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In the black of night, before the moon’s beams caressed the mountainous Sierra de Oaxaca and decades before electric streetlights came to disturb the nocturnal secrecy of the village of Huautla de Jiménez in northern Oaxaca, Pedro Martínez Cid fled. It was 1939. He left parents and siblings, the gravesites of generations of his forebears, and his recently deceased infant daughter Rosa. He also abandoned his elected post of municipal (county) president. For weeks Pedro could not appear in public during daytime. Now vigilantes were looking for him at night too. Carrying his infant child Gloria in his arms and with his young common-law wife Amparo Carrera Roque following closely behind, he furtively chose his village pathways to avoid whatever danger he could.

The footpath out of the village eventually put Pedro and his family in Mexico City. He landed a job as a scribe or clerk (escribiente) in the Procuraduría General de la República (Federal Justice Department), where he learned to use a typewriter. Although at twenty-nine years old he had only a fourth-grade education using the Spanish language, he was experienced, politically perceptive, and exceedingly bright. A relatively well-placed political mentor in his village had sent a letter of recommendation, which helped immeasurably. Aside from Spanish, Pedro spoke a Oaxacan variant of the complex tonal language of the Mazatecs, which was the principal speech of his home.[1] In the strange land of Mexico City, Pedro earned enough income to provide for his wife and infant daughter. There they bided their time. A churning life yet lay ahead of this little Martínez family.

Amparo Carrera Roque and Pedro Martínez Cid, about 1942. Courtesy of María del Carmen Martínez Carrera.

When Pedro’s parents[2] welcomed the fourth of their seven children into their Huautla de Jiménez home,[3] they were eking out a modest living as semi-subsistence farmers, growing most of their own food on a small plot of ground they owned and specializing in a few coffee trees for a trifling cash income. Life was austere in other ways: in the whole mountainous region there was no piped water, no electricity, no medical facilities or resources other than traditional medicine, and no roads. The only modes of transportation were riding a horse or donkey or walking. Most people did not ever leave the mountains of their birth.

There was a fledgling elementary school in Huautla de Jiménez conducted in part in Spanish. Ambitious children could go up to the fourth grade. Most youngsters with this basic education entered the family labor force full-time around age ten. A few went on to become bilingual teachers themselves (maestros rurales). Unschooled youngsters began their life’s work at about age seven, usually in their family’s home economy or as farmed-out servants to other families and, ultimately, as seasonal day laborers on the coffee farms. Pedro’s father saw to it that his son received four years of schooling. He and Pedro’s mother had done so, and he was determined that all his sons and daughters would do likewise. He knew that for his children to get ahead they would need to learn Spanish. With schooling, they could make that transition if they wanted to. He wanted them to.

By all accounts, Pedro was a gifted student. He also seemed gritty enough to succeed at making something of himself. His parents arranged to send him as a servant to a medical doctor in Oaxaca City, about a week’s walk away. Around age ten, Pedro Martínez Cid left his home to live and work there and, on the side, to study, learn, and practice Spanish. He must have done well. By age thirteen he was giving injections to the doctor’s patients and conversing with them admirably well!

In Oaxaca City, Pedro was moving in the direction he wanted, but he was still young by anyone’s standards. Missing his family in the Oaxacan mountains, at around age fifteen he returned to his ancestral home, where he soon had employment as a rural bilingual teacher. In this role he was sent to village schools in the Huautla de Jiménez region to help lift another generation to a world of fourth-grade literacy in Spanish. He worked hard at it for many years. It was nice to have a regular income to try to repay his parents for what they had afforded him.

While working as a teacher, Pedro became acquainted with a beautiful village girl of his same background—a rural teacher with a fourth-grade education as well as bilingual in Spanish and the Huautla dialect of Mazatec, deeply dedicated to her people, and eager to learn new things and improve not only her life but the lives of her family, friends, and others as well. Amparo was a half decade or so younger than Pedro. Their common-law union joined hearts and souls in their joint cause.

As Pedro taught the children, he began to formulate a central principle that increasingly guided his life. For the young to progress as he had (he definitely saw his life as one of progress), he thought they needed to learn to read and write in what to them was the difficult, even foreign language of Spanish and also have a chance to obtain the wherewithal to improve their economic lot and therefore their life’s prospects. Semi-subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture and a few coffee trees were not enough, Pedro thought. Traditional life managed by the priests, the relatively large landowners (terratenientes), the healers (like María Sabina, who induced magical journeys among the faithful via hallucinogenic mushrooms), the police, and even the teachers would not bring what he wanted unless there were changes. To be sure, traditional life was socially and mostly economically stable, but Pedro considered it a stagnant and impoverished stability couched in backwardness and diminished hope. He had been to Oaxaca City. He knew what needed to happen. His wife shared his sentiments.

Aside from Pedro’s intrinsic love of politics, his newly formulated principles for a good life drove him to become a serious politician. Because teachers in a traditional Oaxacan community were accorded much respect (as were the other traditional authority figures—priests, landowners, traditional healers, police), the populace took Pedro seriously right away when he announced his plan to run for election as president of the Huautla de Jiménez municipality. Although only twenty-nine years old, he won the election and, in 1939, replaced Macario Altamirano in the municipality’s top political post,[4] which had jurisdiction over approximately 130 villages and settlements in addition to the town of Huautla de Jiménez itself.[5]

As a president with big ideas on rupturing the status quo and introducing modernizing changes to Huautla, Pedro quickly made political enemies. Some of the established pillars of authority were livid. What Pedro proposed would quash some of their favored economic and social positions. For the priests it was their accorded social prestige and economic benefits. For the landowners, especially those with extensive coffee holdings, it was their easy access to a cheap seasonal labor force. For some traditional healers and others with economic interests in mind who were trying to capitalize on María Sabina’s spiritual pursuit of the hallucinogenic mushroom,[6] it was Pedro Martínez messing up their plans for a tourism boom that the plant, lying abundantly on and below the rich soil’s surface, could generate. Because the area’s microclimate was perfect and the mushrooms rich in psilocybin, the plant and its potential for attracting tourists could bring economic salvation to Huautla. Of course, the proponents were positioning themselves to benefit personally.

As for the priests and landowners, Pedro just thought that the region’s economic life should be fair and that people should be open to enough change to allow it to happen. Regarding the hoped-for psilocybin mushroom tourist industry, Pedro vigorously opposed it. He could see that the traditional religious significance of the plant would be lost and that Huautla would simply become a new mecca for foreign drug dopers.[7]

Pedro’s enemies coalesced long enough to prevail. The police did not offer protection. “My son,” his mother said, “they are going to kill you. Run from this place.” And so he did.

After a couple of years in Mexico City, Pedro was offered a new job with increased pay in an agency of the Justice Department, the Ministerio Público Federal (Attorney General’s Office). Because it would require a sixty-five-kilometer move west to Toluca, his supervisors wondered if this would pose a problem. On the contrary, Pedro jumped at the chance to leave congested Mexico City and move to environs more to his liking: the still-rural ambience of the expansive Toluca Valley. It was not like his beloved Oaxacan mountains, yet the little family was eager to make the move.

On his first day on the job as a secretary and clerk in the Toluca branch of the Ministerio Público Federal, Pedro met with his supervisor, Domitilo Ojeda Flon. Ojeda was a university graduate and a lawyer (abogado). For reasons now lost to time and understanding, he was also a Latter-day Saint. Pedro liked his boss, liked how he conducted his life, and liked some of the things his boss believed.

In 1942 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appointed a new mission president for the work in Mexico. Arwell L. Pierce came with enthusiasm to heal festering wounds among Mexico’s Latter-day Saints and to advance proselyting work.[8] He quickly initiated changes to better support the fledgling Latter-day Saint efforts in the Toluca Valley.

The first missionaries sent from Mexico City to the Toluca Valley had begun their work in Santa Ana Tapaltitlán. By 1942 three Latter-day Saint families (Torres, Ballesteros, and Lara) were meeting there for Sunday worship in the home of the Lara family. However, prospects for more baptisms seemed better in Toluca itself. Pierce asked Domitilo Ojeda to look for a building near central Toluca they could buy and renovate as a house of worship. Ojeda in turn asked Pedro Martínez and a few others to be on the lookout for a suitable place.

One of Pedro’s jobs with the Attorney General’s Office was to investigate all religious buildings in the region to ensure that their occupants abided by the nationalization-of-religious-edifices law that gave the Mexican state title to every church’s property. He was also to determine if the various religious bodies were caring for the nationalized buildings the state allowed them to use in accordance with established legal agreements.[9]

As he traveled about, Pedro examined hundreds of buildings that various churches used and became aware of what different congregations found useful for their services and other needs. Around 1944 he, as well as Ojeda and others who were searching for a Latter-day Saint locale, located and settled on a nondescript edifice facing the lovely Parque Cuauhtémoc in downtown Toluca at the corner of Melchor Ocampo and Plutarco González Streets. Pierce was happy. Within sight of two Catholic cathedrals, the building soon became the new meeting place for the Latter-day Saints in the Toluca Valley.

The first Latter-day-Saint chapel in Toluca as it appeared in 2011. Courtesy of Eileen Roundy-Tullis.

Pedro Martínez Cid was becoming more and more acquainted with the Latter-day Saints. In addition to the Domitilo Ojeda family, at least the three above-mentioned Latter-day Saint families had crossed his path. He liked their family life. He learned more about their beliefs, which he continued to appreciate. Moreover, they liked him, which proved to be fortunate for both.

Toluca was a fiercely Catholic town, as was the whole valley. Taking great umbrage at the invasion of one more alien religion into the central core of their community, some town residents took to breaking windows and doing other vandalism at the Latter-day Saints’ new meetinghouse. The building needed a resident guard.

Pedro was looking for a little larger dwelling for his family. The Church’s building had ample living quarters attached to its meeting rooms. Pedro and the Church struck an agreement, and he moved his family into the building and began his duties as resident caretaker. His last three children were born in that apartment, and there he and his wife raised two of them to young adulthood (the last child having died at age four).[10]

Pedro Martínez Cid was a slight man, but gangs ran from him as he challenged their vandalizing presence. He used a board fashioned in the form of a rifle, and this, coupled with his fierce determination, gave him a presence that routed the destroyers. They soon stopped their vandalism and left the house of worship in peace.

As the months passed, Pedro learned more about Latter-day Saints’ understanding of Jesus Christ and felt a great peace come upon him. He figured that what he had been unable to accomplish by political power in Huautla de Jiménez could be accomplished among the Latter-day Saints by persuasion through the authority and power of what he had come to know as the priesthood of God. People who believed in the good would do good. That was clear to him from reading the Book of Mormon, a volume that captivated him and also sealed his testimony. “In the Book of Mormon,” he affirmed, “I saw how so many people repented of their sins, even crimes, and it made me feel that I would be able to do this in my own life.”[11] He was convinced that what he called el Espíritu Santo, the Holy Spirit, could not only work wonderfully on one individual but could also accomplish miracles to bring people together in principled causes to advance peace as well as spiritual and even economic development among the Latter-day Saints. He asked for baptism.

There was one problem. Although in the isolated Oaxacan mountains common-law marriages were legitimate and binding, the Church did not accept them. Accordingly, and in order to be baptized, Pedro Martínez Cid and Amparo Carrera Roque, with three children in tow, were married by civil authority in Toluca on November 14, 1945. Five days later Pedro entered the waters of baptism.

Shortly thereafter, at age thirty-five, Pedro enrolled in a night school (Tierra y Libertad) to study at its mid-level (educación secundaria), usually attended by children aged twelve to fifteen. No matter, Pedro wanted to pursue the education that circumstances had denied him in the mountains of Oaxaca. Besides, his hero was the great Zapotec Oaxacan reformer from San Pablo Guelatao, Benito Juárez, who did not learn Spanish until age twelve yet went on to become Mexico’s only indigenous president and arguably its greatest president ever. Juárez’s sweeping program of political, social, and economic reforms known as La Reforma, had made it possible for the first Latter-day Saint missionaries to enter Mexico. Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, also of indigenous origins, who became Mexico’s unparalleled nineteenth-century magisterial writer, further inspired Pedro. It is fair to say that he was highly motivated by those of indigenous origin like himself.

Benito Juárez, president of Mexico, 1857-1872. He inspired Pedro Martínez Cid to continue his middle and high school studies even though he was an adult.

Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Mexico's grand master of letters in the nineteenth century who inspired Pedro Martínez Cid.

Aside from guarding the meetinghouse, the whole Martínez family rendered custodial services on the premises. Amparo did the missionaries’ laundry as well as provided them with consistently good meals and generally looked after them. In addition, she ran a calendar for her husband, who needed supplemental support when in about 1953 he was set apart as president of the Toluca Branch. He made so many personal service commitments to help members that a tight calendar and frequent reminders were necessary.

Amparo dressed her little ones as well as the family could afford, and she and her husband made sure that the whole household presented itself as being clean, orderly, disciplined, and inclined to work and to study. Studiousness was a trait Pedro especially encouraged since he routinely invited members and investigators over to the church’s patio for evening classes about what they called the new Mormon religion. Many youngsters in the branch pushed ahead with more education through Pedro’s encouragement.

When around 1957 Pedro’s oldest surviving daughter, Gloria, entered Toluca’s university (La Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México) to study medicine, Pedro enrolled in the university’s sponsored high school (escuela preparatoria) because he had already set his sights on the outrageous idea that he also would get a university degree! He just needed to prepare to enter. Toluca was educationally friendly, and Pedro took advantage of his opportunities. He had just been released as the Toluca branch president and had time on his hands.

In due course, Pedro passed the entrance examinations and the university admitted him to study law. He refused to consider his almost half-century age a handicap. Through devotion, drive, and a high-horizon vision for the future, he accelerated his studies, completing them faster than the norm.

Pedro and Amparo actually studied law together, although only Pedro was certificated. Through her own ad hoc studies and preparation undertaken while her husband was pursuing his education in middle and high schools at his relatively advanced age, Amparo also acquired advanced skills in Spanish-language literacy. Accordingly, she was able to read all her husband’s law books and help him prepare for the exams. At night she would exclaim, “Pay attention! I am going to read to you, but you are going to tell me what it is that you understood.” (¡Pon atención! Yo te voy a leer pero tu vas a decir que es lo que entendiste). And so it went year after year until approximately 1960 when, in a large ceremonial room with national dignitaries, a beaming ex-president of the republic, Adolfo López Mateos, handed Pedro Martínez Cid his law diploma. Pedro was around fifty-one years of age. Clearly, in educational and a few political circles he had become something of a national sensation. Not everyone received a diploma personally from the hands of an ex-president of the republic.

Pedro Martínez Cid, who fled his political enemies in Huautla de Jiménez Oaxaca in 1939 with four years of primary education, receives his law diploma from ex-president Adolfo López Mateos, November 1973. Photo courtesy of María del Carmen Martínez Carrera.

Although Pedro’s mother, widowed since 1953, had been pleased with her son’s decision to join the Church, even journeying from Oaxaca to Toluca on numerous occasions to visit him (on one occasion her son baptized her), the road to baptism for Pedro’s wife was difficult. Also content with her husband’s decision, Amparo nevertheless was reluctant to be baptized. Among other things, she and her whole extended family back in Huautla de Jiménez’s pueblo of San Martín Toxpalán and surrounding areas were staunchly Catholic. Priests were family members, and they were already scandalized over what Pedro had done in Huautla de Jiménez and in San Martín, not to mention Toluca. They let Amparo know about it.

Cleaning the meetinghouse one day, Amparo abruptly heard a voice enjoining her to be baptized. Because no one else was in the building complex, she was understandably astonished. Amparo had listened to the missionaries, studied their message, read the Book of Mormon, and developed a belief of her own that it had to be true. However, there was the social issue with her extended family. Nevertheless, that very day when the missionaries came for their meal, she informed them to get ready to baptize her.

Thereafter Amparo rendered years of service to the Church, especially in the Relief Society, but also beyond that in her self-assigned role to support her husband in his callings, which became more complex with the passage of time. When in 1961 the first stake in central Mexico was organized, the branch at Toluca became a ward. Pedro Martínez, who earlier had been the branch president, was ordained as a bishop, Toluca’s first. Given the demands of his new vocation as a lawyer, not to mention his abiding inclination to always be helping Church members with their legal woes, it took someone like Amparo to not only permit but to encourage him to extend his ecclesiastical and pastoral services as far as he could. In part because of her help, members all over Toluca Valley gave Pedro the affectionate name of “Pedrito” and were wont to say in perplexing situations, “Pedrito will help us.” After obtaining his law degree, Pedro always extended his hand without charge to assist members and investigators in legal difficulties such as Benito Torres Sandoval, who found himself in jail in San Mateo Atenco for standing up to a priest (see the vignette on Sandoval herein).

Pedro Martínez Cid, about 1962. Photo courtesy of María del Carmen Martínez Carrera.

In 1972 Pedro and his wife made the difficult weeks-long round-trip bus ride to Mesa, Arizona, to do temple endowments and sealings for themselves and Pedro’s birth family. Then they stood in as proxies for all the necessary ordinances for Pedro’s parents and the baptisms and endowments for four of his siblings. Pedro and Amparo’s children were not sealed to them at this time. However, their daughter María was sealed to them later, and subsequently she married in the temple. Although her two sisters have never married, both have maintained their church attendance, and one has received her endowment. Two of María’s four children (one daughter and her only son) have been married in the temple, and in 2011 the others were in line to do so when opportunities arose. Her son Sergio also served a mission in Guadalajara.

Amparo’s death in 1977 was a heartbreaking blow to Pedro and his children. Pedro was a widower for twenty years.

How well did Pedro and Amparo’s ambitious culture of educational excellence pass on to their children and grandchildren? Gloria became a medical doctor specializing in physical rehabilitation. María became a certified schoolteacher and taught professionally for many years. Sonia became a lawyer specializing in labor law.

Of Pedro and Amparo’s grandchildren through their daughter María, as of 2011 Abish was a systems engineer working at the local university, Marffissa was a bilingual communications specialist also at the university, Miriam held a master’s degree in business administration and was teaching at the university, and Sergio was an architect working for the Church. Marffissa’s fifteen-year-old daughter represented Mexico in an international language competition in England in 2010 where she won recognition. Beyond their education attainments, all of Pedro and Amparo’s children and grandchildren have rendered noble and important service to the Church and to their communities.

Pedro MartÍnez Cid with his three daughters María, Soña, and Gloria in 1964. Courtesy of Soña Lulú Martínez Carrera.

Pedro and Amparo’s grandson Sergio sums up his grandfather best:

My grandfather instilled in us, his grandchildren, the understanding that the seed of success is hard work supplementing the most important thing in our lives, that is, being a good example and adhering to gospel principles. I am thankful to have received from my grandfather his good example and his faithfulness in the gospel. He and my father—they were always together on church matters—made sure that even if we were tired from a Saturday-night date we nevertheless must carry out our church responsibilities on Sunday. I will forever be grateful for his example in his home-teaching visits and in giving service. He literally radiated happiness when we were all at church.

I had a special experience with my grandfather when he was very old and very ill. I was about twelve (I had just received the priesthood). He was completely deaf. I fell to my knees at his bedside. I knew that I could not restore his health, but I could pray for him. When I had finished my softly spoken prayer, he told me everything I had said, almost word for word. I was overcome with emotion.

My grandfather always encouraged me to fulfill my responsibilities in the gospel. He always demanded that I be a good student and a good son. I love my grandfather because he always gave me a magnificent example, the same as my father. He was not just my grandfather, he was my friend.[12]

From the tonal language of the Mazatecs to the specialized Spanish of a lawyer is a vast linguistic journey. From being embedded in an isolated mountain tradition to emerging as the first bishop of the Latter-day Saint Toluca Ward and being a stellar example of uncountable hours of service to others is the equivalent of a multigenerational expedition in the gospel. From governing by power and force to leading by example, love, and persuasion as a shepherd among the Saints is a triumph of a mighty change of heart. All these existential modifications in one man in the single generation of his own lifetime! It was all possible because Pedro Martínez Cid found and followed what he understood to be the Lord’s way, and also because his dear wife, Amparo Carrera Roque, provided crucial and constant support.

Martínez Cid, born in humble, inauspicious circumstances, died an accomplished and powerful man among the Latter-day Saints in Toluca, Mexico. Together he and his wife laid down a stellar legacy, a reminder of what persevering people with suitable opportunities can do with their lives when a desire to do good overwrites their souls.

Notes

This vignette derives from three interviews over approximately six hours that LaMond Tullis and Eileen Roundy-Tullis conducted on September 14 and 27 and October 28, 2011, principally with María del Carmen Martínez Carrera, one of Pedro Martínez’s three surviving daughters, in her home in Toluca, which she shares with her husband, Sergio Maldonado. It also profits from the extended Martínez family’s review of and extensive notations on a Spanish translation of an

English draft of this vignette dated October 10, 2011. Frederick Newell Raile produced the Spanish translation for the Martínez family’s review. Claudia Marffissa Maldonado, Pedro’s granddaughter, checked for errors. On September 14 the Tullises also interviewed Sonia Lulu Martínez, another of Pedro’s daughters, in her home in Toluca, where she provided family documents and photographs. Sergio Benjamin Maldonado Martínez, Pedro’s grandson, joined for almost the entire September 27 interview and made valuable contributions. In addition to the interviews, I consulted demographic, monographic, and genealogical resources (e.g., Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, Estado de Oaxaca, Huautla de Jiménez, Martínez family records showing temple ordinances performed, and official Church records). Eileen Roundy-Tullis and Sharman Gill made helpful comments on several English drafts of this vignette.

[1] Mazatec is a group of eight closely related indigenous dialects, some of which, like the Tzotzil dialects, are not mutually intelligible. The Mazatecan dialects are spoken by around two hundred thousand indigenous people in northern Oaxaca and adjacent areas of the states of Puebla and Veracruz—the “Sierra Mazateca.” The Huautla Mazatec variety, which is the dialect that Pedro Martínez spoke (spoken in the first part of the twenty-first century by around fifty thousand people in and around the municipality of Huautla de Jiménez), is said to be the “prestige variety.” Linguists classify all the Mazatecan dialects as tonal because tone “plays an integral part in distinguishing both lexical items and grammatical categories. The centrality of tone to the Mazatec language is exploited by the system of whistle speech, used in most Mazatec communities, which allows speakers of the language to have entire conversations only by whistling.” “Mazatecan Languages,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazatecan languages. For technical information on whistle talk, see Annie Rialland, “Phonological and Phonetic Aspects of Whistled Languages,” Phonology 22, no. 2 (2005): 237–71. The full text of her article is available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.484.4384&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

[2] Emigdio Sixto Martínez Pineda (b. 1878) and Apolonia Cid Pereda (b. 1880).

[3] Huautla de Jiménez refers both to a mountainous municipality (“county”) in Oaxaca and also to the largest and most politically and economically important town there.

[4] The transition in municipal presidents is noted in the comprehensive sketch of Huautla de Jiménez in the section “Cronología de los Presidentes Municipales,” Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, Estado de Oaxaca, Huautla de Jiménez, http://www.inafed.gob.mx/work/enciclopedia/EMM20oaxaca/municipios/20041a.html.

[5] The villages and settlements are noted by name in “Municipality of Huautla de Jiménez.” See https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/8741028/Municipality.

[6] María Sabina Magdalena García thought of herself as having been born in 1894 outside Huautla de Jiménez. Her parents were campesinos, or farmworkers. She came from a multigenerational paternal line of shamans who were considered to be skilled in using mushrooms to communicate with God. She was the first native shaman (curandera) to allow nonnatives, as in Westerners, to participate in the healing vigil that practitioners call the velada. All participants ingest mushrooms as a sacrament to “open the gates of the mind.” This was the rage during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with many youth and, reportedly, rock star celebrities from industrialized countries making their trek to the Oaxacan mountains to see María Sabina and experience her mind-altering mushrooms. See Álvaro Estrada, Huautla en tiempo de hippies (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1996). Among her reported visitors were Robert Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Roger Heim, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Walt Disney, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernando Benítez, Bruce Conner, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Peter Townshend, Jim Morrison, Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum, and Carlos Castaneda. “16 legendarias personalidades que visitaron a María Sabina,” Más de México, https://masdemx.com/2016/04/16-legendarias-personalidades-visitaron-a-maria-sabina-en-mexico/.

[7] When in the mid-1950s news of María Sabina hit the outside world, Huautla became much of what Pedro Martínez had feared. Aside from a raft of celebrities, such as John Lennon, people ranging from hippies to academic researchers from across the globe came to take their hallucinogenic trips. They reportedly were not so much interested in the religious basis of the mushroom plant as in its psychotropic effects. Accordingly, traditional healers lost much authority because of the new tourist industry.

[8] For details see LaMond Tullis, “A Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints: Arwell L. Pierce and the Third Convention,” BYU Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1997): 127–57.

[9] The Mexican constitution that emerged from the civil war (1910–17) forbids religious denominations from owning buildings, including their own houses of worship. Whatever buildings they owned previous to the Revolution were obligatorily deeded to the state, and the same holds for buildings later constructed with the approval of the state. In turn the state gives the religious organizations a right of usufruct as long as they abide by the law that severely circumscribes their activities. “The Religious Conflict in Mexico,” CQ Researcher, https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1926080100.

[10] These last three children were, in order of birth, María del Carmen, Sonia Lulu, and Ruth.

[11] María del Carmen Martínez Carrera, interview by LaMond Tullis, Toluca, Mexico, September 14, 2011.

[12] Sergio Benjamin Maldonado Martínez, quoting his grandfather, from a group interview by LaMond Tullis in Toluca, Mexico, September 27, 2011. The translation is mine.