Awards

• Winner of Winner of the Best Biography from the Mormon History Association.
• Winner of Winner, 2021 Best Biography Award, John Whitmer Historical Association Winner of the Best Biography from the Mormon History Association.

Overview

This book is the first full-length biography of Margarito Bautista (1878-1961), a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century who was a Mexican cultural nationalist, visionary, founder of a utopian commune, and Mormon dissident. 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 Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of Mormon evangelization, Mexican nationalism, and religious improvisation in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.A successful proselytizer of Mexicans for years, from 1922 onward Bautista came to view the paternalism of the Euro-American leadership of the Church as a barrier to ecclesiastical self-governance by indigenous Latter-day Saints . In 1924, he began his journey away from mainstream Mormonism. By 1946, he had established a completely Mexican-led polygamist utopia in Mexico on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, twenty-two kilometers southeast of Mexico City. Here, he preached an alternative Mormonism rooted in Mesoamerican history and culture. Based on his indigenous hermeneutic of Mormon scripture, Bautista proclaimed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a chosen race, destined to wrest both political and spiritual authority from the descendants of Euro-American colonists. This book provides an in-depth look at a man still regarded with cultural pride by those Mexican and Mexican American Mormons who remember him as an iconic and revolutionary figure.

Full Product Details

9780190942106

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Reviews

Pulido's superb interpretation of Bautista's journey and the revelations it gives us of how we are shaped both by history and our unique spiritual, economic, and social passage illuminates religious experience from an exceptionally different vantage point. I learned so much from this must-read. * Martha Bradley-Evans, Nova Religio *

Author Information

Elisa Eastwood Pulido is a Visiting Scholar at Claremont Graduate University through June 2020. She is a religious historian, who specializes in Religion in Mexico, Religion in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, Race and Religion, and Gender Studies. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

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