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.
Margarito Bautista was born in San Miguel de Atlautla, Mexico State, Mexico on June 10, 1878. His family, along with the village of San Miguel de Atlautla, were bilingual and spoke both Nahuatl and Spanish. Bautista grew up Catholic, but he was also familiar with the teachings of a Mexican Methodist minister in the area. However, Bautista found neither Catholicism nor Methodism spiritually satisfying. Nevertheless, based on the religious example of his mother Petra Candelaria Valencia, he had a sense of spiritual commitment to and interest in God.
Not much is known or was recorded about Margarito Bautista's childhood or his siblings. Shortly before Valencia died, she urged him to work to ordain the people of Mexico.
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. In a few months, Bautista became very sick and was welcomed back home where Tenney visited and ministered to Bautista with a priesthood blessing, after which Bautista recovered. 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. Margarito received many job offers to work with other faiths as he gained a reputation for his preaching, but he preferred preaching for the LDS Church.
Around the time of Bautista's conversion, large numbers Latter-day Saints lived in Mexico in settlements, the results of a colonization project started in the late-nineteenth century. 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. Interested in foreign economic investment, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz had encouraged the immigration. In the early 1900s, the church was in the middle of a transition between endorsing plural marriage and ending it, so many Anglo-American Latter-day Saints still lived in Mexico in "Mormon colonies."
Bautista spent time living in these Latter-day Saint settlements, moving between multiple Mexican colonies and becoming introduced to the practice of polygamy. Bautista even practiced polygamy himself to maintain his position as a teacher. While living in Mexican-Mormon colonies, Bautista further invested in the church, and he wrote about his faith journey, eventually becoming published in the church's official magazine for male youth, the Improvement Era.
Bautista eventually left Mexico and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where LDS Church headquarters were located, effectively living in the center of church activity. While in Salt Lake City, Bautista continued studying genealogy and Latter-day Saint theology, but he also studied polygamy and other controversial doctrines. The church also called Bautista to serve as the first branch president of the Temporary Lamanite Branch, later renamed Lucero Ward.
From 1922 to 1924, the church assigned Bautista to serve as a genealogical missionary in Mexico, a calling he embraced and gained great fulfillment from. He taught Mexican Latter-day Saints about temple work, and he organized local genealogical societies. During this time, Bautista also began more openly teaching interpretations of the Book of Mormon and of Latter-day Saint doctrine that took inspiration from Mexican nationalism. When Bautista trained administrators for genealogical society, he encouraged them to believe in Mexicans' potential for religious triumph over Anglo-Americans and Europeans.
However, the church's Anglo-American leadership disapproved of Bautista's nationalist interpretations of doctrine. Rey L. Pratt, the president of the Spanish-American Mission, went so far as to preach two "anti-Bautista" sermons in 1923 and 1925. In the first sermon, Pratt was gentle, but in 1925 he spoke with noticeable anger.
In 1924, Bautista concluded his genealogical mission and returned to Utah. Because of his controversial teachings, church leadership withdrew official callings from Bautista from 1925 onward.
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. Still yearning to proselytize to Mexicans, Bautista wrote La evolución de Mexico: sus verdaderos progenitores y su origen: el destino de America y Europa while living in Utah over a period of about five years, from 1930 to 1935. The 500-page book was a theological treatise that established Mexicans' origins and predicted their future and destiny.
Church claims about Lamanite ancestry
To explicate Mexican origins, Bautista used the Book of Mormon, the central religious text of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which implied that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were descendants of the Lamanites described in the text, themselves descendants of ancient Israelites. 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. This could sometimes be understood as an epithet, as Book of Mormon narrators often described Lamanites pejoratively as degenerate or fallen, and Anglo-American Latter-day Saints in Bautista's lifetime typically imagined Lamanites through the lens of their stereotypes about American Indians as "dark, degenerate, and savage." At other times, however, Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical leaders and missionaries used Lamanite tropes as a missionary tactic and focused on the Book of Mormon's promises of choice blessings to the Lamanites as a way to build bridges with and draw converts among American Indians and Latin Americans.
Bautista's use of Lamanite identity in La evolución
Bautista also took the idea of Lamanite ancestry seriously—he even called himself "a Descendant of Father Lehi"—but he did not use Lamanite identity pejoratively. Instead, Bautista used the Book of Mormon and other Latter-day Saint teachings about Lamanites selectively, focusing on promised blessings and claims of pre-conquest Christianity, much as missionaries might. In La evolución, Bautista also fused Lamanite identity with post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism, going on to claim that Mexicans were literal descendants of Abraham, Israelites, and Lamanites and had a birthright privilege to the Book of Mormon's choicest blessings, meaning Mexicans would someday lead the church religiously while Mexico would lead the world politically. Bautista even urged the United States to return previously-Mexican territory in the American West, including Utah, to Mexico on these grounds of Mexico's religious and political destiny. Bautista's La evolución therefore challenged Anglo-American church leaders' control over the affairs of Mexican Latter-day Saints. Simultaneously, Bautista advocated for all Mexicans to convert to the LDS Church, become Latter-day Saints, and fulfill their divine destiny as Lamanites.