The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista

Book excerpt: "In 1903, at the age of twenty-four, Margarito Bautista (1878-1961) left his childhood home on Mexico's Central Plateau and relocated to the Mormon Colonies in the northern Mexican wilderness. Enthused by his recent conversion to Mormonism, Bautista wanted to live in proximity to and learn from the Euro-Americans who had evangelized him. Nearly forty years later, as a Mormon excommunicate and religious entrepreneur, he returned permanently to the Central Plateau to establish his own indigenously-led polygamous utopia in the town of Ozumba. In this volume I have tried to answer two central questions concerning Bautista's journey: After dedicating so many years of his life to the evangelization of Mexicans on both sides of the U.S. border, what led to his separation from the Mormon Church? How did he become the founder of an indigenous movement which observed Mormonism's most difficult practices? My study of Bautista's spiritual trajectory has been an exercise in deep "listening" to the writings he left: a 564-page tome that employs an indigenous hermeneutic in its melding of Mormon theology and the history of Mexico, nearly sixteen years of diaries, numerous letters, and multiple pamphlets. Bautista is often represented as the sole creator of his Mexican-inspired improvisations on Mormon doctrine. The Mormon Church however played a major role in his spiritual education. Bautista took his life-long views on indigenous exceptionalism directly from Mormon scripture. In the two decades following his conversion Bautista thrived under the Mormon umbrella, moving through the ranks of Mormon priesthood, mastering Mormon doctrine and scripture in English, and becoming acquainted with esoteric temple rituals. But in 1924 his meteoric rise stalled. In this volume I will demonstrate that Bautista's insistence on independent Mexican ecclesiastical authority and his fundamentalist clinging to historical practices and doctrines, at a time when the mainstream Church was abandoning them, estranged him from both Euro-American and Mexican Mormons. Nevertheless, These same views propelled him on to his ultimate calling and mission, that of an independent religious entrepreneur and utopian founder. I will show that the roots of Bautista's uncompromising doctrine and religious activism are multiple and complex. They are found in the Mexican anarchism extant in the farmlands of central Mexico where he was raised, in the flourishing cultural nationalism of Mexico, in the transnational perspective created by his frequent movement across borders, and in the tenets of early Mormonism, which Bautista learned while a resident from 1903 to 1910 in the polygamist Mormon Colonies in the wilderness of northern Mexico"--