Fifty Years of United Order in Mexico

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought

Journal of Mormon History, 2002

With two new publications, the Museum of Mormon History in Mexico has firmly established itself as a leading venue for the production of Mormon history in Mexico. The Spanish translation and English commentary on Part 1 of F. LaMond Tulllis's Mormons in Mexico is a significant contribution to both Spanish and English readers. This text, published through Deseret Book, makes a valuable resource available to Spanish speakers. It also offers an impressive correction of documentary errors in Tullis's interpretation and historical data. A second significant contribution to the literature on the same subject is a series of four articles available in Spanish or English by Fernando R. Gómez Páez (museum president). Read side by side, the translation of Tullis's book and this new selection of articles by the museum's president provide a worthwhile and balanced introduction to Mexican Mormon history. Readers will recognize that Mormon history in Mexico extends well beyond the colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora. The most interesting stories may very well come from central Mexico. Mexican Mormons now have a significant voice in the writing of their own Mormon histories.

Dialogue

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 2021

is a commitment worth making. This volume, written as an extension of Eastwood Pulido's doctoral dissertation, withholds no detail as it weaves a nuanced and important history that typically goes unmentioned in most US Mormon spaces. Given that I, too, work at the intersections of race, migration, and Mormonism, I praise Elisa for identifying her own positionality while noting the kinds of historical negotiations nonwhite Church members have had to make. She recognizes the ongoing dualities of those who identify as Indigenous, Mexican, and Mormon without making one person's experience a monolith of representation. She also is truthful about Bautista's moral shortcomings, including his sexism and racism. The book maintains a balance by elucidating his dualistic experiences-of both radical acceptance and mobilization to do good and the marginalization, assimilation pressures, and ultimate rejection by both Anglo and Mexican Church leadership. Indeed, Eastwood Pulido succeeds in giving us a historical portrait of Margarito Bautista that accounts for "his achievements and his failures, his gifts as well as his flaws" (4). Chapter 1 builds a foundation for the reader by introducing them to religious authority in Mexico. This backdrop, which highlights historical

Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought

T he LDS Church is currently gaining many new members in Asia, Africa, and especially Latin America. Nowadays more than 35 percent of the worldwide membership is concentrated in Latin America, compared to about 45 percent in the United States and Canada. By 2020, the majority of Mormons in the world will be Latin Americans, if the current growth rates continue. 1 Judging from current LDS growth rates, the future Mormon heartland will be the Andes and Central America, instead of the Wasatch Front. Rodney Stark is exaggerating, however, when he labels Mormonism the next world religion, 2 since he ignores a drop-out rate for converts that generally exceeds 50 percent. 3 One year after joining the LDS Church, only about half of the new converts remain active, meaning that they attend Church services at least once a month. Latin America contains more than one-third of the worldwide LDS membership, but the members are not equally divided among the nineteen countries. (See Table 1). Numerically, the Mormon Church in Latin America is currently strongest in Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Honduras (and Central America as a whole), Peru, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. In all of these countries, between 1 and 3 percent of the population have been baptized into the LDS Church. Active Mormons, who go to Church at least once a month, make up at best about half of the baptized members. Core members, those who pay their tithing and follow the LDS code of conduct, usually form about half of the active members. 4

Once the continent of the sword and the cross, very Catholic Latin America has seen over the last decades large numbers of its people affiliate with other religions. Yet the pattern of religion change has not occurred evenly; not every country or region has been equally subject to religious change, nor has every region been subject to the same kind of religious change.

Chile is exceptional among the countries in which Mormonism is present with the highest relative percentage of Mormons outside Polynesia. This paper essays an explanation by examining the elective affinities established between Mormon proselyting and the historical sociology of Chile. US Mormon expatriates arrived at a propitious time. Chile had an already large urban population and rapid urban growth. Chile's class structure emphasizing industry, management, and informality conjoined with Mormonism's symbolic offerings of management and mobility. Mormonism built a vertebral organization across differences in class. Mormonism saw major growth during the postcoup neoliberal adjustments due to economic dislocation and political repression. Mormonism lost momentum with the re-development of secular political and social organizations as the dictatorship wound down. Since democracy, Mormonism grows, though at a lower rate, in association with the unusual weight of management in Chile and the growth of administrative centers outside the cities of Mormonism's classic growth.

Dialogue-A Journal of Mormon …, 2005

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 29.1 (Spring 1996): 177-192.

Mormonism in Guatemala is being locally reinvented. Cultural translation can be observed through a variety of avenues. One particular example is a public assertion by a Guatemalan Mormon of an ethnic difference with Euro-American Mormons. This claim is examined with insights from anthropological literature on ethnicity. Comparable avowals of ethnic distinction by Native American Mormons are highlighted. A second avenue of cultural translation can be seen in Guatemalan interpretations of the Book of Mormon and the Popol Vuh in the context of Guatemalan nationalism. A third avenue can be seen in recent assertions of a Mormon ethnicity by scholars in the United States that are analyzed in relation to ethnic distinctions affirmed in Guatemala to suggest that rapid growth is reshaping Mormonism at its center as well as at the periphery. The emerging international gospel is increasingly lived locally by individuals trying to make sense out of a globally interconnected world. In the next century claims of an ethnic Mormon identity will continue to be made by those uncomfortable with the changing character of Mormonism; but they will be countered by an uneasy attachment to an international gospel adapted to a variety of local cultures.