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Against his will, a few of Toluca’s religious figures detained Cayetano Maldonado for a day in their central cathedral. They vowed to keep him until he recanted, but as night drew nigh they figured they had made their point. They let him go.

“Cayetano, you fool, pull your posters from your taxi or we’ll have you eliminated and your family will most certainly be in danger. Think about it.”

Upon his release that evening in the late 1950s, Maldonado, a Latter-day Saint in Toluca, went home to ponder his fate. He had not agreed to remove his posters. Yet he had to consider his family’s welfare. He gathered his wife, Ciria Portina Carbajal Mendosa, and children around to talk.

Should they remove the posters and thereby resolve the conflict? The family decided that would exact too high a price on their psyches, their souls, the very essence of their beings. Could they do something else? What? What about the children’s safety? What about Ciria’s security? Cayetano weighed in with what he termed the spiritual “balm of Gilead” that he had acquired from learning to read by studying the first book he had ever owned, the Book of Mormon:

And they did rejoice and cry again with one voice, saying: May the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, protect this people in righteousness, so long as they shall call on the name of their God for protection. (3 Nephi 4:30)

The Maldonado family knelt in prayer and arose with what they considered an assurance that their Lord would protect them. Cayetano would not remove his posters.

This was an enormous pushback on established community authority. Some observers thought that the whole family was senselessly unwise if not deranged.

This was not the first time that several religious personalities had complained about Cayetano’s posters. Earlier, one had said, “Your message may be right, but you are pulling the people away from us and we cannot, will not, tolerate it.”

What was so mortally threatening to established authority about those posters?

The posters did not seem to deter Cayetano’s taxi business. They did promote several conversations a day about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Cayetano—no shrinking violet—advanced the awareness of his faith at every opportunity by talking not only to his regular fares but also to campesinos, merchants, salaried day workers, priests, lawyers, magistrates, and the moneyed. Among his greatest joys was seeing others come to the knowledge and happiness he enjoyed as a member of the Church. He was unwilling to prejudge that people, regardless of station in life, would be unable to make the journey he urged upon them.

Cayetano Maldonado at age fourty-two in 1955.

Cayetano was born in 1913 in Jiquipilco, state of Mexico. In 2020 it was about an hour and a half by car from Toluca, but in 1913 it was about a day’s journey by buggy. There he lived with his parents[1] until age six, whereupon they abandoned him to the care of his maternal grandmother[2] and departed for Toluca, presumably to find work to sustain their numerous other progeny, whom they apparently did not forsake. Tellingly, the children, including Cayetano, took both the surname and maternal name of their mother (Maldonado Medina), not, as was the custom, the surnames of both their father and mother.[3]

Cayetano chose not to speak to his children much about this phase of his life, so he leaves us to wonder why his parents left him when they moved to Toluca. Certainly he was unlike his siblings. From almost his first utterances, he declined to take sides in family squabbles but rather assumed the role of peacemaker, a trait he carried throughout life even in the face of odious provocations. Moreover, he was a dreamer of big dreams. He seemed to live in a fantasy world, probably to isolate himself from the cacophony of his bickering parents.

From age six until his mid-teenage years, Cayetano was entirely dependent on his grandmother. His support, tutelage, and upbringing fell to her. From both her objective circumstances and maternal capabilities, in hindsight one can see that her role was a gnarled one. Being staggeringly poor, she lacked the wherewithal to give her grandson an economic boost in life. And being old, she was without the energy to push him.

Although Cayetano’s grandmother was one of the few women of her age group who could read and write, she did not pass those skills on to her grandson. She also never saw to it that he went to school. Ever.

I do not know if the village of Jiquipilco even had a school that Cayetano could have attended at the time. Most likely not. During that period, apparently many people in the area spoke some variant of the Otomí language. If Otomí-speaking people spoke Spanish at all, it was as a second language.[4] Additionally, the Mexican government had not yet launched educational programs to reach indigenous speakers in the area.

In 2005 Jiquipilco’s population was only 1,880. In 1920 it was probably considerably less, which hardly made Jiquipilco a demanding place for the state to establish a public elementary school or for private parties, such as the Methodists, to found one to their liking. Whatever the case, Cayetano did not go to school, nor did he otherwise learn to read and write.

Besides her love for her grandson, Cayetano’s grandmother did have one small asset that proved providential for the boy—a small, one-hectare (2.5-acre) piece of rural property near her home in Jiquipilco. From a tender age, Cayetano had shown a great liking for animals, so she turned the property to him so he could raise creatures to his liking. He was ecstatic. It was almost as if a superb work ethic accompanied the lad from birth and he intuitively knew how to employ it.

With a long-term dream occupying much of his daily thinking, the boy entered the labor force at an early age. He saved and scrimped, planned and dickered, and finally ended up with at least one breeding animal. Within a year he had a few animals he could sell on the open market to add considerably to his income as a boy servant and later as a teenage day laborer. Thus the years passed.

As with many young folks, should he waste his economic gains on the trivia of a teenager’s fantasy? Not at all. He got to thinking about owning a taxi. Somehow he convinced someone to teach him to drive—which he was doing around the village at age twelve—and from there his big day finally arrived. At age sixteen he gave his grandmother a small sum as a thank-you, paid cash for a used vehicle he could use as a taxi, and headed for Toluca to join a taxi cooperative (sitio) and put his machine to work.

The record is silent as to whether Cayetano soon saw his parents who were living in Toluca at the time. However, in their old age he routinely advanced them money for food, as he also did for some of his siblings. On the small plot of land he purchased in Toluca he continued to raise animals, giving him a little surplus with which to help his parents and siblings.

Cayetano worked for many years, always spending less than he earned, watching over his taxi investments carefully, and cultivating, through honest, efficient, and trustworthy service, a regular clientele. He developed his social skills and acquired hands-on expertise with business arithmetic.

Amid his business success, his many friends, and his reaching out emotionally and financially to the family of his birth, Cayetano nevertheless had a problem. Although he wanted a wife and family, he had never met a woman that captivated him. All about him he saw much bickering, quarreling, faultfinding, name-calling, and emotional and physical infidelity. This was alien—had always been alien—to his basic instincts. Thus in his early thirties the taximan was still looking. He did not want to reap sadness from so portentous a decision as marriage.

In the late 1940s, one of his regular clients was a thirty-nine-year-old widow who, since her husband’s death, had taken a factory job—much on the ascendancy in those days in Toluca—and needed daily transportation to and from work. Earlier, with World War II raging, Toluca had industrialized, with firms so in need of workers they were even hiring women, not a usual practice of the time.[5] Cayetano and his fare, Ciria Fortina Carbajal Mendosa, who was five years his senior, talked about the weather and the conditions at the factory where she worked. They discussed the political and economic ambience of the country, including the growing number of factory jobs in the valley that gave women an opportunity to work outside the home. Cayetano learned that Ciria was grateful for her employment. Aside from some financial support from her two oldest sons,[6] who had outside jobs, he discovered that she was the sole provider for her surviving family of six children.[7] Although hard-pressed financially, she was making ends meet.

The daily conversations unfolded. Cayetano asked about her life; she asked why he had never married. He wondered what she thought of his beautiful taxi; she marveled that he would ask. He increasingly inquired about her children. She began to share openly.

Twelve years after learning to read by means of the Book of Mormon, Cayetano Maldonado journeyed with his wife, Ciria Carbajal, to the Mesa Arizona Temple. Passport photo, 1968.

In June of 1949, Cayetano Maldonado and Ciria Carbajal were married. Her children ranged in age from twenty-three to five. With Cayetano she had two more.[8] From the beginning, Cayetano embraced them all as his own. “He treated us all the same, he loved us all the same, and we were all his children,” affirmed Benjamín and Andrea as they struggled with their emotions upon recounting their father’s life.

In 1956 Cayetano became acquainted with the Latter-day Saints. When the missionaries knocked on the door of the Maldonados’ attractively appointed home, Cayetano was immediately interested. As with his animals, his taxi, and his wife, Cayetano knew what mattered to him, and he jumped into the traces with full attention and enthusiasm. Night after night and sometimes all during the day he pressed the missionaries with his questions: “How is it that we are children of God? How do you know? What happens to us when we die? What will happen to my wife and me and our children? What makes you so sure you are right?” His desire to learn about Jesus Christ was so strong that he quite literally kept the missionaries in his home multiple hours beyond their comfort zone. He and his daughter Gloria started attending the local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ.

The missionaries spoke often of a new book they called the Book of Mormon. In due course, they presented Cayetano with a copy and asked him to read it so he could know of a surety, they told him, that what they had been teaching him was true. He fasted and prayed, pleaded and implored. It was of no use. He could not read the book. As we now know, he was illiterate.

Blessed with a prodigious memory and an accompanying capacity to absorb, process, retain, and otherwise deal with enormous quantities of information, Cayetano had successfully faked literacy for almost his entire life. Now, however, he could no longer continue the ruse. He wept and tearfully confessed to the missionaries that he could not read the book.

Thinking the matter over, the missionaries wrote out the Spanish alphabet for Cayetano, taught him the phonetic pronunciation of the letters, showed him how letters combine to make sounds and sounds words, and assured him that the Lord would bless him to read the book for himself and that he would know its meaning and promises.

Cayetano parked his taxi and secluded himself in a back room in his home. He struggled long hours with little sleep, hardly stopping to eat, even when he was not fasting. He succeeded in reading the book, and he told his children that the things he had read were from the Lord. How long did it take him? One week! (Lo hizo en una semana.) His children affirmed this on three occasions. Such an accomplishment seems a stretch, indeed would be a stretch for any normal human. Somehow Cayetano was outside the norm in intelligence, learning capacity, and motivation.

Cayetano especially liked the Book of Mormon’s illustrative stories, in particular those of King Benjamin. They informed him about living a good life. He liked how the stories taught him to comply with God’s words so that he could be blessed. He could see that God loved all his children, that Jesus Christ had made it possible for good people to be blessed forever. With study, faith, conviction, and his newly acquired and continually improving ability to read via the Book of Mormon, Cayetano made his posters and put them in and on his taxi. He and his daughter Gloria were baptized on December 1, 1956.

The children regarded Cayetano, in their words, as a “just and honest man who never raised his hand against us. He was a loving father who patiently showed us what to do and how to properly live our lives.” Nevertheless, in incorporating his new faith in his life, a great change came over the man that not only reinforced his goodness with respect to his children but also showed them how one may, from his perspective, progress from better to excellent. Clearly, in recounting his story, his children—Benjamín, Andrea, and Judith—were moved by their father’s example of how a good man may become excellent through the gospel and the workings of what the family frequently referred to as “the Spirit.”

Cayetano Maldonado with his daughters Judith (left) and Gloria, ca. 1990.

Not even good and excellent men can avoid reverses in life, some temporary, some permanent. Cayetano’s oldest son, José Trinidad, left the family when the restored gospel entered the home. The new religious teachings were more than he could bear. The second son, Jorge Ernesto, accepted the Book of Mormon and the gospel but died before being baptized. For a time, Cayetano’s eight siblings joined their parents in disowning him, ordering him never to cross the thresholds of their homes again. It was a grave sin in the Toluca Valley not to be a Catholic. In time, accompanied by his patience, long-suffering, and peacemaking personality, Cayetano won his birth family back. He helped them financially, and they grew to value his counsel.

Cayetano’s wife Ciria loved the changes that had come over her husband but could see no reason to affiliate with the Latter-day Saint faith herself. Never mind that after he had read the Book of Mormon the first time, he had Ciria go through it with him again to help polish his reading. However, not only did Ciria not believe the Book of Mormon, but she did not trust anything the missionaries said. In fact, their presence was a constant irritant. When the missionaries arrived to visit her one day, she told her young daughter Gloria to tell them she was not at home. (Dilos que no estoy.) Hearing her, the missionaries responded, “Yes, sister, we hear that you are not at home!” (¡Sí, hermana, escuchamos que no está!) Given her husband’s rectitude, this may have been a pivotally embarrassing moment for Ciria.

Despite Ciria’s misgivings about the Church, she would press her children’s pants, shirts, and dresses so her little ones would look dignified in Sunday meetings. She even urged them to attend church and insisted they abide by its behavioral standards. “The Savior does not like things done halfway,” she told them, which was something she had amply learned from her husband.

Ciria’s resistance did not last long. Six months after her husband’s baptism, she also was baptized (May 1957). Her children could point to no pivotal moment in her decision. She simply said to her children, “This is what you do to return to the Savior.” They think it was their father’s example that strengthened her. Moreover, her daughters Gloria and Alicia were enthusiastic about not only their own membership but also their Church service. Their example of gospel living had a profound effect on their mother.

The children remember their father always insisting that they work and study hard. “I do not want you to have problems because you do not have a degree. (Yo no quiero que Uds. tengan problemas por no tener algún estudio.) I do not want you to live life as I did and not learn to read. I want you to study!” Thus he spoke. Thus they listened. Gloria even began to write poetry heralding her relationship to God.

In Toluca, Cayetano served as a counselor to branch president Gabelo Montesano and continued as a counselor to Bishop Pedro Martínez Cid when, in 1961, the first stake in central Mexico was organized and the Toluca Branch became the Toluca Ward. Cayetano’s wife and almost all their children extended their every support. At one time Gloria held five positions in the ward simultaneously!

They all worked hard, but they faced stone walls. Toluca remained a difficult place. In the schools, Latter-day Saint children were shunned. Some of their parents saw their employment conditioned on their withdrawal from the faith. There were public insults and vandalism. With the exception of the Ballesteros, Torres, Martínez, and Lara families, most of the old members fell by the wayside in the face of the social onslaught. Yet Cayetano and his family carried on and the posters stayed on his taxi.

Nineteen years after their civil marriage, Cayetano Maldonado and Ciria Carbajal journeyed by bus to the Mesa Arizona Temple, where in 1968 they were, by Latter-day Saint custom, sealed for eternity. Twenty years later, they stood as proxies for the sealing of Cayetano’s parents to each other and their children to them. From being disregarded by parents and siblings to performing the temple work for six of them is a long journey. Cayetano was different, an unusual man. He always seemed to carry the Light of Christ in his soul no matter the obstacles.

It was therefore natural that in 1983 the couple would serve a two-year temple mission in the newly constructed Mexico City Mexico Temple, the first of Mexico’s current thirteen. Cayetano Maldonado was the first temple worker to be set apart to work in the 116,642-square-foot building with its elaborate Mayan motif exterior. Temple president Harold Brown affectionately called his first set-apart worker Cayetanito. Cayetano and Ciria served two days a week, traveling back and forth by bus and car from their home in Toluca.

Judith, Benjamin, and Andrea, children of Cayetano Maldonado and Ciria Carbajal, 2011.

As of 2011, fifty-eight children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren follow Cayetano’s and Ciria’s footsteps in the faith they adopted as mature adults. The youngest sons, Sergio and Benjamín, have served missions and have been bishops, members of high councils, and seminary and Sunday School teachers. Sergio was also a patriarch. Gloria, Andrea, Alicia, and Judith have served as presidents, counselors, secretaries, and teachers in the Relief Society, in the Young Women program, and in Primary, Sunday School, and seminary. As of 2011, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild had served or were serving missions, and among the children and grandchildren there were ten temple marriages.

Six of Cayetano and Ciria’s oldest grandchildren are named after Book of Mormon characters: Lehi, Saríah, Alma, Jared, Helamán, and Benjamín. They and seven other adult grandchildren have long lists of impressive service to the Church.

In 1961 Cayetano and Ciria responded to support the call of their two sons, Sergio and Benjamín, on missions to their own people. At the half-century anniversary of this event for which the family of more than fifty souls had gathered in formal celebration, this motto was posted: “Today we celebrate fifty years of having walked in their shoes, not in ours.” (Hoy celebramos cinquenta años de haber caminado en sus zapatos, no en los nuestros.)

After being on their missions for a year, someone photographed Sergio and Benjamín in prayer with the bottoms of their shoes exposed to the camera. The holes in the soles told the whole story: hard work, dedication, spiritual submission, nurtured talent, study, humility, faithfulness. By Latter-day Saint standards anywhere, Cayetano Maldonado and his wife Ciria Carbajal had taught their sons well. Many descendants of Cayetano and Ciria will likely have occasion to thank them for their lives, for their teachings, and for their example.

Notes

This vignette derives from three interviews, lasting approximately five hours total, with children of Luis Cayetano Maldonado Medina and Ciria Carbajal, as well as from information from family documents and photographs the family provided to me. On September 20, 2011, Eileen and I conducted a two-hour interview with Benjamín, Andrea, and Judith Maldonado. Gloria Maldonado, another daughter, who was ill at the time, was nevertheless intermittently present. A follow-up two-hour interview was conducted on October 11, 2011, with Andrea, Judith, and Gloria, at which time they made their family documents and photographs available for scanning. They also provided additional information.

From these interviews and documents, I wrote a draft English narrative, which Frederick Newell Raile translated for the Maldonado family’s review to catch errors in fact or interpretation and to trigger their memories for additional information. Because some of Maldonado’s grandchildren read English, English as well as Spanish versions of the manuscript were provided for their review.

On November 28, 2011, Eileen and I returned to Toluca to review the family’s redactions, corrections, and additions. Aside from making a few factual emendations, in this one-hour interview Andrea and Gloria provided fascinating additional information and supplemental documents.

All interviews were conducted in the homes of Andrea, Judith, and Gloria in Toluca, Mexico.

[1] Cecilio Jacinto Sánchez and Francisca Maldonado Medina.

[2] Francisca Medina Díaz.

[3] Under the “necessary explanations” (explicaciones necesarias) section of the parents’ family group sheet prepared for temple ordinances is the following: “Because of marital problems, all of the children carry the surname of their mother.” (Por problemas conyugales todos los hijos llevan el apellido de la mamá.)

[4] Enciclopedia de los Municipios y Delegaciones de México, Estado de México, s.v. “Jiquipilco,” .

[5] Since the 1940s, Toluca has continued its industrial expansion. It produces “drinks, food, textiles, cars, electric products,” and other consumer goods. By 2015 it had developed five industrial zones in which thousands of workers were employed. In 2015 the greater Toluca area’s population was the fifth largest in Mexico. Wikipedia, s.v. “Toluca,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toluca#cite_note-tolucatravel-23.

[6] José Trinidad and Jorge Ernesto.

[7] Aside from her older sons, there were Alicia, Gloria, Sergio, and Benjamín. One child, Guillermo, died as an infant.

[8] Andrea and Judith.