The Mormon Enclave in Mexico : Descendants of Pioneers Gather to Celebrate Centenary

One February morning 100 years ago, a 29-year-old man named Peter Skousen left his home in Snowflake, Ariz., and headed for Mexico. With him were his two wives, Annice, 28, and Mary, 21, their seven children, and all the plows, shovels, beds, chairs, flour and chickens they could fit into a horse-drawn wagon.

The Skousens, like other Mormon polygamists, knew Congress had passed two laws making a crime of what they believed to be a religious duty. So in 1885, the Skousens joined 32 other polygamist families and fled the United States.

An Arduous Journey

It took them nearly a month to reach Mexico, fording rivers high with snowmelt and crossing steep mountains. Uphill, they doubled the wagon teams to pull the load. Downhill, women carried the children while the men tried to control the wagons and horses.

An advance scout watched for Apache Indians; a rear guard watched for U.S. marshals.

Eventually, they reached the mile-high valleys and plateaus of the Sierra Madres, about 200 miles south of El Paso, and built a town. Skousen, who was my grandfather’s oldest brother, was later joined by relatives including my grandfather, who grew up there.

Later, about 6,000 Mormons--mostly monogamous--were “called” by the church to join the expatriates, colonize the area and convert the Mexicans.

This month, from Aug. 5 to 11, 2,000 descendants of these pioneers--mostly from the U.S. Southwest but from as far away as Hawaii and Paraguay--gathered in Colonia Juarez and Colonia Dublan, the last of what were once seven Mormon colonies in the state of Chihuahua, to celebrate the colonies’ 100th anniversary. Greeting them were about 500 more descendants and relatives of the settlers who still live there, raising apples, peaches, pears, cattle and children.

Some, returning to their homeland, were nostalgic for the rugged, close-knit community life they had left. Others had come out of curiosity to see for themselves the setting of family legends.

Many were unable to view their ancestors’ homes. Entire colonies were destroyed in the 1910 Mexican Revolution or by fire, or abandoned because they were too isolated. But they could still find remnants of the past, crystallized in an oasis of 19th-Century America that has become lush and prosperous in time.

Colonia Dublan has merged with Nuevo Casas Grandes, a Mexican town of 30,000 that has since developed in the plateau. But Colonia Juarez is tucked into an isolated hillside valley 16 miles away, beyond old Casas Grandes. It is planted thickly with cottonwood, ash, walnut and weeping willows as well as the locust tree whose hardwood was valued by the pioneers for making shovels, hoes and tongues for wagons.

Utah in Chihuahua

With its neat orchards, shady rivers and tall trees gracing one- and two-story red brick homes, Colonia Juarez appears to be an island town, plucked out of Southern Utah and plunked down into a land of peeling paint, swaying buses and semi-finished construction.

The colonists had been planning centennial festivities for four years, said LaVon Whetten, a Colonia Juarez native and a member of the centennial committee. For their visitors, they staged a parade with family floats, a rodeo, a dance, a tour of the fruit-packing plant, barbecues and a historical pageant with one performance in English and another in Spanish. They also held two talent shows that included the singing of an original centennial hymn, opera and pop music, an 86-year-old harmonica player, and small-town humor: “We used to ring a curfew bell at 9 p.m. . . . but we had to stop because it woke everybody up.”

Souvenirs Sold

The colonists had repainted the first church/schoolhouse in Colonia Juarez and turned it into a museum and gift shop where they were selling centennial T-shirts, souvenirs and commemorative books including a three-inch encyclopedia of the settlers’ biographies.

The visitors mostly entertained themselves by reading name tags and tracing their roots and connections. For a week, our main identities came from the names of the first colonists--Romney, Turley, Pratt, Call, Hatch, Whetten, Walser, Farnsworth. Who are you? I’m a Skousen. Who did your grandfather marry? What was his brother’s name? We’re cousins then!

“We’ve been here for four days and we’ve only found one person we’re not related to,” exclaimed Bud Taylor, 70, of Scottsdale, Ariz., who had come with his wife, Mary, a Farnsworth, who had been raised in the colonies.

“There’s a saying in Spanish, ‘ crema y nata .’ It means the cream of the crop,” Whetten said. “Those were the people who came in first.” There is pride among the tens of thousands of descendants of the early pioneers, she said. Many church leaders were born in the colonies. Other natives include George W. Romney, the former governor of Michigan, and Henry Eyring, former dean of the graduate school of chemistry and metallurgy at the University of Utah.

Descendants like to exchange Pancho Villa stories, dating from the 1910 Mexican Revolution which caused three-quarters of the Mormons to return to the U.S. in what they call “the exodus.” While the atmosphere was unsettled and dangerous, the wilder stories--which almost always portray the revolutionary leader as a fearsome desperado, stealing guns and horses and leering at the women--have been exaggerated by those from “over the line” (the U.S.), said Dr. Leroy Hatch, 74, a native of the colonies and the only doctor in Colonia Juarez for the past 40 years.

Bertha Shupe, 83, a resident of Colonia Juarez, recalls the day Villa’s troop train stopped at Nuevo Casas Grandes. “We went up close. Everyone was shouting ‘Viva Villa!’ My father said Pancho Villa wanted a drink so I gave him a drink of water. He was wearing a gray suit and polished boots. My impression was not of a dirty bandit. He looked so nice.”

Shupe and her sister, Blanche Peterson, 80, who came from San Marino, Calif. for the reunion, remember the exodus. It was July 28, 1912. They were 10 and 6 at the time, living in Colonia Garcia, a valley colony 35 miles south of Colonia Juarez. “We had 24 hours’ notice. My mother was sewing all night. We were only allowed one trunk per person,” Peterson said. They packed their belongings in a wagon and took a rough mountain road to the nearest train station at Pearson.

“It was a lark to us,” Shupe said. “We couldn’t understand why all the mothers were crying.”

The men stayed behind to sell their cattle and save their horses while the women, children and older men took the train to El Paso. There, they stayed for four months in lumber sheds, hanging quilts for privacy. Shupe recalls the U.S. government gave them food including bottled milk, which she had never seen, and Post Toasties.

They had thought they would be gone only a few weeks. But the family did not return to the colonies for five years.

Death was common in the colonies, Shupe said. “Lots of babies died. In summer from diarrhea and typhoid. In the winter from pneumonia.” Her mother lost four of her 13 children when they were babies, she said.

On a hot, silent hillside at the end of a steep, rocky road, the old graveyard looks down on Colonia Juarez. The rectangular graves are outlined or covered by round brown stones. Some of the graves stand alone. Some are grouped together. Most of them are small.

Shupe and Peterson, both former schoolteachers in the colonies, also remember life in a polygamist family. Their grandfather had four wives and their father had two. They called their father’s other wife “Aunt Martha.” While some polygamist families lived under the same roof, their mother and Aunt Martha had separate homes. Their mother had 13 children; Aunt Martha had nine.

While some women grumbled at “plural marriage,” Aunt Martha and their mother were fond of each other, said Peterson. “We grew up as one family,” she said. “We were not allowed to call our brothers and sisters half-brothers or half-sisters. We are still one family.”

When Aunt Martha died in childbirth in 1925, Peterson said she was deeply saddened. Her own mother took in the children, which meant she had eight children under the age of 6, she said.

Issue of Polygamy

The colonists seem neither proud nor ashamed of their polygamist heritage. While they now believe polygamy is morally wrong, they also believe their polygamist relatives were morally right, most of them sincerely following what their religious leaders at the time called a religious principle.

Only 5% of the Mormons ever practiced polygamy, which was regarded as a divine revelation from the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith in the 1840s, a church spokesman in Salt Lake City said. But in 1890, to satisfy a condition for Utah statehood, the church renounced polygamy. In 1893 President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation of amnesty for all polygamists who had entered into the relationship before 1891.

Any Mormon who practices or even advocates polygamy now is excommunicated, the spokesman said.

All the polygamists in the Mormon Mexican colonies have died--except for a roundly scorned fundamentalist family known as the LeBarons who live an isolated existence 55 miles to the south, Dr. Hatch said. “I’ve been their doctor and father confessor for 30 years,” he said. “No one has caused them more static than I have. They claim they’re practicing polygamy because of a religious principle. I say it’s passion that’s guiding them. I’ve written a novel about them.”

Today’s colonists say they are mainstream Mormons--paying 10% of their gross income to the church, fasting one day a month and giving what they would have paid for food to charity. They believe in having as many children as possible as part of the “eternal plan.” They advocate traditional Mormon values of hard work, optimism, education and honesty.

Church, Family and School

Like Mormons in Salt Lake City, their lives center around the church, family and school. They shun coffee, tobacco and alcohol and promote chastity before marriage and faithfulness afterward. In recent years, three men known to have committed adultery have been excommunicated, said Fred Hatch, 44, a grower from Colonia Juarez and former bishop.

The majority of the Anglo Mormons consider themselves Mexicans now. Eighty-five percent are Mexican citizens, subject to taxes and military service, according to Dr. Leroy Hatch. But the colonists basically govern themselves. Their own “sheriff” registers births and deaths and settles disputes among church members. They tax themselves for civic, farm and educational improvements.

The early settlers built a diversion dam on the Piedras Verdes River and dug canals to irrigate the fields of Colonia Juarez. Some of their roads are now paved and satellite dishes bring U.S. television programs into many homes.

Four years ago, when improvements in Mexican schools allowed the church to stop funding the colonies’ private elementary school, colonists taxed themselves up to $6,000 to buy an apple orchard whose profits would finance the continued operation of the elementary school.

“The thing that has kept us on the map and friendly with the government is the fame of our schools,” said Hatch, who runs the apple orchard. Many wealthy Mexicans send their children to the private high school, Academia Juarez in Colonia Juarez, where they can learn English and are subject to Mormon discipline, he said. Students there are required to sign pledges they will not smoke, drink or take drugs. They adhere to a dress code; boys wear their hair short. Classes are taught in Spanish and English and at graduation, most go to college at Brigham Young University or on missions for the church.

In colonist vocabulary, the colonies are “down here.” The United States are “out there.” “Imports” are spouses, almost exclusively women, who were born out there but now live down here. “Exports” are natives who leave for good.

‘Nothing for Us to Do’

Most of the girls grow up and become exports. “There’s really nothing for us to do,” said Marci Bowman, 23, who was born in Colonia Dublan but now lives in Phoenix where she teaches. “Everybody’s in agriculture here. You can’t buy land here. No one wants to sell.”

Since growers must inherit their farms and their land is limited, many men who would like to return cannot, said Kent Romney, plant manager of the fruit growers cooperative, Empacadora Paquime.

In 1974, when fruit was a buyer’s market, 100 growers mortgaged their homes to create the co-op and a modern state-of-the-art packing plant. As a result, profits have increased 200% and the growers, who average the price of their fruit, now market $10 million worth of fruit annually to Mexico’s largest cities, according to Romney. The cooperative is the largest in Mexico, provides the main source of income in the Nuevo Casas Grande area and has strong government support, he said.

The colonists claim to have blended harmoniously with the Mexicans over the years. But many colonists at the reunion said that tension exists with the Mexican agrarians, a cooperative of small farmers who lease adjacent land from the government. The Latino farmers claim the Mormons never obtained true title to their land from their forefathers. And they complain that the Anglo Mormons have become rich through the Latino Mexicans who provide the labor on their farms.

In addition, while the majority of Mormons in the colonies are now Latino, church wards (local congregations) are segregated into Spanish- and English-speaking units. The Anglos do not approve of intermarriage. They bury their dead in separate parts of the Colonia Juarez cemetery.

As changes come to Northern Mexico, some colonists see their life style threatened. General Motors and other U.S. companies are building assembly plants in the area which will bring in more laborers and alter the rural character.

Some worry about the instability of government and the peso. The most recent peso devaluation caused some growers to move out.

And those who fish, hunt and camp in the hilly canyons have been surprised to find fields of marijuana and poppy plants fenced in and protected by armed guards. According to Hatch, the owner of the fields lives in Colonia Juarez. He bought his house from a colonist who moved out.

Looking at the future, Romney quotes Mexican sayings. “No hay sopa que no tenga pelo.” (There’s no soup without a hair in it.) And “El que porfia mata venado.” (He who waits, will kill his deer.)

“After you live in this country for a hundred years, you learn to roll with the punches,” said LaVon Whetten who was born in Colonia Juarez, was educated and taught school “out there,” but came back to the colony. “I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to these colonies. I felt a certain degree of responsibility to carry on the tradition.

“What it really boils down to is it’s just home.”