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Since the moment the Church had taken an interest in his fourteen volumes of diaries, Juan Camacho had anxiously awaited this day. . .

Years earlier, being lonely yet overcome with enthusiasm for his new life following his baptism in 1984, he began to record what would eventually become twenty-six hundred pages of handwritten entries covering every day of his life for twenty-eight years![1]

Juan Serafín Camacho Reyes in the La Presa Ward chapel, Lindavista Stake, January 2012. Photo courtesy of Eileen Roundy-Tullis.

Aside from the usual desiderata found in diaries (reflections about family, food, work, sickness, money, love, pathos, sadness, joy, and national, world, and astronomical events), these volumes burst with particulars of Juan Camacho’s riveting new spiritual and religious life. There is a singular supplement. The first ten years of his diaries contain every flyer, leaflet, announcement, and agenda dealing with his prodigious missionary and church-maintenance activities, which included organizing members to sweep the temple grounds! Among the numerous pages are announcements for ward, stake, and regional conferences, many of them printed on ���ܲ���’s printing presses. His diaries may be one of the most complete depositories of original printed Church materials of this kind in Mexico.

Clearly, Juan loved his diaries, which he dutifully began to write after Elder Dallin H. Oaks urged members to do so in a conference talk. The diaries were his friends. Indeed, in some sense they were a repository for his soul. Now he was giving them away: “The date has now been set for handing over my diaries,” he confided to his diary. “I’ll give a sacrament meeting talk on Sunday, January 15, 2012, between 10 and 11 a.m., and the delivery will be that same day after the service.”

He mentioned his plan to his daughter Lupita and her husband Rubén Vázquez, to his son Marco Antonio Camacho Vázquez. and to a friend, Lupita Hernández from the Tlalnepantla Stake. They all said they would be at the ceremony. The transfer occurred as planned in the La Presa Ward of the Lindavista Stake, located in the Tlalnepantla municipality of the State of Mexico.

The sacrament meeting talks on that day in January 2012 focused on family and Church history. In reality, however, it was a celebration of Juan Camacho’s life since joining the Church. Stake president Rodolfo Gómez Morán was there, as was his first counselor, Cuauhtémoc Manuel Olguín González. They spoke about Church history and the Lord’s command that among Latter-day Saints a record be kept. President Gómez Morán cited Doctrine and Covenants 21:1: “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.” The president and his counselor spoke about Juan Camacho. They also told their own family history stories that were worthy of capture for posterity. Mexicans excel at riveting narrations.

Nevertheless, it was Juan Camacho who lifted any sleepy eyelids in the congregation with his engaging narratives of missionary work, blessings, and the role of the temple in his life. Members and investigators in the congregation alternately responded with concentration and spontaneous laughter. At no moment did they disengage. Then, at the last second of his allotted time, Juan abruptly closed and sat down. Clearly, he could have continued for an hour or more. There seemed no doubt that several in the congregation would have remained absolutely attentive.

In the Relief Society room afterward, Juan tearfully relinquished ownership of his diaries in a formal donation to the Church’s new archives in Mexico City. Vicente Bolaños, the Church’s regional history advisor for the Mexico Northeast Area, had prepared everything well. On behalf of the Church History Department, I happily received the fourteen volumes of diaries.

Fourteen volumes of diaries that Juan Camacho donated to the archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico City. Photo courtesy of Eileen Roundy-Tulis.

From around 1981, when ���ܲ���’s religious convictions fused, and up until his baptism three years later, he attended church, participated in all its activities (including teaching classes), and, above all, engaged vigorously in the principal behavior that would consume the rest of his life. He reached out to convince his fellow Mexicans of the blessings to be found within the Latter-day Saint gospel of Jesus Christ. On this count his creative instincts honed as a professional photographer and printer found release in strikingly novel ways.

When Bishop Alfredo Esponda Noriega loaned him the keys to the meetinghouse so that seventy-eight-year-old Juan could get it ready for his “ceremony,” as he called it, the bishop said: “Brother Camacho, you have my total confidence. You have nurtured and cared for this building since before the first stone was laid. You have been a model member. I am happy to loan you my keys.”

Background

Juan Serafín Camacho Reyes was born in 1934 in the El Oro gold-mining Mexican countryside of Michoacán, where he lived until age seven or eight. Juan remembers his father[2] as a good, hardworking man who spent from seven to eighteen hours daily in the mines. As one may well imagine, the life that ���ܲ���’s father shared with his wife and four children[3] was economically difficult and the effort to provide for them tiring. Nevertheless, even after the passage of seventy years, Juan remembers his father with affection: the children liked to talk to him, he hugged them, and on weekends he took them to the fields to harvest peas, beans, lentils, corn, and wheat.

Shortly after his father died from contaminated air in the mine where he worked, ���ܲ���’s family moved to Mexico City, where they lived with an aunt in Azcapotzalco. There ���ܲ���’s mother became reacquainted with a fellow countryman, Alfonso García González, from her hometown of Tlalpujahua, Michoacán, who also had worked in the gold mines. She and her new friend soon married, and the man became a father-in-fact to Juan and his siblings. They liked him.

Neither ���ܲ���’s mother Isaura nor her new husband Alfonso was very literate. Beyond that, they lacked the insight, desire, and ability to give the children under their care much schooling. However, Alfonso, influenced by Isaura, did make it possible for his stepsons—Juan and Raúl—to receive six years of primary education. They attended the first three years during the day and the following three at night so they could maintain their employment during the day.

Moreover, Alfonso passed on to his stepsons an understanding of the redeeming value of principled work engaged with enthusiasm, insight, helpfulness, and honesty. Aside from any philosophy of work Alfonso may have been able to articulate, in those days the children’s working enthusiastically, insightfully, helpfully, and honestly was pragmatically good. They added to the household income from their menial jobs that were much in demand.

Alfonso taught his stepchildren to make snow cones, which they sold at the Ermita-Tacubaya train station. Later he showed them how to make boxes from sheet metal and taught them the little bit of carpentry that he knew. By age twelve, Juan was selling newspapers, shining shoes, hawking merchandise, and running errands. When selling newspapers, he picked them up from the distributor at six o’clock in the morning in order to get to his assigned place—the corner of Bucareli and Morelos Streets in Mexico City—in time to hawk them.

By thirteen or fourteen, Juan had secured a stable position as a bagger and loader in the Mercado de San Juan in Mexico City. At the market he followed his stepfather’s work ethic, dressed uncommonly well, and serviced the market’s customers with dispatch and enthusiasm. Both children became sufficiently economically independent that many times they failed to return home for being so occupied with work during the day and school at night. The record does not disclose where they slept when not at home. In any event, Juan and his brother quickly saw the relationship between pleasing behavior and tips, particularly among the Americans who came to shop at the Mercado de San Juan. Juan Camacho liked the Americans.

Learning Photography in the United States

Around 1950 an American couple temporarily residing in Mexico took a liking to Juan. They were attracted to his work ethic, his cleanliness, his curiosity about gadgets, his quick intellect, and his engaging spirit. On their return to the United States in 1951, the couple invited Juan to go with them. “Come with us, lad. We’re going to give you a job.” They helped him get a passport and a visa for their trip to Miami.

In Miami, ���ܲ���’s American benefactors negotiated a position for Juan with a professional photographer named McGrat. Soon Juan was studying lighting and illumination, flash photography, and candid and formal composition. ���ܲ���’s new skills turned out to be of great interest to his benefactors. He was in the United States about two and a half years.

From helper to professional in a few years, Juan was a photographer for diverse events, from greyhound races to show events for automobiles, tractors, and even burros. He also was a photographer at Miami beauty pageants, where he principally photographed Mexican participants. McGrat then sold the photos to newspapers and magazines.

With his professional photography, Juan Camacho made “a lot of money,” he said, saving most of his salary because the Americans covered his living expenses. Returning to Mexico City in 1953, Juan eventually invested his savings in nine photography shops around Mexico City that specialized in film processing, prints, and the usual associated sales. At least one of his shops had a modest photographic studio. He also invested in printing processes and supplies, and even a sandwich shop.

Juan purchased his photographic materials from Foto Regis, American Photo, and La Ansco. La Ansco staff inquired if he considered himself capable of working with Walter Joseph, who had a contract with NASA to process nine hundred photos a night. Juan responded in the affirmative. He was nineteen years old.

Juan Meets Lupita

In this work Juan became acquainted with Lupita (Guadalupe) Vázquez Mendoza, who during the day did the photo washing and cleaning. Yet uninformed by gospel principles that later would vigorously channel his life, Juan soon developed a relationship with her and not long thereafter took her to Tacubaya to live in his mother’s house on land settled by paracaidistas (squatters) of the Colonia Arvide, a neighborhood in Mexico City. At the insistence of Lupita’s family, Juan and his devotee were married on January 7, 1961.[4] They quickly changed the last name of Lupita’s daughter Susana (from a previous relationship) to Camacho.[5] Eighteen days later, the couple’s daughter Rosa María was born,[6] the first for the couple, the second for Lupita.

With a stable marriage, in 1963 Juan and Lupita had their third child and only son.[7] Following a ten-year gap, a fourth child came to bless their home.[8] Despite his occasional waywardness that produced other progeny, Juan loved all his resulting children: three with Lupita, four from other mothers, and an adopted daughter.[9]

In the meantime, before finding the gospel of Jesus Christ and while his midlife crises were underway during his forties, Juan found solace in his work as a photographer and owner of the nine photography shops and in a newly acquired interest as a printer, all of which were lucrative for the time. Later his printing presses became a key element in his fervently embraced missionary work.

The Printing Presses

In 1970 at age 36, Juan apprenticed himself to a master printer and learned how to use an 1800s-model press not unlike the one on which the first edition of the Book of Mormon was printed. In due course he brought in enough work to justify a motor-driven press, an idea the master printer had advanced with enthusiasm. Juan imported two Chandler & Price cog-and-gear models at 17 million old Mexican pesos each. Their weight was such that it took a dozen men to offload them from the delivery truck.

One of the motor-driven presses that Juan Camacho imported from Chicago. Photo courtesy of Eileen Roundy-Tullis.

Somehow, Juan got the two presses down into the basement of his printshop in La Presa and there put them to work, sometimes twenty-four hours a day, employing, at one time or another, most of his eight children. His biggest and best account was with the United Nations, which tendered him stable work for nearly two decades until technology changed and made the presses obsolete. He also continued to run his photography businesses.

Juan Finds the Church

In 1978 or 1979, a woman whom Juan had trained to run one of his photography labs and who happened to be a baptized member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told Juan the Joseph Smith Story and something about the Book of Mormon. Intrigued, Juan obtained a copy of the Church’s sacred text and a few pamphlets. Thus began his subsequent days of voracious reading.

With ���ܲ���’s reading, studying, and conversing came an overwhelming joy, he said, accompanied, rather understandably, by sharpened dismay and heartfelt pain. His joy lay in what he was reading and hearing and studying. The newly found knowledge rang true to him. His studies and the teachings excited every part of his being. He felt that a portion of his sentient self was awakening from a slumber that had dulled his sensibilities and deadened his spirit. He wanted a rousing coming-alive, and he wanted it now.

���ܲ���’s dismay came with his awakening from spiritual slumber. He was aghast at the mess he had made of his life. He knew it would require effort and enduring conviction to turn his life journey around so as to bring it into alignment with the teachings he had been reading and that so delighted him. He knew he could do it, but he also knew he would have to pray for strength to persevere. He was sure that if he made every effort to live an honorable life, his Lord would fortify his worthy desires with steadfastness and enduring conviction.

���ܲ���’s heartfelt pain lay in knowing that in order to exercise his new faith by repenting of sins that he could now see were egregious, and to thereafter remain true to his new convictions, he must abandon the relationships that had produced four of his children and forego any other such entanglements in the future. Abiding by a focused sense of honor and decency, he would nevertheless continue to provide for all his children and, where necessary, offer support for their mothers. Juan was forty-five years old, his oldest child twenty-five. He was, as is often said, “between a rock and a hard place.” His life was messed up. He had messed with other people’s lives. He could not change the past. He could not restore others’ lives to what they might have been. Where to now? One sees in Juan Camacho the psychological limits of a course of full repentance. Nevertheless, he was thankful for the Church’s doctrine of repentance and was especially mindful of a new scripture he had read: “He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (Doctrine and Covenants 58:42).

Juan thought he would have a good life with his wife Lupita—that she would share his convictions, that she would accept the restored gospel and join the Church, that as husband and wife they would prepare to be sealed in the temple, that together they would work hard to reclaim their lives and steadfastly raise their youngest children in a harmonious home filled with love and affection. Juan had come to realize that he adored his wife and was grateful to have a second chance to secure her happiness.

Guadalupe (Lupita, Juan continued to like to call her) thought otherwise, not valuing, or at least not believing in, her husband’s laudable family goals of caring for and loving both their children and his children and trying to make her happy. She ultimately could not reconcile her husband’s past with his desire for their future. ���ܲ���’s hopes for a legal family with love and affection joined in harmony with the restored gospel had become his life’s principal motivation. It was too much for Guadalupe. While she accepted ���ܲ���’s incredible conversion and would occasionally attend religious functions with him, they lived apart in separate houses, although they did visit each other from time to time to celebrate the children’s birthdays and Christmas. Thus ���ܲ���’s fondest hopes were quashed. In the end, Lupita left him standing at the precipice as she walked a different pathway toward her own future.

With his fortitude deriving from an abiding belief, a continual reinforcement from service and affiliation in the community of the Saints, and emotional help from friends and some of his children who responded to his entreaties with thoughtful kindnesses, Juan survived to live a repentant life of such extraordinary note as to cause one to marvel.

A Beautiful Place for the Saints

"The La Presa branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was born here." Members met on the first floor of Juan Camacho's home, which he had designated a "House of Prayer." Quotation from the diary of Juan Camacho.

Even before his baptism in 1984, Juan Camacho was actively engaged in spreading the Latter-day Saint gospel. He turned an upper room of his house in La Presa into a casa de oración (house of prayer) where for ten months members of the Church met and worshipped. When those attending grew from the initial thirty to nearly a hundred for standing-room-only services, Juan helped find larger accommodations in the vicinity and made a suitable place of them for the members to hold their meetings. He was an active proponent of a Church-owned chapel and meeting place in La Presa, which he lived to see come to fruition. In all cases he has been a self-appointed custodian-in-fact for the buildings in which the members have met.

One of Juan Camacho's varied invitations for people to help sweep the temple block in Mexico City, January 1985. Note at the bottom of the card reads, "Don't forget your broom."

���ܲ���’s exuberance for physical beauty and comfort in and around the Latter-day Saints’ meeting places reached to and was felt on the temple grounds in Mexico City. For a number of years, initiated by elegant invitations printed on his presses, Juan gathered up young men and their leaders in his area and took them to the temple on many Saturdays to perform an unusual, hardly heralded service—sweeping the lawns, sidewalks, driveways, and parking areas with rustic brooms.

Camacho (on right) and his custodial team at the temple block, July 6, 1985.

On any given morning in all areas of Mexico City, one sees people out sweeping the streets. Every morning in the more pronouncedly middle-class and upscale areas, apartment-building doormen (porteros) and gardeners not only sweep their buildings’ parking areas and nearby walkways and roads, but during the entire day they vigilantly carry to the trash bin any stray detritus they find. Ground-floor dwellers who frequently have outdoor space in the rear of their apartments put their maids and gardeners to sweeping the grass with the traditional brooms. Not a blade is left untouched nor any fallen debris uncollected.

Should not the temple grounds be equally cared for? Juan thought so, and thus for many years he put in motion the plan and human power needed to make it happen. Mechanical cutters, trimmers, sweepers, and collectors now do the job. Before that the grounds were kept immaculately ordered and clean by human power, helped in no small part by Juan and his volunteer temple-grounds custodians.

The Photograph of the Temple

In the fall of 1982, two years before his baptism, Juan went to Aragón to live a couple of months near the Mexico City Temple. He loved to do temple work. He lived there with a half-sister, Leonor García. During his stay, he became aware that his friend, Octaviano Tenorio, president of the Aragón Stake, was looking for a professional photographer to take a dramatic photograph of the temple. When Tenorio became aware that Juan had a professional medium-format camera, he became very interested. Thus Juan took his most prized photograph and subsequently donated a thousand reproductions that were sold in a small store outside the temple. It is a night shot taken fourteen months before the temple’s dedication (December 2, 1983) that, with the help of Tenorio, took Juan weeks to prepare. The result is strikingly spectacular. Throughout Mexico one sees poster-size as well as smaller reproductions of it hanging on the walls in many member homes. Mexican Latter-day Saints widely recognize it as the first photograph of the temple taken by a professional photographer. In 2012 Juan donated a poster-size reproduction to the local archives of the Church in Tecamachalco, D.F.[10]

The first professionally taken photograph of the Mexico City Mexico Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1982, fourteen months before the temple was dedicated. Photo courtesy of Juan Camacho, the photographer.

Other photographers have donated their own pictures of the temple, and some may be purchased at the Church’s sales outlet nearby, but none are as strikingly engaging or as dramatic as the night photo Juan took using the skills he had honed since his first photographic training in the United States. It helped that he had an expensive camera with multiple finely crafted lenses that prudent savings had allowed him to purchase.

Printed Flyers, Information Stands, and Service

In due course Juan became ward mission leader and stake mission president as well as a member of the high council and a counselor in the bishopric of the La Presa Ward. In these roles, with the help of his printing presses and at his initiative and expense, he excelled in marshaling stake missionaries to take time on many Saturdays to hand out leaflets (volantes) advertising meet­ings and events and inviting people to attend. Before his Camarones Stake was divided and the Linda Vista Stake was organized (an event made possible through the vigorous membership growth Camacho helped to foster), the stake boundaries were enormous. Notwithstanding, as ���ܲ���’s missionary teams extended their outreach by flyer, leaflet, announcement, and word of mouth, the results were noteworthy.

There were the standard Sunday meetings, of course, but ���ܲ���’s flyers also invited people to sessions on family history, firesides on special topics, language classes, and Church-sponsored sports events. On his printing presses he even produced flyers heralding free chartered bus service, which Juan paid for, to the Mexico City Temple for people to view that magnificent edifice with its Mayan motif exterior and immaculate grounds and to go through the visitors’ center. People just needed to sign up. With names and addresses in hand, the full-time missionaries would then follow up to pursue any continuing interest.

Top: Juan Camacho routinely paid for rented buses to transport investigators to the temple visitors' center. Bottom: One of the many flyers that Camacho printed on his presses advertising meetings of the Church in the La Presa area, ca. 1984. He organized ward and stake missionaries to hand them out.

Juan and his stake and ward missionaries distributed their announcements along roadways, byways and pathways, in mercados, and on information tables in front of his photography shops. On November 1 and 2 of each year, the days when Mexicans honor their dead, the missionaries also set up information stalls in cemeteries. Wherever people congregated, there Juan and his missionaries would be to offer pamphlets and discussions about the Church and invite people to meetings. One consequence was electrifying: several times the president of the Temple Visitors’ Center instructed Juan to slow down. Juan and his stake missionaries were bringing in more people than the center could accommodate!

On Saturdays and Sundays, Juan dedicated his life to Church service. His activities were structured. Routinely being among the first to arrive for Sunday meetings, he liked to set up the chairs, ensure the whiteboards had markers and the earlier blackboards had chalk and erasers for the teachers, see to it that the rest­rooms were clean and stocked, and otherwise get things ready. He taught Sunday School and priesthood classes, gave sacrament meeting talks, and taught and attended preparation meetings. He was particularly irritated when those who had custody of the keys were late to open gates and unlock doors. He had no patience for unpunctuality, no matter the cause.

Clearly, ���ܲ���’s Saturdays and Sundays were fully occupied in his Church work. During the week he took care of his photography and printing businesses—that is, when he was not preparing his Sunday School and priesthood lessons or out talking to neighbors about the Church or reading the Liahona and the Book of Mormon, hundreds of which he gifted to acquaintances and friends. He read every word in more than three hundred issues of the Liahona and transited the scriptures several times. Not surprisingly, Church members accorded him status as a man of spiritual substance. They frequently called upon him to give them blessings.

For his lesson preparations, Juan liked to acquire photocopies of materials that interested him to pass out to his students. During the time his photo shops were in operation (they included a copy center and fax services), he used his Xerox copier a lot. In later years, when he did not own a copier, he went by bus or car to have copy work done so as to, in his opinion, be a good teacher.

The Cemeteries, or Panteones

An outside observer would justifiably be surprised at ���ܲ���’s fervent dedication. Such an observer might also be astonished at ���ܲ���’s risky decision to turn his photo shops into proselyting centers (would it not drive business away?) and at his presumptive arrogance in setting up Church-literature information booths in cemeteries (panteones) and talking about “families forever.” On those counts, Juan had no trepidation. The cemetery issue is sufficiently stupefying as to require some kind of explanation.

Owing to traditions predating the arrival of the Spaniards in Mexico and enduring and adapting in the present day in a modernizing yet sympathetic culture, many Mexicans do not ever feel far away from their deceased loved ones. There is a natural bonding among the generations, living and dead, that in many other Latter-day Saint cultures, especially Anglo-European ones in the United States, is achieved only through temple sealings, and sometimes not even then. In Mexico’s pre-Hispanic times, the dead frequently occupied space close to family homes (sometimes in tombs underneath the homes). There was a great emphasis on maintaining ties with deceased ancestors, who were thought not only to continue to exist on a different plane but to periodically make their presence known for, say, a family reunion.

By tradition in Mexico, this “presence” occurs annually on November 1 and 2, first in the cemeteries and perhaps later in the homes. For their deceased loved ones—first for deceased children, then for the adults—many families prepare elaborate meals, build and decorate altars, and en masse visit the cemeteries. Frequently it is a joyful and festive occasion, with thoughts turned to one’s ancestors and relatives, to their legacies, to love bequeathed and bondings treasured,[11] all the Halloween-like antics currently practiced in Mexico notwithstanding.

With people’s thoughts turned to ancestors, deceased children, and extended families, for nearly two decades Juan Camacho and his missionaries set up information booths in various cemeteries on these celebratory days. They talked about temple work for the dead and other aspects of the gospel that, according to Latter-day Saint teachings and doctrine, bind generations together not only for time but also for eternity. Interested people responded well. Others apparently exhibited no animosity. Many attended Latter-day Saint meetings at least once to find out more about this strange religion they called Mormonism.

Juan Camacho on November 2, 2011, giving out copies of the Book of Mormon in one of the numerous cemeteries, or panteones, where over the years he placed information tables offering Church literature to passersby.

With such a life of dedication and service since learning about the restored gospel and ordering his existence to be consistent with its teachings, one amply understands the words of ���ܲ���’s bishop: “You have been a model member. I am happy to loan you my keys.”

The Temple

It is the temple that steeled ���ܲ���’s life and ordered the substance of his soul. In 2010, two years following the death of his wife Lupita, and at great personal effort, he had her sealed to him in the Mexico City Temple.

Being sealed to his wife gave Juan an abiding contentment, helping him weather his declining years of failing eyesight, abdominal suffering, general body aches, family disappointments, and distress over finances now that his printing presses had fallen silent, victims of their obsolescence, and his photographic shops had succumbed to the digital age and big-box stores.

In retrospect, and from the vantage of the gospel he later came to know, Juan bittersweetly wished that his life with Lupita would have become stable. He loved the five children that came from his extramarital affairs but fervently wished that all his children had been his to love within the bonds of marriage to his Lupita, whom he belatedly came to realize he dearly adored. That she was illiterate and the two of them lived in different houses distant from each other contributed to a failure of reconciliation in this life under circumstances that give a premium to those who can read the scriptures and live a stable life in a faithful conjugal relationship.

Although changing technology left Juan financially wracked on his highway of life, he does not cease to thank God for his blessings, in particular those associated with temple sealings that bond the living with the dead in a symbiotic dance of life filled with hope, joy, satisfaction, and wonderment. Juan Serafín Camacho Reyes happily looks forward to being reunited with his Lupita for the eternities. He is forever grateful to have become a Latter-day

Notes

This vignette draws on the following sources: (1) recorded oral history interview of Juan Camacho conducted by Vicente Bolaños on May 29, 2011; (2) recorded interview of Juan Camacho conducted by LaMond Tullis, Eileen Roundy-Tullis, and Vicente Bolaños on October 29, 2011; (3) on-site visit to Juan Camacho’s home by LaMond Tullis and Eileen Roundy-Tullis on October 29, 2011, to inspect his printing presses (set up in his basement) and to solicit more information; (4) fourteen volumes of Camacho’s handwritten diaries dating from November 13, 1984, to January 14, 2012; (5) reference checks in local periodicals; (6) night photograph of the Mexico City Mexico Temple; (7) my participation in the sacrament meeting of the La Presa Ward on January 15, 2012, honoring Juan Camacho and the ceremony afterward in which I accepted on behalf of the Church History Department the fourteen volumes of diaries.

The following people helped develop this vignette or had input in its refinement: Eileen Roundy-Tullis, Viridiana Morales, Frederick Newell Raile, María Cora de Bolaños, Vicente Bolaños, Alejandra Isabel Arámbu García de Watanabe, Ricardo Cruz, Sharman Gill, and Ivette Cuautle.

[1] From November 13, 1984, to January 14, 2012.

[2] Porfirio Camacho, born ca. 1890–1900 in Tlalpujahua, Michoacán.

[3] Isaura Reyes Ramírez, also from Tlalpujahua, and his children Ermila, Juan, Raúl, and, eventually, Alberto.

[4] Juan affirmed this on his temple recommendation received on November 17, 1985.

[5] Susana Camacho Vázquez, born April 19, 1954, in San Juan Ixtayopan (see vol. 13 of ���ܲ���’s diaries, last three pages).

[6] Rosa María Camacho Vázquez, born January 25, 1961, in Mexico City.

[7] Marco Antonio Camacho Vázquez, born April 15, 1963.

[8] María Guadalupe Camacho Vázquez, born July 25, 1973.

[9] Carmen Camacho Córdova, adopted daughter, born September 16, 1965; Martha Camacho Córdova, born December 21, 1966; Isaura Camacho Córdova, born July 5, 1969; Juan Camacho de la Luz, born August 29, 1971; Elia Camacho de la Luz, born in 1975.

[10] Around 2016 these archives were moved from Tecamachalco to new, climate-controlled quarters near the Mexico City Temple in Aragón.

[11] See the illustrations and bibliography in Efraín Cortés Ruíz, Beatriz Oliver Vega, and Catalina Rodríguez Lazcano, The Days of the Dead: A Mexican Tradition (Mexico City: GV Editores, 1988).