Review: Elisa Eastwood Pulido. The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Authors

Susie S. Porter

Keywords

Margarito Bautista, indigeneity, Mormonism, polygamy, ethnicity

Abstract

Margarito Bautista was born in 1878 in Atlautla, Mexico, a small farming community tucked into the folds of the Popocatépetl volcano in the state of Mexico. Even today, the community remains small, with fewer than thirty thousand people in 2010. Bautista’s father was a farmer and respected community member, serving at one time as municipal president. Elisa Eastwood Pulido provides no occupation for his mother, whom she describes as “pure Nahua” (50). Margarito Bautista converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, moved to the Mormon colonies in Northern Mexico, and became a volunteer evangelizer. His time in the colonies was formative. Throughout his life, Bautista was attracted to the ideal of a religious colony and considered polygamy central to his understanding of the faith, even after the LDS Church had denounced the practice. Pulido places Bautista within the context of the Latter-day Saint teachings to which Bautista committed himself, especially conceptions of ethnicity and Indigeneity as expressed in the Book of Mormon story of the Lamanites. How, Pulido asks, did a man who identified as “Indian” navigate non-Hispanic White religious institutions and practices?

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Porter, Susie S. (2022) "Review: Elisa Eastwood Pulido. The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 14.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/14