As the Church became strongly established in Mexico, it spread from the historic epicenters in Mexico City and the northern colonies to reach across the full country—including among the Maya peoples of southern Mexico.
The Third Convention was reunited to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in part due to the observation that stakes with local leadership and local temples would come only as the schism healed and the Church continued to become stronger in Mexico. It took some time, but stakes and temples did come.
Events conspired to create a schism in the Church in Mexico, but eventually the Third Convention group that had split reunited with the Church.
Despite dealing with isolation and neglect, Latter-day Saints in Mexico continued to function and serve well. But eventually, things reached a breaking point.
While Mexico had stabilized from the Revolution, the 1920s saw continuing strains for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico.
The Latter-day Saint colonies in Mexico were becoming successful after years of effort. But the Mexican Revolution changed them forever.
The Mexican Revolution impacted every Mexican, and that included the Mexican Latter-day Saints, some of whom did their best to stay out of the conflict, some of whom became casualties of war, and some of whom joined in the revolution.
The Mexican Revolution was a decade of terrible destruction that brought a wave of changes to the Church in Mexico.
The closure of the mission in Mexico in 1889 led to an 12-year gap in the presence of missionaries and official church leadership in central Mexico. Ammon Tenney worked to restart the mission, connecting with the Latter-day Saints who were effectively abandoned and beginning new efforts at proselytizing.
While efforts to gather converts from central Mexico failed and the mission in central Mexico closed, there would still be future successes. Among the earliest converts in the 20th century in Mexico, the Bautista family would go on to have an impact on the Church for years to come, including the development of an indigenous-affirming perspective on Lamanite identity.
An attempt to found a colony of Mexican converts in the north didn’t end up going as well as anyone had hoped, to disastrous results.
A lot of early missionary work in Mexico was driven by an understanding that the missionaries were preaching to Lamanites. But being considered a Lamanite can be both a blessing and a curse.
As a haven established to practice polygamy, the colonies in northern Mexico played a role in plural marriage persisting in the Church into the 20th century.
One of the important aspects of the Church’s presence in Mexico was the establishment of colonies in the far north. Intended as refuges against anti-polygamy legislation and persecution, the colonies were a constellation of settlements that proved successful for many years and, in some cases, still continue to exist to this day.
The first two years of missionary work in central Mexico brought some long-standing successes, such as the conversion of Desideria Quintanar de Yáñez and her family, and some frustrating failures, as was the case with Plotino C. Rhodakanaty.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints post-WWII, the statement that a socialist and anarchist was largely responsible for initiating missionary work in the country that is home to the second-largest community of Latter-day Saints is unexpected. Yet, that is exactly what happened in Mexico thanks to Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty and his associates.
It seems that in times of trouble, the early Latter-day Saints looked towards Mexico for refuge.
Elder Parley P. Pratt’s mission to Chile highlighted a few things that needed to happen in order to successfully establish missions in Spanish-speaking countries.
The first attempt to proselyte to Spanish-speaking peoples was not directed at Mexico, but was aimed at Chile instead.
It’s time to return to the Mexican Mission Hymns project, with a slight change. Instead of running hymn translations and the brief history discussions together, they will be separate posts moving forward. To do this properly, the previous history segments are going to be rerun as their own posts, starting with this one.
