This book is the first full-length biography of Margarito Bautista (1878-1961), a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century who was a Mexican cultural nationalist, visionary, founder of a utopian commune, and Mormon dissident. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista's remarkable life, the scope of his work, or the development of his vision. Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of Mormon evangelization, Mexican nationalism, and religious improvisation in the U.S. Mexico borderlands. A successful proselytizer of Mexicans for years, from 1922 onward Bautista came to view the paternalism of the Euro-American leadership of the Church as a barrier to ecclesiastical self-governance by indigenous Latter-day Saints . In 1924, he began his journey away from mainstream Mormonism. By 1946, he had established a completely Mexican-led polygamist utopia in Mexico on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, twenty-two kilometers southeast of Mexico City. Here, he preached an alternative Mormonism rooted in Mesoamerican history and culture. Based on his indigenous hermeneutic of Mormon scripture, Bautista proclaimed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a chosen race, destined to wrest both political and spiritual authority from the descendants of Euro-American colonists. This book provides an in-depth look at a man still regarded with cultural pride by those Mexican and Mexican American Mormons who remember him as an iconic and revolutionary figure.

"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"--

This volume is divided in two parts. The first examines the founding of the LDS Church in the village of San Marcos in Hidalgo, Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries amid the trials of a revolutionary war and the martyrdom of two members. The second examines the trials of developing and organizing the faith in the state of Hidalgo up through the 1950s. It places historical Mormon figures clearly within the context of their country¿s society, economy, and polity. In this context, it reviews the background and details of how the Church survived Mexico¿s civil war of 1910-1917, when its members were under severe duress from insurgent militias as well as their own government.

For most of his life, the megachurch ministry of Robert H. Schuller in Orange County, California, displayed an apparent strength that betrayed none of the fractures that lay below the success-oriented surface. Yet, when tested and stressed in the late 2000s, the ecclesial structure's accumulated fragility proved to be catastrophic. Drawing on extensive data gathered from archives, interviews, and ethnographic observation, The Glass Church examines the spectacular collapse of The Crystal Cathedral to better understand both the strength and fragility of Schuller's ministry. The apparent success of the ministry obscured the many tensions that often threatened its future. Certainly, all churches depend on a mix of constituents, charisma, and capital, yet the size and ambition of large churches like Schuller's Crystal Cathedral exert enormous organizational pressures to continue the flow of people committed to the congregation, to reinforce the spark of charismatic excitement generated by high-profile pastors, and to develop fresh flows of capital funding for maintenance of old projects and launching new initiatives. The constant attention to expand constituencies, boost charisma, and stimulate capital among megachurches produces an especially burdensome strain on their leaders. By orienting an approach to the collapse of the Crystal Cathedral on these three core elements--constituency, charisma, and capital--The Glass Church demonstrates how congregational fragility is greatly accentuated in larger churches, a notion we label megachurch strain, such that the threat of implosion is significantly accentuated by any failures to properly calibrate the inter-relationship among these elements.

As the sacred text of a modern religious movement of global reach, The Book of Mormon has undeniable historical significance. That significance, this volume shows, is inextricable from the intricacy of its literary form and the audacity of its historical vision. This landmark collection brings together a diverse range of scholars in American literary studies and related fields to definitively establish The Book of Mormon as an indispensable object of Americanist inquiry not least because it is, among other things, a form of Americanist inquiry in its own right--a creative, critical reading of "America." Drawing on formalist criticism, literary and cultural theory, book history, religious studies, and even anthropological field work, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon captures as never before the full dimensions and resonances of this "American Bible."

In almost every country in the world, minorities and indigenous peoples suffer greater ill-health and receive poorer quality of care than other segments of the population. They die younger, face higher rates of disease and struggle more to access health services compared to the rest of the population. This year's edition of State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples presents a global picture of the health issues experienced by minorities and indegenous communities, features country profiles and case studies, and makes recommendations for addressing these key issues.

"Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the late 1960s to the present. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The central concept, "moving otherwise," names how concert dance - and its offstage practices and consumption - offer alternatives to, and sometimes critique, the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer, the book analyzes a wide range of practices including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including crossings between contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence"--