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The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961

2022; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.9.1.12

2156-8030

Susie S. Porter,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Margarito Bautista was born in 1878 in Atlautla, Mexico, a small farming community tucked into the folds of the Popocatépetl volcano in the state of Mexico. Even today, the community remains small, with fewer than thirty thousand people in 2010. Bautista's father was a farmer and respected community member, serving at one time as municipal president. Elisa Eastwood Pulido provides no occupation for his mother, whom she describes as “pure Nahua” (50). Margarito Bautista converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, moved to the Mormon colonies in Northern Mexico, and became a volunteer evangelizer. His time in the colonies was formative. Throughout his life, Bautista was attracted to the ideal of a religious colony and considered polygamy central to his understanding of the faith, even after the LDS Church had denounced the practice. Pulido places Bautista within the context of the Latter-day Saint teachings to which Bautista committed himself, especially conceptions of ethnicity and Indigeneity as expressed in the Book of Mormon story of the Lamanites. How, Pulido asks, did a man who identified as “Indian” navigate non-Hispanic White religious institutions and practices?Within the context of his spiritual faith, Bautista found opportunity to be a leader. With the outbreak of civil war in Mexico, Bautista moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1914. He played a leading role in the establishment of the Lamanite Genealogical Society, the Salt Lake City Mexican Mission, and, after returning to Mexico, the 1930s self-governance movement, a movement that called for Mexicans to serve as leaders of Mexican Mormons. This trajectory of community building and his calls for self-governance led to his ex-communication. Bautista then established Colonia Industrial in Mexico State in the 1940s, which was part of a larger trend of fundamentalist schisms within and away from the LDS Church.Pulido states that both European and Mesoamerican cultures “understood that religion legitimizes empires” (11). This process of colonization was crucial to Bautista's, and Mormonism's, history. On July 24, 1847, a group of faithful Mormons arrived in Mexican territory now known as Utah. They settled on land without the permission of Indigenous peoples already living in the valley, or of the Mexican government, which was at that time engaged in the North American Invasion, known in the United States as the Mexican American War (1846–1848). The Mormons were fleeing prejudice, persecution, and violence suffered at the hands of their fellow United States citizens. But while the Mormon exodus from Missouri, to Illinois, and then to Utah has shaped Mormon identity as immigrants and as a persecuted people, their migration was also integral to the expansion of the United States empire both westward and southward. Following in the path of Canadian and American fur trappers, Mormon settlers took control of land and resources upon which Native Americans had depended, and Utah achieved statehood fifty years later in 1896. The Mormon colonies in Mexico were established in the mid-1880s, within the context of United States economic expansion in Mexico that was facilitated by Mexican president Porfirio Díaz. The overwhelming power of foreign interests in Mexico fueled resentment and, eventually, rebellion.The Mexican Revolution in 1910 was a nationalist rebellion against foreign influence, a civil war, and a massive experiment in socioeconomic reform. Some, including those in the region of Mexico from which Bautista hailed, fought for land reform. Others formed unions and fought for an eight-hour workday. The Mexican state took over key foreign-owned natural resources and infrastructure, expanded public education, and funded the arts. Nationalist sentiment fueled all these policies. Artists, intellectuals, and government officials all contributed to indigenismo, the celebration of Indigenous culture as a means of distinguishing Mexico from other countries. Revolutionary government policies tended to be paternalistic and, at best, only partially address entrenched racism and socioeconomic inequality. Pulido shows that Margarito Bautista, who shared the despair over poverty and inequality, was compelled by the idea that “the perfecting of Mexican society was a religious enterprise that demanded community building and a commitment to early Mormon principles, such as polygamy and the communal ownership of property” (61). Inspired by both his personal experiences within the LDS Church as well as the nationalist sentiment of the moment Bautista saw Mexican Mormon self-governance as the way to achieve those goals.According to Pulido, Margarito Bautista authored the first book-length Spanish-language hermeneutic, La evolución de México; sus verdaderos progenitores y su orígen; el destino de América y Europa (1936). The title echoes that of a book by Mexican intellectual and one-time minister of education, Justo Sierra, La evolución política del pueblo mexicano (1900–1902), and like Sierra, Bautista provided an interpretation of Mexican history, in his case through the lens of the Book of Mormon. Bautista equated the Chichimeca with Lamanites and claimed that Nezahualcóyotl and Cuauhtémoc descended from Laman (112–115). Bautista's interpretation of Mexican history built upon the belief that Indigenous peoples, as descendants of the Lamanites, had been cursed with dark skin by God for their wickedness. Pulido traces the ways Bautista navigated his faith, including conceptions of race and salvation, as well as his commitment to self-governance. She explains Bautista's “passive acceptance of this account of the origin of indigenous skin color,” because it was integral to the belief that Indigenous peoples were a chosen people who were uniquely positioned to become “white and delightsome” (80). Bautista's interpretation, in other words, was rooted in his scriptural literalism and bolstered by his cultural nationalism (116).Drawing on a Nahua term popularized by Mexican anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla and Chicano studies scholars, Pulido argues that “Bautista stood in nepantla, the space between his Aztec past and the potentialities of a Mormon future” (44). What precisely that “Aztec past” was and how it related to multiple other identities, is not totally clear in Pulido's analysis. A footnote nods to the fact that the term “Aztec” is an inexact way to refer to people, including but not limited to the Nahua, who did not use this term to describe themselves. The acknowledgement does not inform her analysis. Further complicating matters, the author uses the terms “indigenous” and “indigene” to describe Native Americans in the United States, Indigenous Mexicans, Mexicans of Indigenous heritage, and Mexicans in general, regardless of their ties to Indigenous culture. The differences in how these diverse groups may or may not have related to being Indigenous are significant. The book provides a glossary that defines Indigenous as “a term applied to native peoples, and sometimes by those people themselves, who are involved in a desperate struggle for rights, land, and place within a nation's economy and society” (300). The definition papers over diverse historical experiences of Native peoples, many of whom may not in fact seek inclusion in a “nation” but to preserve their own. The word “desperate” implies hopelessness in a way that denies those people agency. In fact, Pulido's discussion of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity is deeply problematic. She describes Bautista's mother as “pure Nahua,” despite the fact that most anthropologists and theorists would not use the word “pure” to describe ethnic identity (50). Race is not biological, as the word “pure” suggests; culture, conversely, is always evolving and transforming.The great strength of the book lies in Pulido's examination of Bautista's “Mormon future,” or perhaps the lack thereof. On the one hand, Bautista played a crucial role in converting Mexicans to the faith. His work in genealogical research, explaining rituals such as baptism, and his camaraderie and leadership within Mexican Mormon communities, both in Utah and in Mexico, were significant and highly valuable to the LDS Church. Indeed, Bautista supported Mexican Mormons spiritually and culturally as they navigated an Anglo-dominated faith and church hierarchy (100). In Salt Lake City, Bautista and his family held Sunday gatherings in Pioneer Park and in Westside homes that led to the establishment of the Mexican Mission in 1921. As a result of the success of his work, the church sent Bautista to Mexico on a mission in 1922. Bautista's commitment to his faith and work among the Mexican communities on both sides of the border led to his belief that Mexicans should hold leadership positions within the church, a belief that came to be known as self-governance.The self-governance movement came to a head with the Third Convention held in Mexico in 1936. With rich detail, Pulido demonstrates how the conventionists navigated their faith and the men who led its hierarchy. By citing the Book of Mormon, they pointed out the contradictions of church paternalism and cultural appropriation (165). They also referred to article 3 of the Mexican Constitution (1917), which banned foreigners from leadership of religious institutions (167). Convention attendees nominated several individuals, including Bautista, to lead the newly reorganized Mexican Mission. Bautista withdrew his name, however, and the convention voted in favor of Abel Páez. The self-governance movement presented a significant challenge to Anglo Mormons both in the United States and in Mexico. In Mexico, Harold W. Pratt and others blocked the movement's efforts to present their case to General Authorities of the Church in Salt Lake City (169–70).The Mormon self-governance movement was one of several nationalist impulses during the postrevolutionary period. Mexican government official rhetoric emphasized national sovereignty. Bautista's belief in self-governance would have dovetailed with such sentiments. Postrevolutionary government programming in the arts celebrated Indigenous identity in ways that may have supported Bautista's attraction to the story of the Lamanites. The flourishing of the Latter-day Saint faith in Mexico in the 1920s occurred within the context of the formation of several new churches with some shared characteristics. In 1925 a group sought to distance itself from the Roman Catholic hierarchy and established what they hoped would serve as a Mexican national church, the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church (MCAC). In distinction from the Roman Catholic Church, the MCAC allowed clerical marriage, rituals in the vernacular, and opposed Papal infallibility. In 1926 a group founded La Luz del Mundo, a religious movement with international reach, led by men considered to be modern-day apostles, focused on the establishment of religious colonies.Bautista was not the first Mexican Mormon to be attracted by the possibilities of the Mormon faith to resolve spiritual and socioeconomic needs, nor the first to encounter resistance to self-governance. Among the first missionaries who arrived in Mexico in 1876, Plotino Rhodakanaty (1828–1885) had been similarly attracted to Mormon statements regarding communal property holding and was baptized in 1879. Rhodakanaty, a Mexican-national of Greek heritage, had also advocated for Mexican leadership at the local level and, like Bautista, ran up against resistance of church authorities. After he left the church, Rhodakanaty continued his commitment to communalism, established a school in Chalco (the same region from which Bautista hailed), and played a major role in spreading anarchism throughout rural and urban working-class Mexico. Bautista differed from Rhodakanaty in that he claimed a Lamanite identity as expressed in Latter-day Saint theology.By the time Bautista was in his late sixties, he had at least seven wives, including four preteen girls, one of them eight years old and the others twelve years old. Yet Pulido claims that Bautista's Mexican neighbors would not have been surprised by the young age of his wives, only the number of them (197). She dismisses the disparity and young age of Bautista's plural wives as a manifestation of Mexican customs, suggesting that Mexicans find it culturally acceptable that a sixty-seven-year-old man marry an eight-year-old girl. This is not the case. Child marriage, with or without such age disparities, has long been understood in Mexico as a violation of human rights rooted in poverty, gender discrimination, and cultures of violence. Pulido's footnotes lead to sources that say as much.1 The assertion also gives a pass to the ways polygamy, across cultures, encourages child marriage and the sexual abuse of girls.2Pulido's history of Margarito Bautista will be of interest to scholars of Mexico for the rich detail it provides and the questions it raises. In the midst of revolution, Bautista chose a path to social improvement that drew on individualism and religious faith more than the collective organizing we think of as characteristic of the era and the region from which Bautista hailed. What conditions, beyond the life of the individual, shaped that choice? Why was Bautista attracted to the Book of Mormon story of God's curse of the Lamanite and the promise of future rewards rather than Mexican official celebration of Indigenous identity? Why did one rhetoric attract Bautista over another? The book also leads us to ask what we can learn from Bautista's frustrated attempts to hold leadership positions—proselytizing in Utah, and then in the self-governance movement in the 1930s—and his eventual formation of his own polygamous colony that he could control himself. What connection has existed, we might ask, between frustrated male desires to exercise leadership and the practice of plural marriage or religious colonies?