Jesus en las Americas: Exploring Latter-day Saint Latinx Politics and Culture

Abstract

Why am I here? A social justice Catholic who has embedded herself with Pentecostals for over twenty years, only to try to embed with another conservative religious group that has seen exponential growth in the Latinx community? According to anthropologist Brittany Romanello, 43 percent of Latter-day Saints globally come from Latin America or Latinx heritage.1 So, this was naturally my next research area. I wanted to visit churches, do interviews, and take lots and lots of notes at events. But I couldn't do that, so I modified my plan when I was invited back again to give the Smith-Pettit Lecture at the 2021 Mormon History Association meeting in Park City, Utah. This paper was supposed to be delivered in 2020, when the meeting was scheduled for Rochester, New York, but the pandemic has upended all of our plans.What I want to do is look at LDS Latinx through a few lenses and help us all understand how much you have in common with the Latinx Pentecostals/evangelicals I have studied for over twenty years. I want to establish that there are particular entryways to these and other groups; there is “glue” that helps these movements stick together.Off the top of my head, what Latinx LDS and Pentecostals have in common are they are marked by persecution, a desire to both despise and want to be loved by the “world,” and eschatology, for starters. However, as I read more about Latinx LDS, I discovered that along with the commonalities I just listed, there were additional shared facets that helped me delve deeper into my topic.I would like to look at Latinx LDS through two bookends, two highly educated Mexican Americans representing nearly the opposite of the religious spectrum. Thus, I can examine the current state of Latinx LDS politics and culture. Examining these bookend differences will hopefully move us toward a series of concluding thoughts that I think many in the LDS academic and larger communities have been struggling with for quite a while.Let me establish something first. I think Christianity, in whatever form it has come to the Americas—Franciscan friars in seventeenth-century California, Pentecostal missionaries in Brazil, LDS missionaries, everywhere and no matter the denominational imprint—is a colonial project. It is essential and historically honest to begin from that premise. As such, much of what has comprised Latinx religious life has been lives lived in supervised worlds, governed by white men, taught morality by white women and men, with the desire of becoming paragons of white middle-class Protestant and Catholic gentility. Throughout all this, it is the conviction of scholars and practitioners alike that Latinx religionists have agency, use agency, and continue to do so despite many obstacles in their way.Anthropologist Sujey Vega's work on LDS Latinas helps us see what she describes as “underground feminism”2 as these hermanas attempt to navigate their faith lives outside the corridors of centralized church power. So then I began reading more, and what I found out was fascinating! The idea of blossoming—the necessity of Latinx LDS conversion as a civilizing process of genteel religious culture that privileges personal piety and conservative politics over almost anything else—when this is discovered, critiqued, brought out, in any way, usually the first thing to happen is to deny that there is anything to this other than an earnest desire to convey the benefits of the faith to others. While this will be contentious to some, it will be evident to others. But it is always a part of a conversation focused on Latinx politics and culture. In nearly any marker of success, public health, education, or crime, Latinx are not doing well. Of the sixty million Latinx in the U.S., 70 percent have a high school diploma, compared to 93 percent of whites; 17 percent have a BA/BS, compared to 36 percent of whites; and 5 percent have graduate degrees, compared to 14 percent of whites.3 And if you are wondering about the elite of the elite, Latinx with a PhD? I don't have those numbers, but I can tell you that the number is small. When I graduated in 2001, I was the twenty-fifth Latina in the U.S. with a PhD in history; my advisor/mentor/and oracle, Dr. Vicki Ruiz, was number five. So when I tell you that my case studies, my bookends as they were, are elites, I refer to them.When it comes to politics, despite what I am sure are many of our desires, the subject inevitably returns to immigration. Latinx politics is much more than that, but it cannot be avoided. Many other issues Latinx care deeply about: education, crime, health care, and COVID. But the season we have all just survived, otherwise known as the Trump years, makes immigration a necessary focus. Let me say that Latinx immigrants are used to being treated poorly, working for meager wages with little protection, being targeted as carriers of disease, perpetrators of crime, drains on the public purse—so much so, that over a million Mexican American and Mexicanos were deported to Mexico during the Great Depression.4 The Trump years, the cages, the separation of families, the utter lack of human concern for the claims of asylum is “new” because it is ubiquitous. There is one other ominous event that we have not really begun to process, probably because we collectively are trying to manage our psychological health. But the immense toll COVID took on Latinx communities is one of the reasons I cannot present this paper in person. I had a stem cell transplant and my immune system is compromised. I have spent over a year inside most of the time, hoping I didn't become one of the over 106,000 Latinx who've died of COVID. Over 20 percent of COVID deaths are our Latinx brothers and sisters. In other words, in health care (the lowest insured), in education, and perpetually chasing the stability and legality that comes with immigration status Latinx are the subalterns. So as we look at LDS Latinx politics and culture, keep these numbers in mind. Keep in mind that for over a century, Latinx immigrants have worked in the factories, in the field, suffered the vacillations of a broken immigration system, and have been racialized as a matter of practice—as not sufficiently American, criminal, outsiders, and as Latinx Mormons. So, let us start with las hermanas.Jorge Iber, in his pathbreaking book, Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999, offered this fascinating story of Domitila, Agustina, and Dolores Rivera, three Mexican sisters who were among the first LDS women in Utah in the 1910s. They were Mexican converts whose mother had converted and, in turn, converted others in her family. Very much in keeping with what I found among Latinx Pentecostal converts, women often converted first; men, usually fathers and brothers, had to be brought along later. In the Rivera sisters’ case, their father did not fear theology; he feared ostracism from family and friends. This again is in keeping with what I found with Latinx Pentecostals.5Most of the Latinx in Utah at the turn of the twentieth century were Catholics. Having to be the only one to attend weddings, fiestas, or funerals—where the vigilios and post-funeral get-togethers often came with copious amounts of alcohol or at least a little cafecito—was a cultural rupture that few Latinx Catholics were willing to trade-in. Nevertheless, the Rivera sisters continued their labors as sugar beet workers on the southern Idaho/Utah migrant trail, seeking converts to the Mormon cause along the way.6 Is there any doubt that these migrant trails are still populated by Latina/o immigrants, still working in the factories and the fields? Only now they are surrounded by the LDS kin-doms of Utah and Idaho. Are the wards that offer these weary workers Spanish speaking? One wonders if they still proffer that part of the benefits of becoming Mormon is whitening their skin, which opens up the heavens. The “white and delightsome” idea was new to me (2 Nephi 5:21). When I read it, my first reaction was, “What???”Anthropologist Sujey Vega, examining how LDS hermanas navigated their faith lives, especially during the uproar over Arizona's immigration debates in 2010, found that las hermanas were not passive receptors of the debates swirling around them. Instead, Vega found that they advocated for themselves in “gendered, ethnic, religious networks.”7 Countering a typical critique, usually offered by North American white feminists—who view conservative women's religion as illegitimate because it does not insist on ordination—Vega notes the agency these women have as they supported each other, visited each other, supported their families as dual-income earners, took care of their families, and benefitted from and found solace in church and their fellow hermanas.Vega captures the lives of sisters, moms, daughters, “These Latinas artfully wove their church roles with their ethnic identities and built a unique intersectional faith practice.”8 LDS Latinas expressed moments of agency and empowerment despite the limitations of a male-led church. LDS Latinas were provided space to speak confidently about scriptures and simultaneously helped each other navigate gendered experiences.9 Vega offers a word borrowed from theological studies of Latina Catholic and Protestant women, hermandad, solidarity with their daily life struggles, their “underground feminism” focused more on daily life. Their pain and struggles were shared among each other and became a source of “strength and resiliency.”10I want to break here to be careful with the romantic notion that laboring in obscurity is a good thing; sometimes it is the only thing as Vega describes it. LDS Latinas labor as faith leaders in their homes, often without recognition. One woman who claimed the mantle of revelation spoke out eloquently on political issues, especially the immigration issues surrounding Arizona state representative Russell Pearce's attempts to pass SB 1070 that would have prompted school districts to identify undocumented students, and additionally Pearce's support for eugenics and for fellow Mormons who later were found to be openly white supremacists.That is something LDS and Pentecostals have in common—the fact that these revelations, or prophecies in the case of Pentecostals, cannot help but be birthed from the cultural and political constructions of those in power (though sometimes, those prophecies do come from the subaltern). Where does this confidence to speak out come from? In part, LDS organizations such as Mujeres Jovenes and Sociedad de Socorro both operate, as Vega states: “A collective emotional faith-based, release valve, a kind of group therapy session that strengthened their ability to navigate their lived experience.”11Like many, Latinx LDS women of different classes, education, and political stripes are caught in the liminal space of desperately wanting to belong and feeling repelled by what they can't leave behind. Again, from Vega: LDS Latinas faced a political climate that positioned them as “vessels for anchor babies and rendered their brothers, sons, fathers, and husbands rapists. Some hermanas utilized skills gained in their faith to stand up and demand action against injustice.”12 Ignacio M. García notes a presumed unfitness, an “inherent unfitness” that keeps many LDS Latinx waiting, kept waiting to rise in leadership, their interests never being met.13 It is not only LDS folks waiting for their institutional church to catch up to the present times; it seems like a perpetual issue across denominations. So, for people waiting for a change, you're in good company. The concluding section of this paper asks questions based on this idea. How much more can people take? And how long are they supposed to wait?Anthropologists are doing some phenomenal work, embedding themselves with LDS Latinas, capturing oral histories, and fieldwork for which we are all the beneficiaries. For example, Brittany Romanello's work examines LDS mothers and their precarious lives as undocumented women. She writes: “Many mothers I interviewed felt that the multifaceted factors that shaped their undocumented immigrant experiences were greatly oversimplified within U.S. church conversations, which emphasize personal agency as the primary determining factor for economic and personal success in the U.S. rather than the support and access to resources that studies have demonstrated as most important. This, layered on top of Mormonism's historical racialization of worthiness and authority among Lamanite descendants, can create a toxic emotional health environment for migrant mothers trying to find their place.”14This idea is that LDS Latinas need to fit their experiences in a premade universal narrative of success that is wholly placed in an idea of personal responsibility, hard work, thriving, sacrifice—all things that immigrants constantly do, only the structural disadvantages are not acknowledged. It is the aversion to examining structural issues that plague most of these conversations because it means acknowledging that those structures need to change. As Vega sees hermanas finding their voice in LDS structures and working out of those structures to find their political voices, there are still issues, according to Romanello, where hermanas and madres find themselves stuck in the gendered spaces created and maintained by the LDS Church. Romanello continues: “Many of those interviews reported feeling expected to restrict their energy to domestic spheres, religious belief, and child-rearing. Most of these traditions encourage women to personify characteristics such as self-sacrifice, family, well-being, purity, and loyalty: qualities all akin to the Catholic conception of the Virgin Mary.”15 This is a fascinating finding that I do want to comment on because it's very similar to what I have found with Latina Pentecostals—though I don't know if my subjects would have had the self-reflection to describe their experiences as restrictions—they would have said that they were living their best biblical lives now. They would have NEVER viewed La Virgen in anything close to positive terms. They would have never even mentioned her unless it was a way to demonstrate how their new lives as Protestants saved them from the idolatry of Mariology.The mothers Romanello spoke to attended Latinx congregations.16 This idea that people feel comfortable with their own, speaking their language, surrounded by their customs, culture, and foodways is often viewed as dangerous. Why? Aside from questions of who controls the money and the power, an added point of contention is the very nature of these churches, these wards—why do people need their own? Why not have all people worshipping in the same place? It is not that the madres Romanello interviewed were not wholly committed to the LDS cause; she notes that las madres were intensely loyal and felt an abiding sense of belonging, but that this loyalty came at a cost, “one that can compromise or erase identity and place by succumbing to Anglo assimilation pressures.”17 As long as Latinx have been assimilated into a variety of Christian contexts, whether they should or should not attempt to retain their ethnic identities has been debated actively. The issue is not whether assimilation happens; whether it is a choice, and more so, a demand that, if not met, somehow means that churchgoers are somehow disloyal.When it comes to the metanarrative of generations, nearly all Protestants have a complex. For example, when I interview Pentecostals, some will give me their denominational history; others will go back to the book of Acts and claim their real roots are in the upper room. Many denominations have their history that starts in the book of Acts, selectively chooses some early church figures, skips centuries till they get to the Reformation, then leapfrogs to their denomination. This is a way to bypass the centuries where the early church meant the Roman West or Greek East, neither acceptable spiritual heirs. For LDS, the roots are very different, and then again, they are not.When examining generations among LDS Latinos, one has to go back to see at least one reason certain People of Color are attracted to the Mormon Church; it is a very intriguing narrative of generations. To quote Romanello, LDS missionary work and the “colonization of presumed ‘Lamanite’ dominant geographical areas in the American Southwest, Polynesia, Latin America, and the Caribbean began shortly after Mormon settlement in the Western frontier in 1847.”18 This also included the beet fields of the southern Utah/Idaho migrant trail. But, their dark skin prevented some of these enterprising Mexicano immigrants from moving up at work. Iber tells the story of Rafael, who sought promotion at a hotel, but was turned down because he was “dark-skinned.”19 No doubt, Mexicano workers would have been used to the racialized nature of the American workplace. However, the added complexity of being dark-skinned in Utah in the early twentieth century was mixed with a religious urgency.The conversion efforts for many LDS members included something much more ethereal: the LDS Church's “doctrinal and institutional foundation in the Americas directly hails those who trace their ancestry to the continent.”20 American studies scholar Leticia Alvarado adds provocatively, the “[A]doption of the Mormon faith asks Latino LDS to identify with the racialized abject figure . . . they are taught that ‘whitening’ follows righteousness made evident through testaments of faith—through conversion or performative proclamations of conviction—and foreshadows the second coming of Christ.”21 Pentecostals believe that the move of the Holy Spirit ushered in the last wave foretold in Joel, and they are the last generation before the second coming. There is no loss of Christian groups all claiming to be the last generation, the one tasked with ushering in Jesus's return, is that because they know that? Or is it because it helps secure their present truth claims? Since no one knows the appointed time, we may be able to confidently say that the desire to be the last generation is more about the present than the future. Because everyone wants to be right, to have the right revelation, but this one—the Lamanites’ narrative—is really something! Alvarado adds, “In addition to a godly mandate to restore the knowledge of their ‘true heritage’ to the Lamanite descendants, white members of the church use to serve as custodians of the Lamanites themselves.”22 The crux of LDS Latinx culture and politics, then, may be whether or not they are the custodial heirs of their white overseers. Whether they can advocate for themselves, politically, culturally, or not, and if not, what is stopping them? Is the Lamanite narrative just one of a long history of racialized origins’ narratives that intend to subjugate People of Color? Or, is this narrative, even with its racialized elements, part of Latinx “eternal genealogy”? For an attempt at some resolution, we turn to our bookends.These two are not representative; they are not supposed to be universalized, though I suppose it will be done out of habit. However, it should be noted how unique they actually are. Ignacio García and Leticia Alvarado: male bishop, daughter of a bishop; Mexicano, Mexican America; chaired senior scholar, Ivy League tenured professor. As such, García and Alvarado do not represent most Latinx LDS, they are both—whether they accept the term or not—elites. Both have intimate knowledge of LDS church life and culture. Both are aware of the racialist aspects of the church, and for Alvarado, this was a factor in choosing to leave the church. So what can we learn from these two?Ignacio García writes of a lifetime as a Chicano Mormon, growing up in San Antonio with his devout Mormon mom and his Rosicrucian dad. As the most prominent Chicano Mormon academic, through a sample of his writings, we learn about his life trying to get a decent education out of the unjust educational system of the San Antonio barrios. His work describes a devout faith life that helped him in a medic unit in Vietnam and academic life. García is self-aware. He knows who he is, and the fact that he repeats specific stories and makes impassioned pleas speaks to his tenacity. In his own words, García is a “complicated Mexican.”23 Socially conservative, he openly worries about today's “postmodern culture wars,” which he does not describe. However, it might be safe to say that this phrase, which was popular when I was in graduate school in the late 1990s, was to my Gen X ears what CRT (Critical Race Theory) is to millennial and Gen Z ears today.García writes of the profundity of the Vietnam experience, the horror of war as it were, but also about the horror of swearing and how that is elevated to one of the biggest markers of piety, so much so that he wanted to transfer out of his unit.24 His rise up the ranks as a historian of the Chicano experience, even his use of the term Chicano, says a lot since it has mostly fallen out of favor among a younger generation (not mine). García wants Latter-day Saints to recognize Latinx members, teach and research their history; he demands that they not be ignored. With all the slights, disappointments, and struggles the LDS Church is still his.Turns out that being part of a sacred community doesn't come with all the perks one thought: “We were simply ‘los Lamanitas,’ humble people who listened, obeyed, paid what we could and always followed. We were the symbol of something important . . . we had no history.”25 This depreciation of Latinx religious history is not unique to LDS culture. Until my own work, there were few, if any, works on Latinx Pentecostals that were not written by confessional historians, professional or grassroots theologians, or church folks. The depiction of Latinx as obedient and passive is such an old stereotype; it is really one step up from depicting them as being on a perpetual siesta. But this idea that they are obedient serves a purpose. It means that whenever LDS Latinx step out of line, there is something wrong—not with the system, not with the culture, not with the theology, but with them.LDS, like Pentecostals, have this process called continual revelation. In Pentecostalism it's called prophecy, a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom. It rarely, if ever, is used as a corrective. But in one well-known case in the LDS Church, the concept of continual revelation was used to change a passage in LDS scripture that said the Lamanites’ dark skin would be changed to reflect their conversion. What was once “white and delightsome” is now “pure,” but is that really different? For García, that is not enough. After a lifetime of working inside the LDS Church, he laments that Latinx LDS have a particular narrative to fit into. “Poor people and people of color are not exceptional unless their story is one of having little, giving it all up for the church, and then resigning themselves to waiting for the second coming.”26 But as García has always known, as Vega and Romanello have found, and as we instinctively know—Latinx LDS have always had agency, always had histories, and maintained their various ethnic identities despite the immense pressure to assimilate. In this respect, I take issue with Dr. García when he states, “A faith that many of us love dearly—remains a white religion with shades of color in which Latinos and others remain governed and acted upon and not agents unto themselves in defining and constructing the future of the church or interpreting its past.”27 García asks some good questions that really deserve answers from you. Are Latinx cursed with dark skin? Will whites still be the leaders? Is God white? Will we become white?28García concludes with what is a great answer for a bishop, but probably insufficient for those of us outside the faith. “Eventually, those questions and the problems they create will be resolved.”29There is another bookend I wish to close with, someone of a different gender and a different generation, who decided that the racialist history of the LDS Church was simply too much to bear. Leticia Alvarado is a professor of American studies and ethnic studies at Brown University. She is also the daughter of an LDS bishop from Southern California. For Alvarado—who interrogates all sectors of Mormon life, but as a former insider—she knows, what many who have tried to “decolonize” Mormonism know, you can critique Mormon culture, but “Mormon doctrine is out of bounds.”30 Alvarado continues that as Lamanites, Chicanos, and Latinos, by their very identification with this “eternal genealogy,” “function to cohere white LDS members’ understanding of themselves as superior.”31 Like Vega and Romanello, Alvarado notes that immigration, a word tied to Latinos/as whether they are immigrants or not, is sacred in Mormon culture. “The Lamanite ideology embraced by Latino members offers justification for difficult migration where promises are spiritual as well as material: deep spiritual corrections to past generations, the past of an eventual reclaiming of land, and fortification of white skin.”32 For Alvarado, and maybe a lot of other LDS Latinx, the fact that the scripture was changed does not mean that the culture of white “Panoptic surveillance”33 has changed. Alvarado, the bishop's daughter, writes as an apostate how she completed the paperwork necessary to withdraw membership in the church, and she was unsealed.For Alvarado, the changing of one verse simply does not do enough to erase the racialized roots of Mormon theology related to the Lamanites; she believes the church's racialized ideologies still “demand the eventual purge of the abject.”34 Who is the abject? The undocumented poor, Romanello's madres, Vega's hermanas, Iber's beet workers, García's charges. Alvarado concludes, “I attempt to inhabit this position in the spirit of the promise of the abject . . . not beholden to the church or its structuring ideologies, but in the critique of structured injustice and desirous of imagining a more just beyond.”35Speaking as someone who has no stake in the matter, I want to offer these concluding thoughts. History depends on whom you listen to, whose story gets remembered, passed on, re-vised for purposes always colored with an agenda. Let's say that you can't decolonize Mormonism; you can't decolonize Christianity in any form without stepping on truth claims. Why stay? Why leave? What do you keep from faith that has moved beyond where you're comfortable? What will you lose? Is it, as some behavioral psychologists tell us, kind of a sunk cost fallacy, where you follow through on something because you have already invested time, effort, money, and made such an emotional investment that the prospect of losing friends, family, and faith are more powerful motivators on behavior than the power of what you have to gain from leaving?Do you carve out what you can live with and without and leave it at that? Do you simply ignore what you can't deal with, especially what you disagree with? Are we all subject to this Golden Age fallacy, finding one pristine moment in our faith experience and letting this moment anchor the rest—spending the rest of your faith life trying to re-create it? For Latinx LDS, is the Mormon Church like Vega's hermanas? Is it the complicated Mexican-ness of Ignacio García? Or will it be the apostasy of Leticia Alvarado? One should note that these issues are often not decided on big, bold, messy fields of battle, but are fought because People of Color, Latinx, need to repeat their stories continually, they need to repeat their requests, demand that their histories be included. They do not need to argue for their relevancy—what they need though is allies who are at the centers of power to advocate for them and relinquish power. It is that step, getting off the stage, out of the spotlight, that is so difficult and until that is accomplished, I suppose you will continue to invite scholars here like me. I am grateful and honored for your invite, but I have nothing to lose. I have nothing to be unsealed. I am an outsider who has attempted to illumine my little corner of the world. The insiders, those with everything to lose, those voices are the ones that we all desperately need to listen to.