“Are you a missionary?” one of my fellow passengers asked. It was a pretty smart bet. We were bumping along on a bus ride south from Ciudad Juarez, and I was headed to Nueva Casas Grandes, a tiny town that looks big in comparison to its neighbors Colonia Juarez and Colonia Dublan, the last two active Mormon colonies in Mexico. “No,” I explained to the traveler, “periodista from Estados Unidos.” I wanted to visit because of the area’s fascinating history over the past century.
Crossing the border and traveling 130 miles south proved tougher than I guesstimated, right from the time I left Washington, D.C. My flight from the capital to El Paso was delayed several hours. The next day I was stymied by all the rules and regulations of renting a car along the border. So I had to take a taxi to the bus that crosses back and forth from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez. Most of the day was gone by the time I arrived there, where I had to point and draw pictures to buy the bus ticket that would get me to Casas Grandes.
Five hours later I stepped out onto a dusty street with more stray dogs than lamplights. But the roads were meticulously organized, extending in a grid around the apparently defunct train tracks stretching through the center of town. That layout is the only reason I was able to find a hotel in the dark that night. In response to “no hablo espanol,” and my impression of someone sleeping and snoring, people I talked to on the street counted out where I needed to walk. One block straight and two blocks left, and I found myself at the Hotel California.
The next morning I took a taxi (driver: “you Mormon?”) to Colonia Juarez, 20 miles beyond Casas Grandes. Based on some reading I’d done and some advertisements on the street, it suddenly occurred to me that I had traveled from Ciudad Juarez to Colonia Juarez on March 21, a holiday in Mexico celebrating the birthday of Benito Juarez, the 19th-century politician for which both those places are named. For someone with no plan and no Spanish, I was doing pretty well for myself.
The scenery thus far was beautiful, but familiar: long flat scrappy plains, and low rolling hills, punctuated only occasionally by irrigated farms. Save a few small towns along the way, the road to Casas Grandes is rural and empty. Abandoned cinderblock structures and burning fields were the only sights of interest. That’s what made entering Colonia Juarez such a shock. My taxi driver shot over a hill, and then a valley opened up below us. Suddenly there was color everywhere: rows of pink budding fruit trees and green grass. Old brick homes lined the streets, and at the highest point there was a blazingly white temple tipped with a golden trumpeter, the angel of Moroni, facing eastward.
I’d gotten myself to this point but had no idea what to do next. An encounter soon after at a convenience store provided me one. My taxi driver pulled up to grab something, I don’t know what. But he returned accompanied by a bald guy in a black rock and roll t-shirt, who leaned in the window and asked: “What’s up, man?” The gentleman was a local.
“You Mormon?”
**
Marcos Alveras is the first of two characters I met in Colonia Juarez, The Skeptic. I’d later learn that Marcos is the bad boy of the town. He did some independent research in the LDS archives when he was in high school and learned things about the church that persuaded him to walk away from the Mormon faith. He’s here taking care of his parents, but he can’t find a girlfriend in town because everyone knows he loves his drums and his Mariachi band more than Jesus. Anyway, it’s through his advice that I found John Hatch, the second character, who I’ll call The Bishop. Actually, everyone calls him The Bishop. He’s literally the Bishop at Colonia Juarez, the head of the Latter-Day Saints church there.
I met John and his wife Sandra at their home. John is tall, wears-light wash jeans and sunglasses, and has the healthy look of someone who’s spent a lot of his time outdoors. He taught high school in town at the highly regarded Academia Juarez for 25 years, but recently found himself short on patience and creativity. Now he teaches a more adult set of pupils: tourists and scientists who visit Colonia Juarez, the town John has spent his whole life getting to know. “There is nothing I love more than being out in the wilds, you know. So I got to thinking, ‘I bet I could make a living doing what I like to do.’ So I started my [tour] business.”
John certainly knows how to travel. We loaded up with fried chicken, cokes, and burritos before setting off for Mata Ortiz, an even smaller town than Colonia Juarez further south. Mata Ortiz was a hero to the town for fighting the Apache leader Geronimo, who spent decades attacking small Mexican towns after his family was massacred by Mexican soldiers. Geronimo wanted Mata Ortiz dead for his leadership in the Battle of Tres Castillos, which left more than half of his Apaches killed or captured. Geronimo promised the Mexican leader, in the words of Nelda Whetten, a lifelong Chihuahua resident interviewed by Smithsonian magazine, “no bala, no cuchillo, no lance, pero lumre. You’re not going to have a quick death—no bullet, no arrow, no lance, but fire.” Geronimo and his men ambushed Mata Ortiz outside of town, slowly picked off his soldiers, and did exactly what they promised, burning him on top of the hill.
Today people know the town of Mata Ortiz for its pottery. In the 1980s, Juan Quezada, born and raised in the town, rediscovered how the indigenous population made their pottery hundreds of years ago. It took endless experimentation, but once he got it right, Juan’s pots quickly became world-renowned. His art put Mata Ortiz back on the map, and the entire town of 2,000 people is in some way involved in the business. John told me that the whole family typically takes part, and that children begin learning the craft at a young age. The results are stunning.
So fierce was the Apache’s reputation that settlers stayed away from the Casas Grandes area years after the tribe settled down on nearby reservations. The Mormons, however, had nothing to lose and were willing to take the risk. Why did they come to Mexico in the first place? The people I met in Colonia Juarez are tired of tourists and journalists getting this part wrong, so I’ll leave it up to the official history of Colonia Juarez, written by LaVon Brown Whetten, descended from one of the original Mormon families.
She writes: “With the passage of the Edmunds Bill and later the Edmunds-Tucker Act, both of which were aimed at the practice of plural marriage, it was determined that the time was right for the Mormons to colonize in Mexico.” She goes on: “Although a relatively small percentage of the Church members were ever called upon to practice polygamy, it was a principle which fueled the fires of hatred among the enemies of the Church.”
The Mormons were chased out of the United States with federal marshals hot on their heels. She adds this excellent quote from the church president John Taylor: “Better for parts of families to … go where they can live in peace than to be hauled to jail and … sent to the American Siberia in Detroit to serve out a long term of imprisonment.”
Compared to the fates they faced in Detroit, facing the Apaches was worth the risk. The Mormons saw themselves like the Israelites, on the move, looking for a “place of refuge.” When they found the fertile valley around Colonia Juarez they believed they’d found the promised land. Having just made that same drive in a taxi, and suddenly seeing grass for the first time in Mexico, I can understand the land of milk and honey sentiment. According to Whetten, one of Colonia Juarez’s elders declared that “as long as saloons are banned, and profanity kept off the streets, this spot will remain a place of refuge for all who need it.”
John Hatch also showed me the town of San Diego and an enormous crumbling stone and timber mansion built before the Mexican revolution. He explained how the area of Colonia Juarez is a microcosm of why the revolution took place. All the land was the in the hands of a few wealthy owners. A man named Luis Terrazas was the largest landowner in the state of Chihuahua, controlling a third of the entire state. He owned two dozen mansions like the one we saw in the town of San Diego, all strategically placed a day’s ride from each other. Mr. Terrazas was unbelievably wealthy in a way that’s difficult to put into modern terms. But when the Mexican army at Fort Bliss found themselves in need of horses they went to Mr. Terrazas, who said he’d be happy to fill the order. The purchasing agent shuddered that they needed hundreds, maybe a thousand horses, but Mr. Terrazas insisted it was no problem. “What color do you want?” he asked.
John’s family, the Hatch family, was one of the original families (along with the Romneys) that settled in Colonia Juarez. “My father was a medical doctor, and after he had finished working at the hospital he would make house calls. Someone on horseback would ride up to the house and say, ‘There’s a person or patient you need to see,’ and we’d come down in an old Studebaker pickup, which we liked as kids because we would chase jackrabbits on the plain on the way home.”
With the revolution came Pancho Villa. The renowned general and his army passed like a cloud of locusts on a number of occasions, but everything changed after he was defeated at the nearby town of Agua Prieta. He didn’t know that Woodrow Wilson had officially begun to support his enemy, the Carranza regime, and that hundreds of American troops had reinforced the Mexican forces in Agua Prieta with modern machine guns. Villa’s army was slaughtered, and he vowed to take his revenge on any Americans he encountered. The Mormons lived in fear of Villa, and hundreds of women, children, and elderly settlers were sent back up north to the United States. Those that stayed prayed for deliverance.
The educational tour complete, John turned the car back toward home. Sandra, his wife, had set the table, and we sat down to John’s favorite: Spanish rice, beans, salsa, and cottage cheese all mixed together in whatever proportion you’d like and eaten as a soup. John really is the guy to know in Colonia Juarez. He’s helped a number of writers with their writing projects and is mentioned in a stack of books and magazines, but one name in particular put my jaw on the dining room table: Paul Salozek, the writer for National Geographic who is currently walking around the world. Salozek has passed through Colonia Juarez a number of times, and he and the Hatches have become close friends. I took this as evidence I was doing something right.
I said goodbye to the Hatches and called the taxi driver that had dropped me off that morning. We rode back to Casas Grandes in silence, separated by the void of my language deficiency. There’s 20 miles between the two towns, but not a single street light. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced the kind of total darkness that surrounded that scrappy Toyota. It was menacing, even with the high beams on. I groped around in the backseat for the bag of chips I had just bought at the convenience store and offered them to my mustachioed friend. “Ah si, si,” he said, “Doritos.” Diplomacy achieved.
