| Popis: |
The spiritual biography of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961), a Mexican cultural nationalist and Mormon evangelizer of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this book follows Bautista’s journey into and out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and his subsequent founding of a polygamist utopia in Central Mexico. It argues that Bautista’s insistence on indigenous ecclesiastical self-governance led to his estrangement from the Mormon Church. Bautista’s prolific writings allow a view of his life and thought in his own voice. The book embeds Bautista’s experience in the religious history of the borderlands by devoting beginning chapters to the loss of indigenous spiritual authority at the time of the Spanish Conquest and the arrival of Mormonism in Mexico in 1875. Subsequent chapters follow Bautista’s preaching of a Mexican exceptionalism founded on the Book of Mormon, for which he was ultimately excommunicated in 1936. |
