Mormon colonizers were sent out throughout the desert West in the later parts of the 19th century seeking to expand the world of Deseret. First, they developed arable lands in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Arizona, but also a group ventured further south into northern Chihuahua State. Here, some of the valleys and places where enough water existed, they founded a total of ten Mormon colonies over time. Two survive today, though one of those is becoming engulfed by the growth of nearby Nuevas Casas Grandes.
MORMONS IN MEXICO
Occasional mention of the Mormon colonies pops up in American media. Both in 1967 and in 2011, descendants of one of the pioneering families, the Romneys, reporters focused brief attention first upon George when he briefly tried running for President of the United States – he was serving as Michigan Governor at the time. George was actually born in Colonia Dublan, the surviving Mormon colony in the process of immersion. He ran against Richard Nixon, but as he later said, “You can’t be right too soon and win election.” His son, Mitt, after a stint as Governor of Massachusetts actually did gain the Republican nod for President in 2012. The stories of his family background in Mexico – Mitt was born in Michigan – came up again.
Then in 2019, the Mexican Mormons gained national news briefly again. Nine members of a family from fundamentalist Mormon Colonia LeBaron died supposedly at the hands of gunmen mistaking them for members of a rival drug cartel. Some in the media did not dig very far into the background of the victims simply calling them “Mormon”. The truth is much more complicated.
THE LATER PROPHESES OF JOSEPH SMITH
In 1843, Joseph Smith began swerving Mormon theology and practice into totally new territory – though there is evidence that beginnings occurred earlier. A chronological list of prophesies received by Smith are tabulated in the LDS church Doctrine and Covenants. Section 131 reveals the principal of eternal marriage and separate degrees of celestial glory awaiting after mortal death. Gaining the highest order is through eternal marriage, “only then can he increase.” Prophesies regarding baptism for the dead were recorded in the previous two years. Section 127 notes, “For I am about to restore many things to the earth, pertaining to the priesthood, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
PLURAL MARRIAGE
EVERALSTING REWARDS
But totally new ground unfolded with section 132. “… prepare thy heart to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give unto you … For behold, I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then ye are damned …” The prophecy went on to describe the need for proper church marriage covenants to ensure eternal marriage as a necessity to “inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths …” “they shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fullness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever. Then they shall be gods, because they have no end … Then they shall be gods, because they have all power and the angels are subject unto them.”
The section goes on to describe how Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon and Moses “received many wives and concubines … given of me.” Further, the prophecy describes if a woman has not committed adultery “you (Joseph) have power … to take her unto him that hath not committed adultery but hat been faithful; for he shall be made ruler over many.” Joseph’s wife Emma is told in the prophecy to “abide and cleave” unto the new restored law. Something she never did. She and her son, Joseph Smith III, would always deny her husband’s dalliance into polygamy.
MECHANICS OF PLURAL MARRIAGE
To reach the new keys to the new ordinances – plural marriage – received by the prophet, men of the priesthood were instructed “… if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and vowed to no other man, then he is justified; for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery and that that belongeth unto him and no one else. And if he have ten virgins given unto him, and they are given unto him; therefore he is justified.”
Section 132 comes as the last chronologically of Smith’s prophesies. The doctrine of polygamy at the time of Joseph’s murder in 1844 was not well known throughout the church. It, however, served as one of the indirect reasons leading to his murder. Polygamy was an ordinance only open to select few of the leaders of the church. The ordinance only became common knowledge after Brigham Young shepherded the main bulk of the faithful to Utah in 1847-1848 that the ordinance extended to the church as a whole. Even then, experts believe only a small portion of Mormons participated, around 15% though I have seen higher estimates of 30%, as well.
AMERICAN PUBLIC RESPONSE
Polygamy was not well received by America, as a whole. Even some inside the church fell away. Branches of Mormonism exist today which deny the later prophesies of Joseph Smith. Polygamy was a favorite beating bush for politicians of the middle to late 19th century. Economic and political clannishness combined with public distaste for the bigamous nature of Mormon Utah. Anti-bigamy laws on a federal level came about in 1862 – Abraham Lincoln ignored the laws for the most part since he had other, more pressing matters at hand. Those beginnings reinforced by the Edmunds Act of 1882 whereby bigamy became a felony.
Further measures sought to disenfranchise the church entirely forcing Mormon leaders to go underground to avoid jail. Eventually, Mormon leadership bowed to the federal government. In 1892, church president Wilford Woodruff ended polygamy in the US – not in Canada or Mexico, however. That edict became expounded upon in 1904 when another church president, Joseph F. Smith, pronounced an end to polygamy throughout the church though those polygamous families already in existence were allowed to live out their lives as such.
MEXICAN MISSION
As early as 1874, Brigham Young began thinking of sending colonists to northern Mexico both to expand the Mormon realm in general and to serve as a potential haven for polygamous families to live without the fear of jail. The danger posed by the Apache put the idea on a temporary hold.
Young died in 1877, but his successor, John Taylor, continued the idea by buying 100,000 acres at the consent of Mexican leader Porfirio Díaz. Finally, in the middle of the 1880’s, 350 LDS polygamous families made the trek south to create a series of ten agricultural communities in Chihuahua and Sonora. At one point, the number of Mormons in Sonora almost became a majority.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 brought about an end to order in Mexico. Mormon colonies were overrun by bandits and a vast majority of the colonists – there were about 4,000 – retreated to Utah and Arizona – by church order, including the family of Mitt Romney among them. Mormon assets were overseen by local Mexicans proselytized into the faith earlier. With the end of the Revolution in 1920, less than a quarter of the original colonists returned to Mexico. Of the ten Mormon colonies, only two survive today.
COLONY DIAZ
The original colony, Colonia Díaz, was established in 1885. Vast numbers of fruit trees were planted along with pastures surrounding the community of around 140 blocks laid out in foursquare Mormon pioneering fashion. All Mormon colonies were theocracies with civil decisions made by church leaders. By 1894, 660 people lived in the colony with 80 LDS families.
Díaz and the Mormons got on well together, which became a problem during the Revolution. Colonia Díaz was burnt to the ground on 28 July 1912. Other families in the other Mormon colonies were driven off shortly after. A degree of order returned with the arrival of the Mexican army, but Colonia Díaz was never rebuilt. Nothing but sands remain where the colony used to stand. Sands and the remnant of the colony’s cemetery.
CITIES OF ZION
Colonias Juárez and Dublán – note the much larger grid pattern of blocks.
Both colonies done to City of Zion plan.
Two colonias remain today – Colonias Juárez and Dublán. The geographical layout of both colonies resembles other Mormon settlements from the second half of the 19th century, not completely out of place if they were in Utah. Streets wide enough to turn a wagon team around in; four square grid pattern of streets with blocks all the same size; houses set back from the sidewalks with eight lots to a block – each lot ½ to 1 acre in size. Brick or adobe was the favorite building material for their houses. All of these patterns originally came from Joseph Smith’s 1833 City of Zion plan. Like European towns, people lived in towns with farms located outside. Central blocks were reserved for schools, churches, public buildings.
COLONIA DUBLÁN AND THE ROMNEYS
Dublán, today, sits on the northern edge of the much larger Mexican city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. Nuevo Casas Grandes developed as a stop on the Mexican Northern Railroad. Driving down the main highway – Federal Highway 2 – it is hard to tell where Colonia Dublán ends and Nuevo Casas Grandes begins, but looking from above with Google Maps, the layout of the two towns becomes obvious. Dublán, in 1916, was used by General John Pershing’s interventionist force as a supply center because of the railroad.
The Mormon colony was the birthplace of George Romney who went on to become the governor of Michigan and an aspiring GOP candidate for US president in 1968. Defeated by the eventual winner, Richard Nixon, Romney went on to serve under Nixon as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for four years. His son, Mitt, served as governor of Massachusetts, was the GOP presidential candidate in 2012 – after trying earlier in 2008 – and followed as senator of Utah for a decade.
The Romney family here comes from Miles P. Romney who came south with his three wives and more than a dozen children. There are a lot of Romneys emerging from that tree. Miles’ father originally converted from England. An architect, he designed the LDS temple in St. George, Utah. Brigham Young told Miles P. to take a second wife in 1867 and he ended up with five, the fifth, seven years after the ban on polygamy took place.
COLONIA JUÁREZ AND ITS TEMPLE
Colonia Juárez lies 12 miles southwest of Neuvo Casas Grandes boasting a population of just over 1,000. Juárez dates to 1886. Like the other Mormon colonies, most of the settlers retreated – upon church orders – to the US during the Mexican Revolution. The colony survives today because conditions and the physical location allow agricultural practices to flourish with peach, apple and pecan orchards, cattle ranches and chilies all contributing to the well-being of the small community.
In 1999, the LDS church began a campaign of building small temples throughout the world so the faithful did not have to travel so far to attend temples. Members in Chihuahua used to have to travel all the way to Mesa, Arizona on the southeast side of Phoenix for the nearest temple. The Romney family – not the same Romneys who left Dublán for they never returned from Utah post Revolution – in Juárez donated land on a hill above the town – Romney Hill – to the LDS church so a small – smallest of all LDS temples – could be built. A year after this temple was built, a third Mexican temple – much larger – went up in Ciudad Juárez to serve the 22,000 faithful there and another 7,000 in El Paso.
ACADEMIA JUÁREZ
Below the temple stands the Academia Juárez. The Academia is the oldest private high school owned by the LDS church. Founded in 1897, the school provided the only means of secondary education for the Mormon colonies. The school uses a dual-language program and enrolls some 418 students. About 80% of the students are LDS, a figure certainly down from early years. However, even in early years a few chairs were opened to children from outside the faith. The problem was those children from outside had to deal with Mormon prejudices, which probably became a factor during the Revolution when former Mexican students came back to deal with the colonies forcefully during the Revolution.
The main school building, dating to 1904, originally stood as the Juárez Stake House – stakes, in LDS church organization, are the approximate of a Catholic diocese. Other later buildings include a chapel. Behind the main building lies a multi-use soccer-football field. School teams used to play against American high school teams, but since the problems with cartel violence in the early 21st century, those teams refuse to come south. They play, today, in a nine-team league made up of schools from Chihuahua State.
OTHER COLONIES IN CHIHUAHUA
Four other Mormon colonies existed up the Rio Piedras Verdes from Colonia Juárez, Cave Valley, Colonia Pacheco 1887, Colonia Garcia 1894 and Colonia Chuichupa 1894. These so-called “mountain colonies” were never returned to after the evacuations of the Revolution.
ONTO SONORA
Another three Mormon colonies were set up in Sonora. A rugged wagon path was laid out to the Rio Bavispe where Colonias Oaxaca and Morelos were established. Oaxaca was set up in a flood plain and abandoned by 1905 with people mobbing downstream to either Morelos or the new Colonia San José. None of those colonies were re-established after the Revolution. The Mormon grid-pattern of streets still exists in Morelos.
POLYGAMY IN THE MODERN DAY
Polygamy no longer remains part of mainstream LDS thought. Mitt Romney, for one found the practice “bizarre”. But like in the Mormon heartland, others have hearkened upon the last section of the D&C taking it to heart. One late coming family to the area, that of Alma LeBaron, retreated to Colonia Juárez in the mid 1920’s after being excommunicated from the mainstream LDS church “for violative conduct” – practicing plural marriage, in this case. They involved themselves as leaders of movements involving plural marriage and blood atonement.
Blood atonement dates to the theocracy of Brigham Young. He and his fellow leaders taught that sinners of certain “crimes” needed to be killed so their blood is shed on the ground as a sacrifice in order for that person not to become a son of perdition. Blood atonement, like plural marriage, is very problematic for the LDS church. Refuted today, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith had various things to say on the subject.
BLOOD ATONEMENT
Blood atonement basically allows those found guilty of certain crimes – apostasy being near the top of the list – allowed followers to “sacrifice” those individuals so they could be atoned for. The LeBaron family is involved in several instances of “blood atonement” especially concerning relatives who do not “listen”. Alma LeBaron moved his two wives and eight children from Utah to Chihuahua in 1924.
They formed the Colonia LeBaron on the north side of the Mexican town of Galeana, some 25 miles southeast of Nuevo Casas Grandes. His sons started the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times with the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God later splitting off. A long history of deaths occurred in the following years. Son, Ervil, married 13 women fathering more than 50 children. It was members of this community who were gunned down by Mexican cartel men when travelling to another fundamentalist community in La Mora, Sonora in 2019.
Somehow I have never heard about the Mormon colonies in Mexico before. Interesting.