionaries diminished and bishops’ storehouses were established around the country and stocked with alimentary essentials that needy members could access through a “bishop’s order” on their behalf. At times the storehouses, run by volunteers and stocked via Church funds, were relatively busy as the Mexican economy waxed and waned. Bishops helped needy members in other ways through “fast offering funds” donated by members whose means allowed them to assist.

In 2012 the Church began to dismantle its storehouses in favor of having bishops give plastic gift cards to needy members to be used as payment for authorized purchases from urban retailers (e.g., Walmart). However, since many Latter-day Saints continued to live in rural areas not equipped to deal with gift cards, bishops and branch presidents in those areas had to devise other arrangements to help those in need.

A number of Latter-day Saint–affiliated private organizations and individuals have also stepped up their welfare, self-reliance, and humanitarian work in Mexico. A striking early example is that of Dr. José Ismael Ruiz Guadiana and his nurse practitioner wife, Magdalena Mendoza Hernández. Each summer from 1988 to 1995 they took their children to the mountains of Chiapas for two months to do volunteer medical work among Tzotzil and Tzeltal Maya.[82] They learned the folk remedies employed for various ailments and taught how Western medicine could supplement these with frequent great effect. They convinced the Maya among whom they worked that immunizations were a good thing, and their humanitarian work became not only accepted but widely heralded, even in the village of Chamula near San Cristóbal de las Casas (at the time Chamula was, and remained so at least through 2016, highly suspicious of foreigners, especially Latter-day Saint missionaries).

One medical condition that José and Magdalena occasionally encountered in the high sierra was cleft palate. It appeared in the family of Pablo Gutiérrez in the village of Chojolhó, also near San Cristóbal de las Casas and the “homeland” of the first members of the Church of Jesus Christ in the area.

In 1999 branch president Pablo Gutiérrez’s family had suffered many medical problems that, by Pablo’s testimony, were resolved by priesthood blessings. These included his wife’s hemorrhaging and his son’s cessation of breathing. However, repair of his daughter’s cleft palate required more—the intervention of a gifted surgeon.

A principle that Latter-day Saints practice elsewhere was taught—that is, to seek the healing powers of the priesthood and appropriate medical and surgical intervention as necessary. The problem is that while priesthood blessings do not cost, medical and surgical care usually do, and most often well beyond the economic wherewithal of low-income people. Fortunately, in the case of Pablo’s daughter, funds were raised, the operation was successful, and she was spared a life of severe disfigurement and social isolation.[83]

Another example of self-reliance and welfare practices in action in Mexico only loosely associated with the institutional Church emanates from the initiative of several Brigham Young University faculty members who created “Project Mexico” as part of the university’s nascent study abroad program.[84] In the 1970s it was functioning in the state of Puebla where dozens of BYU students and their faculty mentors gathered each summer to work on nutritional improvements, especially protein enhancement, among needy people.[85]

Low-income Mexicans derived most of their protein from beans and corn, which when eaten within about thirty minutes of each other, provide an amino-acid complementarity that ranks high on the protein intake scale.[86] To help enhance even this, the students introduced a “rabbit culture” by building rabbit hutches and introducing rabbits as a protein source.[87] After nearly a half century, rabbits remained a source of protein in some areas of Puebla.

A third illustration of independent Latter-day Saint action on self-reliance and welfare issues in Mexico is the Academy for Creating Enterprise, a private business college associated with microenterprise education, now allied with Brigham Young University’s Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance.[88] In Mexico it invites returned missionaries from disadvantaged homes to participate in a six-week course that empowers them to start their own microenterprises. The defeatist attitude of “I have nothing; I can’t; it is impossible” is changed to a positive attitude by hands-on training that I personally would have found extremely challenging. One of my informants went through the academy and, as a result, was able to start up his own microenterprise.[89] The outcome of this training in the instances I observed was astonishingly good.

Self-reliance, improved conditions of health and economic well-being, a church that mobilizes to provide relief when a disaster occurs—these are all part of the Latter-day Saint experience in Mexico.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began its work in Mexico in 1876 from a two-pronged impetus. The first was a desire to disseminate the messages found in the Book of Mormon to people that authorities of the time assumed must surely be descendants of Book of Mormon peoples. Hence the enormous efforts to translate the book into Spanish, fund the cost of its publication, and send missionaries to Mexico to distribute it and preach its divine truths. The second prong was a follow-up need, which began almost as an afterthought in Brigham Young’s mind, to couple a mandate to explore sites for colonization with the missionary effort of 1876. Everything that later transpired with the Church in Mexico flowed from this initial desire and need.

Fits of starts and stops characterized the Church’s growth in Mexico up through 1946. These included laying an initial institutional foundation for the faith (1880–89) followed by a dozen-year total abandonment (1889–1901) as authorities in Salt Lake City worked out their final accommodation with the US government and its marshals. Following this interregnum, the Church got back on course for a while (1901–13) until interrupted by Mexico’s civil war. Things ramped up again for the Church beginning in 1921 when the much-beloved mission president Rey L. Pratt was able to return to Mexico as hostilities and banditry following the civil war abated. The result was very positive for the Church until the Cristero War (1926–29) forced Pratt and the foreign missionaries out of the country again. Fortunately, by this time Mexican Saints had acquired enough experience in leadership positions to hold their Church units together and even expand the work on their own.

From Salt Lake City’s perspective, Church matters in Mexico were once again in capable hands with Pratt’s return there in 1927 as the hostilities and aftermath of the Cristero War began to subside. However, after Pratt’s untimely death in 1931 at age fifty-three after having served as mission president for twenty-three years, Church authorities sequentially sent two talented and well-meaning mission administrators to Mexico that some Mexican Latter-day Saints did not receive well. The dynamics culminated in the creation of a serious schismatic movement called “The Third Convention.”

The schismatic period (1936–46) was very difficult for the Church. The conflict arrested the possibility of significant further development of the Church’s institutions in Mexico and the accompanying substantial growth in its membership.

Beginning in 1942 and culminating in 1946 with the resolution of the schismatic crisis, the Church intensified its presence in Mexico and then grew organizationally through 2020 by increasing its membership almost exponentially, creating stakes and wards from mission districts and branches, building and operating temples, constructing hundreds of meetinghouses, and bringing to the fore most of the institutional fabric of the Church and its programs. It is unlikely that anyone can now be found that would argue that the Church, despite notable growing pains in Mexico, will do anything other than stay the course in that land and continue to bless the lives of hundreds of thousands of its members there, a sampling of whom are presented in the vignettes that follow.

Notes

[1] Arwell L. Pierce, interview by Karl Young, magnetic tape, El Paso, Texas, February 22, 1962, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

[2] In addition to the sources cited in this section, I draw 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, as well as on earlier writings in Tullis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 150–59. An abbreviated and popularized version of “A Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints” was published in Bruce Van Orden, D. Brent Smith, and Everett Smith Jr., eds., Pioneers in Every Land: Inspirational Stories of International Pioneers Past and Present (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1997), 113–24.

[3] See Elisa Pulido, “Solving Schism in Nepantla: The Third Convention Returns to the LDS Fold,” 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), 93–94, 102–3.

[4] Harold Brown, interview by LaMond Tullis, Mexico City, June 3, 1975.

[5] See Pulido, “Solving Schism in Nepantla,” 98; and Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 157.

[6] See F. 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). See photo on p. 118.

[7] See E. LeRoy Hatch interview: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1974, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; Julio G. Velázquez interview: Mexico City, D.F. Mexico, 1974, Church History Library; Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 157; and Pulido, “Solving Schism in Nepantla,” 98.

[8] Pulido, “Solving Schism in Nepantla,” 104.

[9] 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, quarter ending December 31, 1946. Pierce made a public announcement of the action in “Anuncio de Interés a la Misión Mexicana,” Liahona, October 1946, 405, 433, and strongly urged the members to support these men in their callings.

[10] See Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 91–99, 113–19.

[11] For a biographical sketch of Isaías Juárez, see the vignette in this volume.

[12] See Rey L. Pratt papers, 1901–1959, Church History Library, September 15, 1937; and Mexican Mission manuscript history, March 31, 1943.

[13] Agrícol Lozano Herrera, interview by LaMond Tullis, Mexico City, May 31, 1975.

[14] Lozano Herrera interview; and García Velázquez interview: Mexico City, D.F. Mexico, 1974, Church History Library.

[15] Mexican Mission manuscript history, March 31, 1943.

[16] For a biographical sketch of Narciso Sandoval Jiménez, see the vignette in this volume.

[17] See Mexican Mission manuscript history, March 31, 1943; and Lozano Herrera interview. See also LaMond Tullis, “Reflections on a Mexican Legacy” (Martin B. Hickman Outstanding Scholar Lecture, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, March 6, 1997), 7–9. For more on Narciso Sandoval Jiménez, see the vignette in this volume.

[18] See Pulido, “Solving Schism in Nepantla,” 93–94, 102–3.

[19] Mexico has sixty-eight officially recognized national languages, of which sixty-three are indigenous. See Antonia Cirjak, “What Languages are Spoken in Mexico?,” World Atlas, June 16, 2020, https://www.worldatlas.com/how-many-native-languages-are-spoken-in-mexico.html.

[20] See World Bank, “Mexico: Literacy Rate from 2006 to 2016, Total and by Gender,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/275443/literacy-rate-in-mexico/. There is a considerable dispute about the meaning of literacy rate statistics. Generally, a stated figure refers to the percentage of a population over fifteen years of age that can read and write at an elementary school level of proficiency. However, there are no universal definitions and standards of literacy. For years, the literacy figure in the United States was thought to be around 95 percent, but there is now evidence that the rate, whatever it was at any given time, is in decline. See “Infographic: Language and Literacy in the U.S.: Going in the Wrong Direction,” https://www.mla.org/content/download/52219/1812312/Infographic-Language-and-Literacy-3.pdf. It is interesting that the United States does not now appear to report any literacy rate figures to international statistical collecting agencies.

[21] Since the educational expansion of the 1970s and 80s and the reforms of 1992, the quality and coverage of public education in Mexico have continued to improve despite the government’s struggle to rein in teachers’ unions and put a tap on educational racketeering. See “Mexico’s Peña Nieto enacts major education reform,” BBC News, February 26, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-latin-america-21582629; and “Mexico Union Head Gordillo Charged With Organised Crime,” BBC News, February 28, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-21597680). In 2019 “faith in the value of education remains strong in Mexico. In public opinion polls, education usually ranks among the top issues that concern Mexican parents most. Politicians, regardless of party, regularly promise that, if elected, they will give more attention to education. . . . Moreover, 94 percent of Mexico’s primary school children are enrolled in public schools.” Merilee Grindle, “Education Reform in Mexico,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, 2019, https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/education-reform-mexico.

[22] See Barbara E. Morgan, “Benemérito de las Américas: The Beginning of a Unique Church School in Mexico,” BYU Studies Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2013): 89–116; and Barbara Morgan Gardner, “A Century of LDS Church Schools in Mexico Influenced by Lamanite Identity,” in The Worldwide Church: Mormonism as a Global Religion, ed. Michael A. Goodman and Mauro Properzi (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2016).

[23] See Clark V. Johnson, “The History of the Development of the School at San Marcos, Hidalgo,” chap. 3 in “Mormon Education in Mexico: The Rise of the Sociedad Educativa y Cultural” (PhD diss., Department of History, Brigham Young University, 1977) , 64–76.

[24] For a strong argument of San Marcos being the model, see Johnson, “Development of the School at San Marcos,” 64–76. The effects of education generally on a society are reviewed by John W. Meyer, “The Effects of Education as an Institution,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 1 (July 1977): 55–77.

[25] The six students were Benjamín Parra, Bernabé Parra Jr. (the two children of Bernabé Parra and Amalia Monroy), Alfonso Montoya, Calixto Cruz, Felipa Cruz, and Virgilio de la Vega. Others are mentioned in the records as having joined quickly thereafter. See “Historia de la escuela ‘Héroes de Chapúltepec,’” Church Education System: Historical Information, 1944–1979, Church History Library, 1.

[26] See Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico, 89–110.

[27] See Tullis, 6–7, 114–19.

[28] See the vignette on Jesusita Mera Vda. de Monroy in this book.

[29] See Joseph T. Bentley, interview by Richard O. Cowan and Clark V. Johnson, March 9, 1976, in Johnson, “Development of the School at San Marcos,” 73–74.

[30] See Bentley interview, 73–74.

[31] See Bentley interview, 73–74. Clark V. Johnson studied the internal workings of the Church and its relationship with the Mexican government in regard to multiple actors and complex decisions giving rise to the creation of the Sociedad Educativa y Cultural S.A. The abbreviation S.A. stands for “Sociedad Anónima” (Anonymous Society), a type of limited company with shareholders.

[32] Albert Kenyon Wagner and Leona Farnsworth Romney de Wagner, Historia del Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas: 1963–1975 (Mexico City: El Centro, 1977).

[33] See Johnson, “Mormon Education in Mexico,” 284–85.

[34] See Morgan, “Benemérito de las Américas, 111.

[35] See Morgan Allred, “New LDS Pathway program will affect the Church’s Perpetual Education Fund,” Daily Universe, June 9, 2017, https://universe.byu.edu/2017/06/09/new-lds-pathway-program-will-affect-the-churchs-perpetual-education-fund/.

[36] Aubrey Eyre, “Virtual Gatherings Break Down Barriers for BYU–Pathway Worldwide Students,” Church News, April 4, 2019, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/virtual-gatherings-break-down-barriers-for-byu-pathway-worldwide-students.

[37] Aubrey Eyre, “BYU–Pathway Worldwide,” Church News, April 7, 2019, 9–10.

[38] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Facts and Statistics: Mexico,” https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/mexico.

[39] For example, Jason H. Dormady, “Introduction: The Mormons in Mexico,” in Dormady and Tamez, Just South of Zion, 15–16, argues that the membership in 2014 cannot be more than 990,000. See also David Clark Knowlton, “How many members are there really? Two censuses and the meaning of LDS membership in Chile and Mexico,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 2 (2005).

[40] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 211n9.

[41] See The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Facts and Statistics: Mexico,” https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/mexico.

[42] See Mark L. Grover, “The Maturing of the Oak: The Dynamics of LDS Growth in Latin America,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 2 (2005): 79–104.

[43] As late as 2016, such irregularities continued as a problem for Church authorities. See Mariah Noble, “4 LDS Mexican missionaries detained after father said they tried to baptize kids without permission,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 1, 2016 (updated August 3, 2017).

[44] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 210n8, compiling information reported in the December statistical summaries for the Hermosillo mission for the years 1974–79 by the Church Missionary Department, under the title “Missionary Department Statistical Report.”

[45] On retention-rate statistics, see Seth L. Bryant et al., “Conversion and Retention in Mormonism,” Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 32.

[46] For an example, see Trent Toone, “The Remarkable Story of Guillermo González, a Mormon Pioneer in Mexico,” Deseret News, August 11, 2011.

[47] Dormady, “Introduction: The Mormons in Mexico,” 15–16, pegs the activity rate for Mexico at 19 percent.

[48] Aside from information I gathered from Agrícol Lozano Herrera (1927–1999) during my 1975 interview with him at his home in Mexico City, Wikipedia has a fine entry (s.v. “Agricol Lozano,” last modified May 17, 2021) from which I have extracted additional biographical matter. Lozano Herrera’s history book is Historia del Mormonismo en México (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Zarahemla, 1983).

[49] See “Fifteen New Stakes Created in Mexico City,” Ensign, January 1976, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1976/01/news-of-the-church/fifteen-new-stakes-created-in-mexico-city.

[50] See “Fifteen New Stakes Created in Mexico City.”

[51] “Facts and Statistics: Mexico.”

[52] See “Inside Temples,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/inside-temples.

[53] See Rachel Bruner, “8 Reasons Why Temples Are Important to Mormons,” https://www.learnreligions.com/why-lds-temples-important-to-mormons-2159559.

[54] “Inside Temples.”

[55] Gary E. Stevenson, “Sacred Homes, Sacred Temples,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2009/04/sacred-homes-sacred-temples.

[56] See “Mexican Mormons Reflect on Church Growth, Temples,” https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/additional-resource/mexican-mormons-reflect-on-church-growth-temples.

[57] See Eduardo Balderas, “Northward to Mesa,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1972/09/northward-to-mesa.

[58] See “It [Is] Not a Matter of Money but of Faith,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/global-histories/guatemala/stories-of-faith/gt-02-it-is-not-a-matter-of-money-but-of-faith.

[59] See Stanley Brandes, “Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 2 (April 1997): 270–99.

[60] See appendix 1 in this volume, “Latter-day Saint Fascination with Native Americans as Lamanites.”

[61] Information gleaned from Wikipedia, s.v. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico,” last modified October 5, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_in_Mexico.

[62] This was particularly noted during the time that Spencer W. Kimball was an apostle and later president of the Church (1943–85). An example of note: Spencer W. Kimball, “Of Royal Blood,” Ensign, July 1971, article adapted from Kimball’s address delivered at the Lamanite Youth Conference in Salt Lake City on April 24, 1971, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/07/of-royal-blood.

[63] In 1980 selections from the Book of Mormon were published in Ecuadorian Quechua as Mormon Killkashkamanta, with a later 2011complete edition as Mormónpaj Quilcasca. In 1982 selections were published in Guaraní as Mormon Kuatiañe'ẽ (for Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil), with a complete translation published in 2009. Selections only have been published for other indigenous languages: in 1978 in Kaqchikel (Guatemala) as Ri Vuj Richin Ri Mormon, in 1979 in Peruvian Quechua as Mormon Q'el Qaqmanta Aqllaska, in 1979 in Quiché (Guatemala) as Jutak Cha'om Wuj Re Ri Wuj Re Ri Mormon, in 1980 in Navajo as Naaltsoos Mormon Wolyéhígíí, in 1981 in Kuna (Panama, Colombia) as Mormón Kaiya Purba, in 1981 in Bolivian Quechua as Mormompa Libronmanta, in 1983 in Mam (Guatemala) as �ʾ�ẍ Aj U'j te Mormon, in 1983 in Maya (Mexico, Belize, Guatemala) as U Libroil Mormon, and in 1992 (some sources say 1994) in Tzotzil (Chiapas, Mexico) as Vun yu'un Mormon. A table summary is found in Kai A. Andersen, “In His Own Language,” Liahona, June 1997, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/1997/06/in-his-own-language. A more robust discussion is in Wikipedia, “List of Book of Mormon Translations,” last modified August 19, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Book_of_Mormon_translations.

[64] See appendix 1 herein for a discussion of recent issues about DNA and the Book of Mormon.

[65] In December of 2012, at the junction of the new stub road that leads to Chojolhó and its small companion settlement Tsabalhó from the main highway, the following announcement was neatly painted in block letters and placed next to a watchman’s shelter: “AVISO—Está estrictamente prohibido el paso de vehículos desconocidos, después de las 9:00 pm. Hasta las 4:00 am. Sorprendiéndolo será sancionado por la cantidad de $4,000 pesos. My translation: “Warning—Transit of unknown vehicles between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. is strictly prohibited. Violators will be fined $4,000 pesos” (approximately $320 US dollars).

[66] See “A gift of water,” Church News, November 9, 2001, p. 9.

[67] See John L. Hart, “75th temple brings a ‘divine experience,’” Church News, March 17, 2000, 3, 4, 11.

[68] A Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) source lists five Tzotzil dialects: Chamula, Chenalhó, Huixtán, San Andrés Larrainzar, and Zinacantán. See M. Paul Lewis, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds., Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th ed. (Dallas, TX: SIL International, online version, 2015), section titled “Tzotzil: A Language of Mexico,” https://www.ethnologue.com/language/tzo. Other sources list the additional dialect of Venustiano Carranza (e.g., Wikipedia, s.v. “Tzotzil language,” last modified October 6, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzotzil_language), which is a Tzotzil variant (San Bartolomé de los Llanos) spoken in the Venustiano Carranza region. It is unique, having two phonemic tones (i.e., pitch or inflection) that clarify grammar and word definition. See Harvey B. Sarles, “A Descriptive Grammar of the Tzotzil Language as Spoken in San Bartolomé de Los Llanos, Chiapas, México” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1966).

[69] Mutual intelligibility among the six Tzotzil dialects is generally 45 to 66 percent except for the San Andrés Larrainzar variety, which is partially understood only among those who speak the Chenalhó dialect. See Lewis, Simons, and Fennig, Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Ethnologue lists Tzotzil as a “threatened” language.

[70] In the sources I have reviewed, the cited figures vary widely, set mostly around 350,000 but ranging from 250,000 to 418,000.

[71] PBS Utah, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, June 24, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/ religionandethics/2016/06/24/mormon-welfare-program/31091/.

[72] See “Humanitarian Relief,” https://philanthropies.churchofjesuschrist.org/humanitarian-services/funds/humanitarian-general-fund.

[73] The quake destroyed or damaged the homes of 284 Latter-day Saint families, compromised 26 of their meetinghouses, and upset the lives of more than two million of their compatriots. See “Church Sends Humanitarian Aid to Chiapas, Mexico, Earthquake Survivors,” September 19, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/church-sends-humanitarian-aid-to-chiapas-mexico-earthquake-survivors.

[74] See “Church Sends Humanitarian Aid to Chiapas, Mexico.”

[75] See “Timeline: A Look Back at the Church Welfare Plan,” March 22, 2011, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/a-look-back-at-the-church-welfare-plan.

[76] The following material on health services missionaries derives from Tullis, Martyrs in Mexico.

[77] For general information, see David Mitchell, “Agricultural and Health Services Missionaries: A New Way to Serve the Whole Man,” Ensign, September 1973, 72.

[78] Lori Smith (health services missionary), “Notes on San Marcos, Mexico,” June 3, 1974–January 1, 1975, 2; copy in author’s possession.

[79] Smith, “Notes on San Marcos, Mexico.” Sarna, if treated, is rarely fatal. It is likely that those who died from it did so from ancillary complications around the infection sites. See “Sarna,” Center for Young Women’s Health, http://youngwomenshealth.org/2005/10/06/sarna/.

[80] See Victor L. Brown, “The Remarkable Example of the Bermejillo, Mexico, Branch,” Ensign, November 1978, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1978/11/the-remarkable-example-of-the-bermejillo-mexico-branch.

[81] Brown, “Remarkable Example.”

[82] Dr. José Ismael Ruiz Guadiana, interview by LaMond Tullis, Tecamachalco, Mexico D.F., January 16, 2013. At the time of the interview, Dr. Ruiz was the Church’s chief medical officer for its missionaries in Mexico, a volunteer assignment.

[83] Pablo Gutiérrez Ruiz, interview by LaMond Tullis, Chojolhó, Chiapas, Mexico, December 17, 2012.

[84] The teachers and advisers were Lowell Wood, Ivan Corbridge, Ted Lyons, and Kay Frantz (letter from David Richardson, May 22, 2012).

[85] Kirt Olson was Brigham Young University’s resident field supervisor for the university’s Indian Assistance Program in Puebla at the time. He was living there with his wife, Beth, and children. Previously, he and his family had lived among the Navajos in Crystal, New Mexico, working in turn for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then the Church’s Indian seminary program. After his humanitarian service in Puebla, Mexico, he served as president of the Colombia Bogotá Mission. In 1980 he joined the Church’s American Indian Services (AIS). While in Utah he also worked with the seminary program and later with the Church curriculum department. See “News of the Church,” Ensign, June 1974; and John P. Livingstone, “Meeting Needs with Resources,” chap. 7 in Same Drum, Different Beat: The Story of Dale T. Tingey and American Indian Services (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2003).

[86] See Densie Webb, “Beans and Grains: The Perfect Pairing,” Today’s Dietitian 26, no. 12 (December 2014): 36.

[87] For a discussion of how this worked out in a specific instance, see the vignettes on Bertha Hidalgo Rojas and Luis Alfonso López Hidalgo herein.

[88] The Ballard Center is housed within BYU’s Marriott School of Business, Provo, Utah. Its name was recently changed to the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Social Impact.

[89] Manuel Solís Ruiz, interview by LaMond Tullis, Chojolhó, Chiapas, Mexico, December 18, 2012.