A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946 by Fernando R. Gomez (founder of The Museum of Mormon Mexican History) provides a streamlined and updated look into the history of the Church in Mexico.
For decades now, Fernando R. Gomez has collected and preserved documents and artifacts to preserve the history of the Church in Mexico. He has drawn on these in previous books that were published in connection with the Museum of Mormon Mexican History (most notably The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Lamanite Conventions: From Darkness to Light). These earlier publications were important contributions to the historical understanding of the Church in Mexico, and this book builds on the foundations that they laid.
Part of what makes this book particularly significant is the inclusion of the minutes of the meeting known as the Second Convention, which were not available for previous publications. These offer some important corrections about the nature of the meeting and how it related to the schismatic movement known as the Third Convention. In histories like F. LaMond Tullis’s foundational works on the subject, the documents available to understand the First and Second Conventions were later recollections that indicated that the seeds of rebellion were present, and petitions were sent to Salt Lake City making demands of higher-ranking Church leaders. The original minutes, however, indicate that there were no mentions of petitions and that members in Mexico were accepting of the leadership they had been assigned. This, in turn, puts more pressure on Margarito Bautista in the narrative to serve as the primary villain who split the church in Mexico during the Third Convention (which is a slightly different perspective than the one offered by Elisa Eastwood Pulido in The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961).
My main complaint is that the book isn’t longer than it is. When I think of documentary histories, I think of University of Oklahoma Press’s Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier Series, which often clock in around 400 to 500 pages. The history narrative in this work is only about 120 pages, with an additional 50 offering the text of the Second Convention minutes alongside an English translation. It makes for an easy read and provides a wonderful introduction to the history of the church in Mexico that is definitely worth reading. But given the amount of emphasis on the number of resources that Gomez has collected; I had hoped to find more that could be used as a resource in historical research on the topic. This does come with the benefit, however, of making the book very readable and accessible to a larger audience than something like the Kingdom in the West series.
Regardless, Fernando R. Gomez offers an important and well-researched narrative of Mormon Mexican history up through the mid-twentieth century. It is extremely readable and will be one of the touch-stone pieces of Mexican Mormon history.