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A startling dream led Desideria Quintanar de Yáñez,[*] a widow and a mother, to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[1] She had been able to set aside her husband’s death. She had reconciled herself to her family’s losses from the sacking of her municipality of Nopala de Villagrán in 1864 by the French army and Mexican monarchists under the orders of Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, then emperor of Mexico.[2] She had overcome her fear that her son José María, who had joined an antimonarchical militia, would ultimately die at the hands of the French and their elitist Mexican allies. Moreover, she had come to peace with respect to spending the rest of her days alone on her family’s ranch in the municipality of her birth among the cactus-studded hills and valleys of the semiarid state of Hidalgo. What she could not set aside was her dream. As a result, Desideria became an early convert to the Church in Mexico, the first woman baptized into that faith in the country’s central region during, as she later learned, what is called the dispensation of the fulness of times.[3] She was happy to be part of those times.

Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maxmilian, emperor of Mexico, whose French army, allied with Mexican monarchists, tried from 1864 to 1867 to wrest control of Mexico from Benito Juárez's Republican forces. Maximillian's army sacked Nopala de Villagrán and caused Desideria to fear for her son's life. Photograph courtesy of Wikipedia.

Desideria’s life-changing dream occurred in 1880 on her family’s ranch about seventy-five miles from Mexico City. At the same time, Apostle Moses Thatcher (who since 1879 had been presiding over a proselyting effort in and around Mexico City) was in Utah Territory trying to convince his colleagues that buying into a massive colonization scheme in Mexico was a good idea for the Church. While away, Thatcher had left his fellow missionaries, James Z. Stewart and Melitón González Trejo, in charge. They were busily translating and publishing literature and newspaper articles to inform Mexicans of the Church’s presence and purpose in their country.

Desideria affirmed that her dream laid bare an objective fact she knew nothing about beforehand. In February 1880, at age sixty-six and energized by what had happened, she sent her son José María to Mexico City to investigate the substance of what she had dreamed.

In her dream, Desideria had seen a man holding a book in his hands as if wanting to give it to her. He looked strange to her, not like any ordinary Mexican she knew. He may well have been heavily bearded or at least very mustachioed. Was he a Spaniard? a Belgian or Englishman? a Frenchman? a German? some descendant of Europeans from the United States? There were many foreigners in Mexico. They had investments in mines, railroads, large agricultural estates, and colonies, and the petroleum and power industries.[4] The Mexican government’s president, Porfirio Díaz, favored them for their investments and technological expertise.[5] They were generally well-to-do, some even wealthy. Aside from the French soldiers who so frightened her, Desideria had seen a few other foreigners near her small village in Hidalgo where she was born in 1814 and had remained all her sixty-six years.

As the man moved through her dream and drew nearer to the eyes of her mind, Desideria tried to make out the title on the book’s cover. At some point, she said, it became clear to her: Una voz de amonestación (A Voice of Warning). She saw men around a printing press making copies of the book. She was impressed to know that this was happening in Mexico City and that she must obtain a copy to read. So she sent her son to investigate. Desideria was one of a small percentage of literate rural women of her time.[6]

Contemporary Mexicans are culturally tuned to see meaning in their dreams. Contemporaneously, during Desideria’s time the significance was probably even more pronounced. Unsurprisingly, therefore, dreams have introduced life-changing events to many Mexican Latter-day Saints. They are in good company, they believe: Because of dreams, Joseph fled Bethlehem to Egypt to save Jesus from Herod’s henchmen; a dream instructed the three Wise Men to avoid tipping Herod off; because of a dream, Lehi abandoned Jerusalem with his family in favor of southern desert camping and ultimately a transoceanic voyage to the Western Hemisphere; a dream persuaded Lehi to send his son Nephi back to Jerusalem for the brass plates; and because of a dream, Melitón González Trejo left his comfortable Spanish military post in the Philippines, traveled to Salt Lake City, and became the translator of Book of Mormon passages carried by horse and mule to Mexico in 1876.

As a preface to life-changing events, “I have dreamed a dream” appears frequently in the Old Testament and in analogous phrasings in the Book of Mormon (e.g., Genesis 41:15; 1 Nephi 3:2). Some contemporary Latter-day Saint leaders have taught that dreams can be a source of revelation in members’ personal lives.[7] Many Mexican converts relate how dreams brought them to the Church.

Dreams frequently surprised the dreamers, who tended at first to be puzzled but later felt to rejoice. There is authoritative precedent: “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, many Mexican Latter-day Saints still have no qualms about recounting their life-changing dreams.[8]

This ranch house in the municipality of Nopala de Villagrán is of the kind in which Desideria Quintanar de Yáñez may have lived in the late 1800s. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Locating the Book—and the Missionaries

When Desideria had her dream, the missionary party of Apostle Moses Thatcher that had arrived in Mexico City in 1879 was hard at work. One task was to translate Apostle Parley P. Pratt’s A Voice of Warning[9] into Spanish and get it printed for a Mexican audience. Melitón González Trejo, with the assistance of Plotino Rhodakanaty, had just completed the translation. On February 9, 1880, Thatcher had sent the manuscript to a local printer to have the type set in preparation for the book’s publication in Spanish. The missionaries were waiting for all the printer’s proofs to be returned so they could make final corrections and then have hundreds of copies printed and distributed throughout central Mexico. It was a new phase of missionary effort that in a way mimicked the arrival in Mexico three years earlier of the Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón.

The Spanish translation of Parley P. Pratt's "A Voice of Warning" was done in Mexico City in late 1870 and early 1880.

Trejo’s manuscript went to the printer close to if not on the same day that Desideria had her dream. On February 17, eight days following the delivery of the manuscript, Desideria’s son finally found the missionaries at their lodging in the San Carlos hotel in Mexico City and asked to purchase a copy.

There was a problem: the book was not yet ready. James Stewart still hovered over some of the printer’s proofs, marking every mistake he could find. No copy had yet been printed in final form and bound. No cover page was yet attached to a single piece of paper. Yet Desideria had seen the finished book, readable title included, held in the hands of someone who wanted her to read it. That is why she had sent her son José María to find it.

One wonders how Desideria’s son found the missionaries. At the time, probably nearly a million of the country’s approximately 9.7 million people were living in and around Mexico City proper—not an easy prospect for a man from the pastoral hinterland who would need to go about making countless inquiries about someone publishing a religious book titled Una voz de amonestación. How long it took José María to find the missionaries is not recorded, but from the probable date of Desideria’s dream to her son’s encounter with James Stewart was only eight days! Stewart noted in his journal: “[I] had a very interesting conversation with Sr. José M. Yáñez, Nopala de Estado de Hidalgo.”[10]

Desideria’s Baptism

Desideria obtained one of the first copies of the published book. Reading it electrified her. She thought of herself as being—and she may well have been—a direct descendant of Cuauhtémoc, cousin of Moctezuma and the last reigning sovereign of the Aztecs. As most Mexicans, many of whom carry the name Cuauhtémoc, she was proud of her indigenous and putative royal ancestry. The message in A Voice of Warning and its witness of a larger book called the Book of Mormon stimulated her, for she soon believed that it might contain something of the history of her own ancestors. She soon asked for baptism. When that happened on April 22, 1880, in a stream on the Yáñez ranch in Nopala, Desideria became the twenty-second person and first woman to enter the waters of baptism in central Mexico. Fittingly, Melitón González Trejo baptized her along with her son José María, his wife, and their daughter.

Desideria’s dream did not just jump into an infertile mind. She had apparently been religiously inclined her whole life and not just in traditional venues. In Nopala she had rejected papal authority, joined a Protestant group, and together with other members of her family had converted a number of people in her locale away from Roman Catholicism.[11] Desideria’s conversion presaged the subsequent affiliation among numerous early Latter-day Saint converts in Mexico—first Catholicism, then Protestantism, then the faith of the restored Church of Jesus Christ.

With such promise in Nopala, Stewart raised discussions about forming a branch of the Church there. The Yáñez family was literate, and they owned agricultural lands and ranching properties in several locations and were therefore relatively well off. Stewart must have thought this to be a providential opportunity.

Four days after his baptism, José María returned to Mexico City for discussions with the missionaries. Stewart and Silviano Arteaga, himself being the first male native Mexican baptized in central Mexico,[12] ordained Yáñez an elder and commissioned him to preach the gospel to his family and friends in Nopala and work toward bringing enough souls to the faith to justify forming a branch there. They sent him home with fifty missionary tracts, ten copies of La voz de amonestación, and two copies of Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón, which three years earlier the first missionaries had introduced into Mexico by horse and mule.[13]

Within a year, several more Yáñez family members were baptized. Later, others in the area also joined the faith. Missionaries, mission presidents, and even Apostle Erastus Snow[14] traveled to visit the Latter-day Saints in Nopala and pay respects to Desideria. The visitors may also have been attracted by the nearby ruins of the magnificent post-Teoti­huacán Toltec capital city of Tula, or Tollan.[15] Then as now, people speculated about the historiography of the Book of Mormon.

Even before the first completely published and bound translation of the Book of Mormon became available in 1886, mission president Horace Hall Cummings sent for and obtained unbound sheets of a complete translated copy. On November 28 he visited Desideria and presented them to her. The unbound volume was the first complete translated copy of the Book of Mormon that had been received in Mexico. The first woman baptized in central Mexico became the first person to receive an entire copy of the Book of Mormon in Spanish.[16]

During the decade following Desideria’s baptism, membership grew in Nopala as elsewhere in the branches outside Mexico City. However, by 1885 the pushback in Nopala against the Latter-day Saints had become fierce. Helaman Pratt, mission president during the mid-decade, made the following report to the First Presidency:

Since my last letter to you, various newspaper articles have appeared in the Spanish and English papers of this City, stating the Mormons had sent their advance guard into Sonora and planted a colony at Las Cruses [etc.] and warning the people against our doctrines and calling on the Government to take active and immediate steps to prevent the Mormons from getting a foothold in this country. This same cry has been raised by the priests and the Catholic and Protestant churches, this being perhaps the only question upon which they are fully united. All this has had quite an effect upon the people. . . .

On my last visit to Nopala I found so much excitement, that I was unable to accomplish but very little. Those who had applied for baptism, had been scared off; and some of the places where I was well received the month previous, sent special word for me not to come again, for if I did I would be roughly handled.

However our brethren here as in other places are feeling well, and appear to be faithful and true.[17]

In 1889 disaster struck the Church in Utah Territory. All missionaries throughout the world were called home to help man the barricades in the onslaught of the US government against the Latter-day Saints. The members in Mexico were left alone for the first of three times and, in this case, would be so until 1901—twelve years.

Desideria’s Abiding Commitment in Isolation

Despite a lifetime of isolation and personal trials, for the next dozen years the dream and what it had revealed rose repeatedly in Desideria’s consciousness. In times of loneliness and sorrow as well as joy and rejoicing, she was reminded of the greater hope to which she had committed the remainder of her life.

In the absence of the missionaries, José María’s ardor cooled,[18] leaving the flock of Saints in Nopala leaderless. They would not be reclaimed until the twentieth century.

Desideria Quintanar de Yáñez died in 1893 at age seventy-nine. Despite the grinding infirmities of her old age, loneliness, and physical, social, and spiritual isolation from the Church, her ardor for her new faith never cooled, even in the face of fierce opposition. Her son mentioned to the missionaries when they finally returned in 1901 that his mother had “died in full faith of Mormonism.” He affirmed that his wife had done the same despite his own disaffection. Indeed, he seemed particularly proud of his mother and his wife.

In her isolation, Desideria endured to the end. Her testimony, reinforced by the memory of the startling dream that changed her life, was sufficient to hold her true to her baptismal covenants.

From her dream in 1880 and throughout the remainder of her life, Desideria worked for a promise in the Book of Mormon that she loved: “Blessed are they who will repent and hearken unto the voice of the Lord their God; for these are they that shall be saved” (Helaman 12:23). She had read this verse in Parley P. Pratt’s La voz de amonestación.

Notes

[*] This vignette is largely based on Clint Christensen, “Lonely Saint in Mexico: Desideria Quintanar Yáñez (1814–1893),” in Women of Faith in the Latter Days, ed. Richard E. Turley Jr. and Brittany A. Chapman, vol. 1, 1755–1820 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), chap. 35. I am grateful for Christensen’s permission to draw heavily from his research and writing for this vignette. The narrative also references my book Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 82, discussion notes from Eileen Roundy-Tullis, and my additional research into Desideria’s life.

[1] Desideria was the widow of Rafael Yáñez and the mother of at least three of their children of whom we have record: José María, Manuel, and Tereza. It is likely they had additional offspring. After her husband’s death, she was known as Desideria Quintanar Vd. de Yáñez, Vd. being the abbreviation for viuda, or widow.

[2] For an overview, see H. Montgomery Hyde, Mexican Empire: The History of Maximilian and Carlota of Mexico (London: Macmillan, 1946). For specific focus on the insurgents’ struggle to remove the emperor, see Jasper Ridley, Maximilian & Juárez (London: Phoenix Press, 2001). For insights into the tragedy for the Austrian royal family, see M. M. McAllen, Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2015).

[3] The Latter-day Saint context for this biblical phrase (Ephesians 1:10) is summarized in Rand H. Packer, “Dispensation of the Fulness of Times,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:387–88, https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Dispensation_of_the_Fulness_of_Times.

[4] See, e.g., David M. Pletcher, Rails, Mines, & Progress: Seven American Promoters in Mexico, 1867–1911 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958); and Thomas Schoonover, “Dollars over Dominion: United States Economic Interests in Mexico, 1861–67,” Pacific Historical Review 45, no. 1 (February 1976): 23–45.

[5] See Mark Wasserman, “Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876–1910: A Case Study of the Role of Regional Elites,” The Americas 36, no. 1 (July 1979): 3–21.

[6] The data on nineteenth-century female literacy in Mexico is illusive, but some of the best of what is available is presented in Mary Kay Vaughn, “Primary Education and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Research Trends, 1968-1988,” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 1 (1990): 31–66.

[7] See, e.g., Richard G. Scott, “How to Obtain Revelation and Inspiration for Your Personal Life,” Ensign, May 2012.

[8] In my interviews in Mexico in 2011–13, more than half of the interviewees mentioned a dream that had sparked their life along a surprising trajectory. Popular interest in dreams is widespread, even among writers who rarely if ever attribute revelatory value to dreams, as seen with Gustavus Hindman Miller’s 10,000 Dreams Interpreted (Boston: Barnes and Noble, 1996), which went through five printings in its first two years of publication.

[9] Sixty-eight editions of A Voice of Warning (originally printed in 1837) have been published. The edition of 1874 was probably the one the missionaries had in Mexico City and from which they did their translation. See Parley P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning and Instruction to All People, or, An Introduction to the Faith and Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 9th ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Steam Printing Establishment, 1874).

[10] Quoted by Clint Christensen in “Lonely Saint in Mexico.” Many years later, in 1903, Alonzo Taylor visited José María Yáñez on his well-appointed hacienda near Nopala. Yáñez implied that he had gone to Mexico City right after his mother’s dream. “After hunting for a long time he met a man who told him that in [the] Hotel San Carlos [were] some men who [were publishing] a book by that name.” Alonzo L. Taylor, journal, July 10, 1903, Alonzo L. Taylor mission papers, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City.

[11] One of James Stewart’s contemporaneous sources said “6,000,” a figure he doubted could have been so large. James Z. Stewart, Mexico City, to John Taylor, April 29, 1880. Brian Reeves found this reference; Clint Christensen made it available to me on August 22, 2013.

[12] Silviano Arteaga was baptized on the same day as Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty, November 20, 1879. See Jeanne J. Hatch, “Moses Thatcher, 1842-1909,” Las Colonias–The Mormon Colonies in Mexico, http://www.lascolonias.org/2016/06/26/moses-thatcher/. See also Moses Thatcher, journal, August 1, 1878–December 31, 1879, under date of November 20, 1879, Moses Thatcher Sr. papers, 1866–1923, Special Collections and Archives Division, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah; and Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 34–36.

[13] Stewart to John Taylor, April 29, 1880.

[14] From 1886 to 1890, Erastus Snow was one of the apostles who temporarily made his home in the northern Latter-day Saint colonies of Chihuahua and from which he visited central Mexico on several occasions, including, apparently, more than one visit to Nopala.

[15] Spectacular views of Tollan may be enjoyed at https://hiddenincatours.com/tollan-ancient-capital-of-the-mysterious-toltec-people/.

[16] Information on this topic can be gleaned from the Horace Hall Cummings family papers, 1865–1937, archived in the J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah. See John Powell’s register of the collection at http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv46743.

[17] Helaman Pratt to John Taylor, February 8, 1885, First Presidency mission administration correspondence, 1877–1918, Church History Library. Brian Reeves found the reference, and Clint Christensen made it available to me via e-mail attachment, September 5, 2013.

[18] José María Yáñez Quintanar actually began to challenge Moses Thatcher early on. For example, José María brought a blind man to Thatcher to be healed, thereby testing his apostolic authority so that Thatcher could prove he was an emissary from God. Moses Thatcher, Mexico City, to John Taylor, May 6, 1881, First Presidency mission administration correspondence. Brian Reeves found this reference, and Clint Christensen made it available to me via an e-mail attachment, September 5, 2013.