Margarito Bautista

Margarito Bautista (June 10, 1878 – August 4, 1961) was a Mexican evangelist and religious founder who wrote and preached for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). After converting in 1901, Bautista preached for the church through word and writing for three decades and spent time in Mexico and Utah. During this time, Bautista developed a theology that fused Book of Mormon doctrine with Mexican nationalism, and he claimed Mexicans held a birthright to lead the church and someday the world. The church's Anglo-American leaders often considered Bautista's interpretations out of line with official doctrine, but they became very popular with Mexican Latter-day Saints.

After Bautista helped lead a Mexican Latter-day Saint convention to protest the calling of an Anglo-American as a mission president in Mexico, the church excommunicated Bautista, and he went on to help lead the Third Convention breakaway movement. When Bautista pushed his interest in early Mormon religious practices such as the United Order and plural marriage, other leaders in the Third Convention expelled him from their movement.

Though most of the Third Convention reconciled with and rejoined the church in 1946, Bautista abstained. Instead of rejoining the mainline church, in 1947 Bautista founded a colonia called Colonia Industrial de la Nueva Jerusalén, and he organized and led his own Mormon denomination in which he reintroduced the United Order and plural marriage. Bautista died in 1961, but his church and colonia survive to the present day.

Early life Margarito Bautista was born in San Miguel de Atlautla, Mexico State, Mexico on June 10, 1878.

Conversion and membership In 1901, Latter-day Saint missionary Ammon Tenney visited Bautista and his family, and Bautista became interested in being baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bautista's father Luz disapproved of this and kicked Bautista out of his house. After that experience, Margarito further investigated the church and was baptized. After his baptism, Bautista worked closely with Tenney to preach and convert Mexicans, as he received further ordinations to Latter-day Saint priesthood offices and was ordained an elder by December 1901. Church leaders had encouraged members to settle in Mexico to avoid prosecution by the federal government of the United States for practicing plural marriage, a form of religious polygyny, in violation of anti-polygamy laws.

Bautista spent time living in these Latter-day Saint settlements, moving between multiple Mexican colonies and becoming introduced to the practice of polygamy.

La Evolución de Mexico After Bautista finished his mission in Mexico, he found himself without an official leadership role in the church and thus without a position from which to preach Latter-day Saint doctrine. Church leaders in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries generally took this claim seriously and often used the word "Lamanite" to refer to indigenous peoples in North and South America. Among Mexican-Hispanic Latter-day Saints, Bautista's La Evolución became popular and highly influential, as it tapped into Mexican Latter-day Saints' national pride concurrent with the post-revolutionary nationalism common in Mexico at the time. By coincidence, in 1936 the church also announced it would divide the Spanish-American Mission—a missiological geographic organization unit—into two missions, creating a Mexican Mission and therefore signaling the church would call a new mission president to lead the mission. Mexican Latter-day Saints had already twice requested that the church call a native Mexican to lead the Spanish-American Mission—and by corollary the congregations in Mexico—and Bautista's book stirred in them a hope that the church would take their requests into account and call a Mexican to lead the Mexican Mission. Church leaders also rejected Bautista's claim in La evolución that Mexicans had a religious birthright as descendants of Lamanites and of Abraham. The church excommunicated Bautista and other Convention leaders like his nephew Páez for rebellion and apostasy. However, within the year almost a third of the 3,000 Latter-day Saints in Mexico left the Church to follow Bautista and other excommunicated Convention leaders as a dissident Third Convention movement.

Colonia Industrial de la Nueva Jerusalén Bautista was not the only Mexican-Mormon unsatisfied with the 1946 reconciliation of the LDS Church and Third Convention. In August 1947, fifty-nine convencionistas and four leaders (Lorenzo Cuautli, Leonardo Belmont, Francisco Sandoval, and Candido de la Cruz) who also abstained from the reconciliation joined Bautista in the municipality of Ozumba. There, Bautista founded Colonia Industrial de la Nueva Jerusalén (Colonia Industrial), their own independent community named for the New Jerusalem. Colonia Industrial also practiced plural marriage, though Bautista applied a strict set of rules of his own creation to guide the program, including a thirty-seven-point set of instructions on plural courtship. For example, only men already sealed to a single woman could enter the practice of plural marriage, and after selecting a second wife, he had to prove his fidelity to his first wife for five years without courting the second woman in order to qualify for the practice. Despite these bumps, however, Colonia Industrial persisted, and under Bautista's leadership it eventually thrived. Before the LDS Church and its colonies were established in Mexico, a majority of the people did not know much about their ancestors or about genealogy.

In his histories of Latter-day Saints in Mexico, F. Lamond Tullis portrays Bautista as a "malcontent" who challenged leadership too often and caused some members to leave the church, and Bautista's clashes with church leaders and his excommunication loom large in the memory of him. Bautista's interpretation of Lamanite identity also continued to be highly influential in spite of and long after his excommunication. For example, Agrícol Lozano Herrera—a prominent Mexican Latter-day Saint writer and poet who served in several church callings such as stake president, mission president, and temple president—embraced Lamanite identity just as Bautista did and, also like Bautista, averred that Mexicans had a special role as descendants of the House of Israel, demonstrating that some of Bautista's ideas remain current among Mexican Latter-day Saints.

Colonia Industrial and El Reino de Dios en su Plenitud In the mid-to-late-twentieth century, most Latter-day Saints and scholars of Mormon history believed Bautista's sect and Colonia Industrial had dwindled away after his death and nearly collapsed by 1983, based on a claim from Lozano. However, in 1996, anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy visited Ozumba and discovered the Colonia Industrial community still existed and several hundred residents still lived there. The religious sect Bautista founded had adopted the legal name of El Reino de Dios en su Plenitud (The Kingdom of God in its Fulness), though members called themselves Mormons.

Colonia Industrial and El Reino de Dios still exist to this day. As recently as 2011, 800 people still live in Colonia Industrial, hold property in common through a community trust, and practice plural marriage, continuing Bautista's teachings.