Latino/a and Mormon

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons, the last of my guest stint there. 

America, as they say, is browning. Latina/os recently surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States, and the Church is experiencing that browning along with the rest of the nation. “According to Church statisticians, the future of the Church does not lie in Europe, Canada, or the United States but rather in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and among the ethnic groups in this country.”[1] Given this fact, it is surprising that so little is known about the history and experiences of those that identify themselves as both Latino/a and Mormon. There is only one thin book on the subject, written by BYU historian Jessie L. Embry that is based on oral histories of BYU students and handful of Latina/o Mormons from Southern California. “In His Own Language”: Mormon Congregations in the United States is a start, but according to Ignacio M. Garcia, Lemuel Hardison Redd Chair of Western History at BYU, we need to know much more about Latino/as Mormons themselves.

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From the Archives: I was born in Sharon, Vermont

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons. 

Yesterday was Joseph Smith’s birthday.  I wonder sometimes how important it is to us in the 21st century that he was born in Vermont, given that the narratives we use to discuss Joseph usually skip his birthplace altogether and fast forward to New York. In the 1840s, however, as the Saints struggled to win support in their redress efforts against Missouri, casting Joseph as a son of Vermont was a crucial component to the image of the Prophet. The following is Joseph’s appeal to the Green Mountain Boys, taken from HC 6:88-93. The appeal was published initially as an extra in a December 1843 Extra for the Times and Seasons (hat tip, MAM) and in 1844 in the Voice of Truth (BYU apparently just has the 1845 printing; hat tip, smb).

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Zion v. Babylon: Life in the Enclave

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons.

 In his recent (and excellent) book, Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes, Paul Reeve examines the contact and interactions between the three groups mentioned in his title in southern Utah/eastern Nevada during the last four decades of the 19th century. Although Reeve uses the word “frontier” in his title, he is not using it in the same way as Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw the frontier as succeeding waves of Anglo

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From the Archives: Vain Repetitions and British Heathens

In the June 1840 issue of The Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, editor Parley P. Pratt included the following short article.

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Joseph Smith’s First Vision and Methodist Conversion Narratives

There seems to be a minor discrepancy among Mormons today regarding the significance of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision.”  While modern Mormons are eager to point out all that Joseph learned in that first encounter with Deity in 1820 — the nature of the Godhead, the falsity of other churches and their creeds, and a host of other things — Richard Bushman has recently suggested that Joseph ?understood the experience in terms of the familiar? and ?explained the vision as he must have first understood it, as a personal conversion.? [1]  Perhaps we might be able to better understand the First Vision, then, and what it meant to Joseph Smith at the time, by approaching it in the terms Joseph understood it — as a conversion experience.  Because of Joseph’s stated partiality for the Methodist sect, and because it appears that it wa

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Narrating the Priesthood Ban and Constructing Selves

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons.

The way we see and define who we are is usually closely related to how we understand the past. Most of us have overlapping identities that require us to negotiate compromises between them and these compromises shape our narratives of history. African American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have two dominant identities, black and Mormon, and as such, they have the burden of negotiating a compromise between these identities

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The Haun’s Mill Massacre in Mormon Memory

This is cross-posted at Times and Seasons.

In April 2005, I spent two weeks on assignment for the Joseph Smith Papers Project in Missouri and Illinois, visiting court houses and archives searching for documents pertaining to early Mormon history. On the second evening of my stay in northwestern Missouri, I drove down a lonely dirt road to a desolate place that had significant meaning for me as a Latter-day Saint. When I arrived, I found only a small creek surrounded by trees, grass, mud, and a small plaque that identified the site of the Haun?s Mill Massacre, where Missouri vigilantes murdered 17 Mormon men and boys in October 1838. As I looked over the site, I felt that I was standing on hallowed ground. I would not know until later that among the 17 wa

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“Plurality of Wives was an Incident, Never an Essential”: James E. Talmage on Polygamy

Historians can learn a lot about a people by examining the stories that they tell about themselves to others. When people wish to communicate something about themselves, they will usually pick some elements from their past to share. These narratives are highly selective, not only in the elements that are chosen but also in the language used to describe them. Present concerns normally shape what people share about their past, leading to the axiom that memory usually has more to do with the present than with the past.

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From the Archives: The Lord’s Prayer From the Book of Mormon

In reading through The Evening and the Morning Star, I came across an interesting piece in volume 1, #10 under the heading “Children”.  It reads in part:

“When the Lord gave the children of Israel commandments through Moses, he said, And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shall talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 

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From the Center to the Periphery: The Place of Sacrament Altars in Mormon Worship Space

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