Maxwell Institute Podcast #138: The Biography of Margarito Bautista, with Elisa Eastwood Pulido

Joseph Stuart: Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Joseph Stuart. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Elisa Eastwood Pulido, a Historian and Religious Studies scholar, who joins me to talk about her book The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. She was kind enough to speak to me when she came to speak to BYU history students earlier last year. As the book's cover describes, Pulito provides the first full length biography of a celebrated Latino leader in the United States and Mexico in the early 20th century. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista’s remarkable life, the scope of his work or the development of his vision, Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of the evangelization efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mexican nationalism and religious improvisation in the United States-Mexico border lands. Please be sure to tell a friend about the podcast and follow us on major social networking platforms with the handle @BYUMaxwell. Let's start our conversation with Dr. Pulido.

Elisa Eastwood Pulido, welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Elisa Eastwood Pulido: Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be here, Joseph, thanks for inviting me.

Stuart: Of course! In reading your book about Margarito Bautista, I was curious, how did you find Bautista in the first place? How did you become aware of him?

Pulido: I did a paper on the Third Convention in graduate class that I had at Claremont Graduate University. My parents had met on their mission to Mexico in 1946. And this is the year that the Third Convention reunited with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so I heard about him as one of the leaders of the Third Convention from my parents. And when I presented this paper in this class- it was taught by Gastone Espinosa, he said, “Oh my gosh, you have to do your dissertation on this man, you must write about this man!” He's a well known scholar of Mexican American religion in the United States. And he could see in Bautista’s life patterns that had occurred in non-Catholic religions throughout the US Mexico border. For example, Pentecostals and Methodists and other Protestant churches had had similar problems with indigenous converts, wanting… well, tensions between the church and the converts with them wanting to be self-empowered to lead themselves. So he was just so excited to see a Mormon chapter. And every time you see one of these chapters, you realize, oh, it's not that they were bad Mormons or something like this. It's not that they were bad Latter-day Saints. It's a desire that was inherent. After 400 years of religious colonization and exclusion from the clergy, it didn't matter what religion you belong to or joined. You were hoping to be allowed, if you were a Mexican or a Mexican American, to lead yourself ecclesiastically.

Stuart: Could you tell us what Margarito Bautista’s early life was like?

Pulido: He was born to Nahua parents, and Nahua is the indigenous term for the Aztecs that they spoke Nahuatl. It's the largest indigenous group in Mexico and El Salvador. His mother spoke only Nahua his father could speak and read both Spanish and Nahua. And they were peasants, they were farmers on the central plateau of Mexico. Because he grew up with farmers and because it was an era of land redistribution, not redistribution, but confiscation. They were confiscating communal farmlands from Mexican peasants and giving them to large corporate or large haciendas in an effort to modernize Mexico. So, he witnessed that struggle with surrounding neighborhoods. His father, on the other hand, was able to go back to ancient documents from in and around Atlautla, and that which guaranteed… which guaranteed in perpetuity, the communal farmlands for the people in this region. And so he went to bat for them. They later elected him Mayor. He was a very trusted figure. Bautista went to school, his parents sent him to school. It would have been parochial school because there was no public education in Mexico at that time. He was born during the Porfiriate, though, during the tenure of Porfirio Diaz, who tried very hard to bring foreign influence to bear to get Mexico modernized and industrialized. So those things actually play a huge role in his life. He's very big throughout his life on land redistribution, giving land back to people, and he's also very interested in seeing Mexicans in control of their own country. He was a Mexican cultural nationalist.

Stuart: Once he left Mexico, he came to the United States. What did he do for work when he came to the United States?

Pulido: First, he went to Mesa, Arizona. It’s very interesting because he follows the trail of the, of the Mormon pioneers down to Mexico. And you know, they set up a colony in Mesa. So he's traveling in reverse, he goes to Mesa, Arizona, and he works as a painter alongside Dara LeBaron, one of the founders, or the founder of the LeBaron polygamous clan. So he's there until 1914, and got moved to Salt Lake City. And in Salt Lake City, he gets a very typical job for a Mexican in the United States. He's made a gardener on Temple Square, and he remains there for quite some time. This is around 1914.

Stuart: Had he joined the church by that time?

Pulido: Oh, yes, he joined the church in 1901, when he was living in the Central Plains at age 22, 23. Like this, it was three years after his baptism that he actually moved to the Mormon colonies. He was in the Mormon colonies until 1910, when the Mexican Revolution began, and then he, he moved to Arizona. So for him, it's kind of like a pilgrimage, right? He's moving ever closer to the seat of the church. He wants to meet prophets and apostles firsthand, he wants to see the temple. He actually does become very proficient at temple work. And he worked every single day in the temple as a volunteer for many years, many, many years. This was all part of his experience in the United States. He became a very good friend of Nathaniel Baldwin, who was the inventor of air-compressed radio phones and had a multimillion dollar company in Salt Lake City. Nathaniel Baldwin was a budding fundamentalist, but he was very dedicated to helping develop what he would call Lamanites. So when Bautista returned to Mexico on a mission in 1922, he placed Bautista on his board of directors, which allowed him a salary for his family while he was gone. And he… also he and his wife also offered support and help to Bautista’s family while he was gone. He was gone on his mission for two years and then returned in 1924, and was back in the United States until 1935, when he permanently repatriated to Mexico.

Stuart: Now, you mentioned the word Lamanite, which most of our listeners will be familiar with. But in the 1920s, how did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints define Lamanite?

Pulido: This is, this is an interesting question. As you know, the term Lamanite has been fluid throughout the history of the church. And Lamanites, in the Doctrine and Covenants refer to Native Americans, the remnant of Jacob. By the time that the missionaries arrived in Mexico in 1875, they were determining who Lamanites or in other words, the descendants of Israel were. Who was an Israelite, by who accepted the gospel, sort of that believing blood thing. However, in 1919, when Margarito Bautista was, was made the president of the Lamanite Genealogical Society, this society focused on helping Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders find their deceased relatives and get them baptized. So, that was a very broad definition of Lamanite at that time in the US by the 1920s. That happened in 1919. This organization was not established officially by the church, it was set up by people who noticed Bautista in the temple struggling to keep records for the 1000s of people, ancestors, relatives he was being baptized for and decided that they were going to help. This organization was given the blessing of Anthon H. Lund, who was a member of the First Presidency of the church at that time. So I don't think there was any disagreement about whether or not Native Americans, Latin Americans and Pacific Islander converts to the church were indeed Lamanites.

Stuart: So that's how the church defined Lamanite, but how did Margarito understand the term Lamanite? And did he identify as one?

Pulido: Well, in his 564 Page tome, he doesn't really write a whole lot about Lamanites. He has the much more nuanced view. He thinks that Mexicans are descendants of Mulakites, and Nephites, and Lamanites, and Josephites and Jacobites as well as Jews, because Mulakite’s cores were came from Judah from Judea. He sees us all as one. He refers oftentimes to Mexicans or Latin Americans, indigenous Americans as the remnant, the remnant of Jacob, the remnant of Israel. So he sees them as Israelites. And I don't know that he would have objected to someone calling him a Lamanite. But he was not only a Lamanite, he was also a descendant of all of these other people who came to the Americas.

Stuart: You mentioned that he served a mission to Mexico and that his friends helped him to support his family while he was gone, but what significant events took place in Bautista's life during those years from 1922 to 1924?

Pulido: He was really surprised on his journey down to Mexico, about the quick development that was occurring in Mexico. Technically, a lot of people will give you the dates of the Mexican Revolution as 1910 to 1920. He comes down two years later in 1922. And there is a Mexican conductor onboard the train, and there is a Mexican engineer driving the train. He thought these were very exciting developments. Mexico City was undergoing kind of a Renaissance, with beautiful buildings being built. And a lot of companies that had come from outside Mexico and set up shop, their properties were confiscated by the Mexican government. And these became businesses and industries run by Mexicans. So this was really, really exciting for him. He really wanted to be involved in this redemption as rebuilding Mexico. At the same time, he was seen as sort of a celebrity in Mexico because, first of all, and this information I'm taking from the history of the San Marcos branch, written by Guadalupe Monroy. She was very impressed by Bautista and wrote several pages on him. She said he had a complete mastery of the Spanish language and he understood the Mexican mind perfectly. So as much as Bautista was surprised by Mexico, the Mexican members were also surprised by him. They had the Book of Mormon, but the Doctrine and Covenants had not yet been translated into Spanish. And so, he was able to expand doctrines to them. He had studied these doctrines in their original languages, and these scriptures, the revelations of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, he had studied them in English, he could explain clearly to Mexicans things they had never been taught before. They were very interested in what he had to say about the pre-existence of spirits and freewill, and what he had to say about why early Latter-day Saints had practiced polygamy, what would happen in the afterlife, and the future of Mexicans in building the new Jerusalem, the future of indigenous Americans, all of these things were very, very exciting to him. So he, he was invited to read his book from pulpits all over the church and to speak at firesides. People also just loved hearing somebody speak to them in Spanish, who could do it well, okay, who could speak Spanish very, very well, to explain to them, what was important to them in a language that they could understand. And in an accent, better said, an accent they could understand. So he leaves Mexico as sort of this celebrity and when he comes back, people remember him for this.

Stuart: That's pretty remarkable for people to remember a missionary from a decade beforehand. You mentioned that he moves back to Mexico, that's in 1935., and in 1936, he participates in the Third Convention. Could you tell us more about what the Third Convention is?

Pulido: Well, it's the sequel to the First and Second conventions. And all of these conventions…the first two took place well, when Bautista was back in Mexico after his mission, I mean, back in the United States. They all asked the hierarchy of the church in Salt Lake City to allow for the appointment of a Mexican de rasa pura, of pure race, a pure Mexican race in Mexico. They thought that would really forward missionary work in Mexico, and that a Mexican from one of their own as mission president would be able to hear the needs of the members. They wanted things like tools, which is something that Protestant missionaries were doing so that expectation was based on something that was happening among Protestants. They wanted their children to go on missions. They wanted more church materials published into Spanish. There were many things they wanted-their goals and aspirations by 1936, when the Third Convention took place, were supported to a very large degree by articles in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which guaranteed Mexicans the right to petition bodies, that these meetings set up to petition institutions could not be disallowed. Actually, the Mexican Constitution forbad the entry or the functioning of foreign clerics in Mexico. This was largely instituted to cut the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, because for about 400 years, most of the Catholic priests had come from either Spain or France. However, the law also affected mission presidents from the United States in Mexico. So anyway, there were these issues that they wanted taken care of. The first two conventions, I don't think even received an answer from the church, but Bautista helped organize this Third Convention, he played a big role in it. They typed up their minutes, they included correspondence between the First Presidency of the Church and the members and made this pamphlet called La Informe General de la Tercera Convención. So the General Report of the Third Convention and distributed it among members of the church in Mexico and sent a copy to the First Presidency of the Church. After all of this correspondence took place, and the members were willing to back down from this request, and the church does not like, even today, to be petitioned to do things. The leaders of the Third Convention, I believe there were seven of them, were excommunicated from the church. At that point in time, the entire Third Convention, separated from the mainstream church and became known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Third Convention. They were separated from the church for about 10 years and Bautista was invited to leave a few months after the Third Convention a few months after its formation as a church, a separate church, because he was interested in the practice of polygamy and the members in Mexico were not.

Stuart: So was Bautista, one of the seven leaders who was excommunicated?

Pulido: Yeah, no, he was, he was definitely one of those who was excommunicated. He never did reunite with the church, even though their convention did. He was very upset when the third convention reunited with the church because even though he was no longer a member of the Third Convention he felt that they had capitulated to the white hierarchy of the church.

Stuart: Right, going back to that idea of rasa pura, right? The idea that an indigenous Mexican should be in charge of spiritual matters, is that?

Pulido: Yes. I do think they had influenced the Third Convention, because it was two years later 1948 that Steven L. Richards, an apostle, went down to South America. One of the things he told mission presidents there was they needed to make sure that local leadership went as quickly as possible to the hands of local members.

Stuart: After the Third Convention, comes back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You mentioned that Bautista stayed away, and that he built his own polygamous community. What did his final decades look like?

Pulido: His colony was called Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalen. And so it's an industrial colony at the same time, it's the New Jerusalem. And this describes perfectly what was happening in the colony. It was… really, they were really working hard scrabbling in the dirt for survival. And, uh, for a long time they lived in holes in the ground covered by tree bows. They were able to farm; this is the way they made their living. They farmed most everything they ate, and then they also grew flowers and sold them in cities roundabout. So, it took them a while they finally got a hot shower, which Bautista described as an old joy when they finally got this hot shower. They managed to build homes. And, but it all took a lot of time. Bautista was the oldest person in the colony by about 15 years. And the physical labor was very hard on him. He describes needing alcohol rubs a lot because his body was so sore from the physical labor involved. So he was also leading the colony spiritually, it was probably harder than he thought. There was a good deal of contention, there were splinter groups, people that broke off and left. There were excommunications, this sort of thing. And he was trying to teach the colonists how to, I believe, redeem Mexico. He really felt that if Mexicans could keep the commandments in ways that white people had never been able to, if Mexicans could practice the hardest hardest strictures ever revealed by Joseph Smith, and this includes polygamy and the law of consecration- If Mexicans could do this, then Mexico can be redeemed and be prepared for its millennial role in building the New Jerusalem. So he names his society, the New Jerusalem, but as a model for the Jerusalem that will be built to usher in the millennium, the New Jerusalem. So yes, he is constantly publishing, constantly publishing. When I was down in his colony, I saw the letterpress that they used. I asked Well and Pablo Deularte, they are leaders in the colony down there, if they even knew how many works in total, he had published. They… I got a blank look, he was just so prolific, they had lost count. And also they don't necessarily read the works of Bautista that much anymore. They've had other leaders since right. He's an important piece of their history. I mean, I know of a score, or more a couple scores of pamphlets that he wrote. He wrote hymns, he wrote letters, he wrote diaries from 1935 to 1961. A lot of his works, and I do believe that his 564 page tome was this giant missionary track, trying to lure Mexicans at large into the narratives of the Book of Mormon, but his… most of his publications, he had an audience in mind. So he was using his pamphlets as missionary tracks, but also to rebut the LeBaron’s, or to answer an accusation he felt had been leveled at him by members of the mainstream church in Mexico. So yeah, he always had a goal in mind who these pamphlets are for. And later on there, you look at the seal on the back of who published these, legítimamente la misión mexicana. Thich means the genuine Mexican mission. That's how Bautista’s colony was the genuine Mexican mission.

Stuart: The name of the book is The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961 by Elisa Eastwood Pulido. Now, Elisa, before we close out, we'd like to ask each of our guests for three of their best books in line with the idea from the Doctrine and Covenants section 88 that we should read out of the best books. What would you recommend that our audience read?

Pulido: Okay, well, I'll tell you first about my most favorite book ever, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It's a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublia Khan. And Kublia Khan has never seen his best kingdom, and wants Marco Polo has traveled it to describe it to him. So, Marco Polo describes many cities to him: cities with rock for sky, and cities covered with banners, cities that float in the air, etc. But cupola con still can't grasp his kingdom. So he tries to reduce it to a chess formula, but to no avail. At the end, he's left staring at this ebony square on the chessboard, but when Marco Polo points out a wormhole in this ebony square, suddenly, that square offers the possibility of the entire forest of ebony, and from there to the world. So if I were to give you a metaphor for a biography, what a biography does it would be this one square of ebony that opens up the wider world. That's what a biography does for its readers. Through the life, the window of one person, it opens up the wider world. My favorite book on Mexican history is written by or was written by French historian Richard Rijkaard. The title is The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. It's a fourth-century history of the role played by mendicant friars, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians and Franciscans in the spiritual conquest of Mexico. It's an absolutely fascinating tale of the brutal clash of cultures, peoples, and religions that took place when the Spaniards arrived. It is absolutely a piece of research genius. And then the favorite book I've read this year is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross, music critic Alex Ross. And it's about the influence of Richard Wagner on the late 19th, the 20th and early 21st centuries. Ross says that the artists who most envied the emotions Wagner created in storms of sound were the silent artists, the painters and writers, so along with Wagner’s creativity and his great dramas, however, his great operas, however, came also misogyny, racism and anti-semitism. But the language is just unassailable, so unearthly beautiful. And if you want to know how to write, you read Alex Ross. The beauty of his prose is absolutely unparalleled.

Stuart: Elisa Eastwood Pulido, thank you for joining us on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Pulido: You're welcome. Thank you for having me

Stuart: Thank you for listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. Could you do us a favor and recommend this show to others, review and rate the podcast on Apple podcast or other podcast providers, or share the episode on social media? Thanks so much and have a blessed week y'all.

Elisa Eastwood Pulido, welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Elisa Eastwood Pulido: Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be here, Joseph, thanks for inviting me.

Stuart: Of course! In reading your book about Margarito Bautista, I was curious, how did you find Bautista in the first place? How did you become aware of him?

Pulido: I did a paper on the Third Convention in graduate class that I had at Claremont Graduate University. My parents had met on their mission to Mexico in 1946. And this is the year that the Third Convention reunited with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so I heard about him as one of the leaders of the Third Convention from my parents. And when I presented this paper in this class- it was taught by Gastone Espinosa, he said, “Oh my gosh, you have to do your dissertation on this man, you must write about this man!” He's a well known scholar of Mexican American religion in the United States. And he could see in Bautista’s life patterns that had occurred in non-Catholic religions throughout the US Mexico border. For example, Pentecostals and Methodists and other Protestant churches had had similar problems with indigenous converts, wanting… well, tensions between the church and the converts with them wanting to be self-empowered to lead themselves. So he was just so excited to see a Mormon chapter. And every time you see one of these chapters, you realize, oh, it's not that they were bad Mormons or something like this. It's not that they were bad Latter-day Saints. It's a desire that was inherent. After 400 years of religious colonization and exclusion from the clergy, it didn't matter what religion you belong to or joined. You were hoping to be allowed, if you were a Mexican or a Mexican American, to lead yourself ecclesiastically.

Stuart: Could you tell us what Margarito Bautista’s early life was like?

Pulido: He was born to Nahua parents, and Nahua is the indigenous term for the Aztecs that they spoke Nahuatl. It's the largest indigenous group in Mexico and El Salvador. His mother spoke only Nahua his father could speak and read both Spanish and Nahua. And they were peasants, they were farmers on the central plateau of Mexico. Because he grew up with farmers and because it was an era of land redistribution, not redistribution, but confiscation. They were confiscating communal farmlands from Mexican peasants and giving them to large corporate or large haciendas in an effort to modernize Mexico. So, he witnessed that struggle with surrounding neighborhoods. His father, on the other hand, was able to go back to ancient documents from in and around Atlautla, and that which guaranteed… which guaranteed in perpetuity, the communal farmlands for the people in this region. And so he went to bat for them. They later elected him Mayor. He was a very trusted figure. Bautista went to school, his parents sent him to school. It would have been parochial school because there was no public education in Mexico at that time. He was born during the Porfiriate, though, during the tenure of Porfirio Diaz, who tried very hard to bring foreign influence to bear to get Mexico modernized and industrialized. So those things actually play a huge role in his life. He's very big throughout his life on land redistribution, giving land back to people, and he's also very interested in seeing Mexicans in control of their own country. He was a Mexican cultural nationalist.

Stuart: Once he left Mexico, he came to the United States. What did he do for work when he came to the United States?

Pulido: First, he went to Mesa, Arizona. It’s very interesting because he follows the trail of the, of the Mormon pioneers down to Mexico. And you know, they set up a colony in Mesa. So he's traveling in reverse, he goes to Mesa, Arizona, and he works as a painter alongside Dara LeBaron, one of the founders, or the founder of the LeBaron polygamous clan. So he's there until 1914, and got moved to Salt Lake City. And in Salt Lake City, he gets a very typical job for a Mexican in the United States. He's made a gardener on Temple Square, and he remains there for quite some time. This is around 1914.

Stuart: Had he joined the church by that time?

Pulido: Oh, yes, he joined the church in 1901, when he was living in the Central Plains at age 22, 23. Like this, it was three years after his baptism that he actually moved to the Mormon colonies. He was in the Mormon colonies until 1910, when the Mexican Revolution began, and then he, he moved to Arizona. So for him, it's kind of like a pilgrimage, right? He's moving ever closer to the seat of the church. He wants to meet prophets and apostles firsthand, he wants to see the temple. He actually does become very proficient at temple work. And he worked every single day in the temple as a volunteer for many years, many, many years. This was all part of his experience in the United States. He became a very good friend of Nathaniel Baldwin, who was the inventor of air-compressed radio phones and had a multimillion dollar company in Salt Lake City. Nathaniel Baldwin was a budding fundamentalist, but he was very dedicated to helping develop what he would call Lamanites. So when Bautista returned to Mexico on a mission in 1922, he placed Bautista on his board of directors, which allowed him a salary for his family while he was gone. And he… also he and his wife also offered support and help to Bautista’s family while he was gone. He was gone on his mission for two years and then returned in 1924, and was back in the United States until 1935, when he permanently repatriated to Mexico.

Stuart: Now, you mentioned the word Lamanite, which most of our listeners will be familiar with. But in the 1920s, how did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints define Lamanite?

Pulido: This is, this is an interesting question. As you know, the term Lamanite has been fluid throughout the history of the church. And Lamanites, in the Doctrine and Covenants refer to Native Americans, the remnant of Jacob. By the time that the missionaries arrived in Mexico in 1875, they were determining who Lamanites or in other words, the descendants of Israel were. Who was an Israelite, by who accepted the gospel, sort of that believing blood thing. However, in 1919, when Margarito Bautista was, was made the president of the Lamanite Genealogical Society, this society focused on helping Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders find their deceased relatives and get them baptized. So, that was a very broad definition of Lamanite at that time in the US by the 1920s. That happened in 1919. This organization was not established officially by the church, it was set up by people who noticed Bautista in the temple struggling to keep records for the 1000s of people, ancestors, relatives he was being baptized for and decided that they were going to help. This organization was given the blessing of Anthon H. Lund, who was a member of the First Presidency of the church at that time. So I don't think there was any disagreement about whether or not Native Americans, Latin Americans and Pacific Islander converts to the church were indeed Lamanites.

Stuart: So that's how the church defined Lamanite, but how did Margarito understand the term Lamanite? And did he identify as one?

Pulido: Well, in his 564 Page tome, he doesn't really write a whole lot about Lamanites. He has the much more nuanced view. He thinks that Mexicans are descendants of Mulakites, and Nephites, and Lamanites, and Josephites and Jacobites as well as Jews, because Mulakite’s cores were came from Judah from Judea. He sees us all as one. He refers oftentimes to Mexicans or Latin Americans, indigenous Americans as the remnant, the remnant of Jacob, the remnant of Israel. So he sees them as Israelites. And I don't know that he would have objected to someone calling him a Lamanite. But he was not only a Lamanite, he was also a descendant of all of these other people who came to the Americas.

Stuart: You mentioned that he served a mission to Mexico and that his friends helped him to support his family while he was gone, but what significant events took place in Bautista's life during those years from 1922 to 1924?

Pulido: He was really surprised on his journey down to Mexico, about the quick development that was occurring in Mexico. Technically, a lot of people will give you the dates of the Mexican Revolution as 1910 to 1920. He comes down two years later in 1922. And there is a Mexican conductor onboard the train, and there is a Mexican engineer driving the train. He thought these were very exciting developments. Mexico City was undergoing kind of a Renaissance, with beautiful buildings being built. And a lot of companies that had come from outside Mexico and set up shop, their properties were confiscated by the Mexican government. And these became businesses and industries run by Mexicans. So this was really, really exciting for him. He really wanted to be involved in this redemption as rebuilding Mexico. At the same time, he was seen as sort of a celebrity in Mexico because, first of all, and this information I'm taking from the history of the San Marcos branch, written by Guadalupe Monroy. She was very impressed by Bautista and wrote several pages on him. She said he had a complete mastery of the Spanish language and he understood the Mexican mind perfectly. So as much as Bautista was surprised by Mexico, the Mexican members were also surprised by him. They had the Book of Mormon, but the Doctrine and Covenants had not yet been translated into Spanish. And so, he was able to expand doctrines to them. He had studied these doctrines in their original languages, and these scriptures, the revelations of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, he had studied them in English, he could explain clearly to Mexicans things they had never been taught before. They were very interested in what he had to say about the pre-existence of spirits and freewill, and what he had to say about why early Latter-day Saints had practiced polygamy, what would happen in the afterlife, and the future of Mexicans in building the new Jerusalem, the future of indigenous Americans, all of these things were very, very exciting to him. So he, he was invited to read his book from pulpits all over the church and to speak at firesides. People also just loved hearing somebody speak to them in Spanish, who could do it well, okay, who could speak Spanish very, very well, to explain to them, what was important to them in a language that they could understand. And in an accent, better said, an accent they could understand. So he leaves Mexico as sort of this celebrity and when he comes back, people remember him for this.

Stuart: That's pretty remarkable for people to remember a missionary from a decade beforehand. You mentioned that he moves back to Mexico, that's in 1935., and in 1936, he participates in the Third Convention. Could you tell us more about what the Third Convention is?

Pulido: Well, it's the sequel to the First and Second conventions. And all of these conventions…the first two took place well, when Bautista was back in Mexico after his mission, I mean, back in the United States. They all asked the hierarchy of the church in Salt Lake City to allow for the appointment of a Mexican de rasa pura, of pure race, a pure Mexican race in Mexico. They thought that would really forward missionary work in Mexico, and that a Mexican from one of their own as mission president would be able to hear the needs of the members. They wanted things like tools, which is something that Protestant missionaries were doing so that expectation was based on something that was happening among Protestants. They wanted their children to go on missions. They wanted more church materials published into Spanish. There were many things they wanted-their goals and aspirations by 1936, when the Third Convention took place, were supported to a very large degree by articles in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which guaranteed Mexicans the right to petition bodies, that these meetings set up to petition institutions could not be disallowed. Actually, the Mexican Constitution forbad the entry or the functioning of foreign clerics in Mexico. This was largely instituted to cut the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, because for about 400 years, most of the Catholic priests had come from either Spain or France. However, the law also affected mission presidents from the United States in Mexico. So anyway, there were these issues that they wanted taken care of. The first two conventions, I don't think even received an answer from the church, but Bautista helped organize this Third Convention, he played a big role in it. They typed up their minutes, they included correspondence between the First Presidency of the Church and the members and made this pamphlet called La Informe General de la Tercera Convención. So the General Report of the Third Convention and distributed it among members of the church in Mexico and sent a copy to the First Presidency of the Church. After all of this correspondence took place, and the members were willing to back down from this request, and the church does not like, even today, to be petitioned to do things. The leaders of the Third Convention, I believe there were seven of them, were excommunicated from the church. At that point in time, the entire Third Convention, separated from the mainstream church and became known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Third Convention. They were separated from the church for about 10 years and Bautista was invited to leave a few months after the Third Convention a few months after its formation as a church, a separate church, because he was interested in the practice of polygamy and the members in Mexico were not.

Stuart: So was Bautista, one of the seven leaders who was excommunicated?

Pulido: Yeah, no, he was, he was definitely one of those who was excommunicated. He never did reunite with the church, even though their convention did. He was very upset when the third convention reunited with the church because even though he was no longer a member of the Third Convention he felt that they had capitulated to the white hierarchy of the church.

Stuart: Right, going back to that idea of rasa pura, right? The idea that an indigenous Mexican should be in charge of spiritual matters, is that?

Pulido: Yes. I do think they had influenced the Third Convention, because it was two years later 1948 that Steven L. Richards, an apostle, went down to South America. One of the things he told mission presidents there was they needed to make sure that local leadership went as quickly as possible to the hands of local members.

Stuart: After the Third Convention, comes back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You mentioned that Bautista stayed away, and that he built his own polygamous community. What did his final decades look like?

Pulido: His colony was called Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalen. And so it's an industrial colony at the same time, it's the New Jerusalem. And this describes perfectly what was happening in the colony. It was… really, they were really working hard scrabbling in the dirt for survival. And, uh, for a long time they lived in holes in the ground covered by tree bows. They were able to farm; this is the way they made their living. They farmed most everything they ate, and then they also grew flowers and sold them in cities roundabout. So, it took them a while they finally got a hot shower, which Bautista described as an old joy when they finally got this hot shower. They managed to build homes. And, but it all took a lot of time. Bautista was the oldest person in the colony by about 15 years. And the physical labor was very hard on him. He describes needing alcohol rubs a lot because his body was so sore from the physical labor involved. So he was also leading the colony spiritually, it was probably harder than he thought. There was a good deal of contention, there were splinter groups, people that broke off and left. There were excommunications, this sort of thing. And he was trying to teach the colonists how to, I believe, redeem Mexico. He really felt that if Mexicans could keep the commandments in ways that white people had never been able to, if Mexicans could practice the hardest hardest strictures ever revealed by Joseph Smith, and this includes polygamy and the law of consecration- If Mexicans could do this, then Mexico can be redeemed and be prepared for its millennial role in building the New Jerusalem. So he names his society, the New Jerusalem, but as a model for the Jerusalem that will be built to usher in the millennium, the New Jerusalem. So yes, he is constantly publishing, constantly publishing. When I was down in his colony, I saw the letterpress that they used. I asked Well and Pablo Deularte, they are leaders in the colony down there, if they even knew how many works in total, he had published. They… I got a blank look, he was just so prolific, they had lost count. And also they don't necessarily read the works of Bautista that much anymore. They've had other leaders since right. He's an important piece of their history. I mean, I know of a score, or more a couple scores of pamphlets that he wrote. He wrote hymns, he wrote letters, he wrote diaries from 1935 to 1961. A lot of his works, and I do believe that his 564 page tome was this giant missionary track, trying to lure Mexicans at large into the narratives of the Book of Mormon, but his… most of his publications, he had an audience in mind. So he was using his pamphlets as missionary tracks, but also to rebut the LeBaron’s, or to answer an accusation he felt had been leveled at him by members of the mainstream church in Mexico. So yeah, he always had a goal in mind who these pamphlets are for. And later on there, you look at the seal on the back of who published these, legítimamente la misión mexicana. Thich means the genuine Mexican mission. That's how Bautista’s colony was the genuine Mexican mission.

Stuart: The name of the book is The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961 by Elisa Eastwood Pulido. Now, Elisa, before we close out, we'd like to ask each of our guests for three of their best books in line with the idea from the Doctrine and Covenants section 88 that we should read out of the best books. What would you recommend that our audience read?

Pulido: Okay, well, I'll tell you first about my most favorite book ever, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It's a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublia Khan. And Kublia Khan has never seen his best kingdom, and wants Marco Polo has traveled it to describe it to him. So, Marco Polo describes many cities to him: cities with rock for sky, and cities covered with banners, cities that float in the air, etc. But cupola con still can't grasp his kingdom. So he tries to reduce it to a chess formula, but to no avail. At the end, he's left staring at this ebony square on the chessboard, but when Marco Polo points out a wormhole in this ebony square, suddenly, that square offers the possibility of the entire forest of ebony, and from there to the world. So if I were to give you a metaphor for a biography, what a biography does it would be this one square of ebony that opens up the wider world. That's what a biography does for its readers. Through the life, the window of one person, it opens up the wider world. My favorite book on Mexican history is written by or was written by French historian Richard Rijkaard. The title is The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. It's a fourth-century history of the role played by mendicant friars, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians and Franciscans in the spiritual conquest of Mexico. It's an absolutely fascinating tale of the brutal clash of cultures, peoples, and religions that took place when the Spaniards arrived. It is absolutely a piece of research genius. And then the favorite book I've read this year is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross, music critic Alex Ross. And it's about the influence of Richard Wagner on the late 19th, the 20th and early 21st centuries. Ross says that the artists who most envied the emotions Wagner created in storms of sound were the silent artists, the painters and writers, so along with Wagner’s creativity and his great dramas, however, his great operas, however, came also misogyny, racism and anti-semitism. But the language is just unassailable, so unearthly beautiful. And if you want to know how to write, you read Alex Ross. The beauty of his prose is absolutely unparalleled.

Stuart: Elisa Eastwood Pulido, thank you for joining us on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Pulido: You're welcome. Thank you for having me

Stuart: Thank you for listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. Could you do us a favor and recommend this show to others, review and rate the podcast on Apple podcast or other podcast providers, or share the episode on social media? Thanks so much and have a blessed week y'all.